Our day visiting the chimpanzees started very early in the morning. We had to be at Kibale park at 6:30 in the morning, so that meant waking up at 4:30.
Like the gorillas, we also setup a “habituation” trek for the chimps as well, which meant that we could spend much more time with them. After the gorilla habituation, we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but everyone assured us that this was on much easier terrain.
Indeed, we got incredibly lucky with the chimps and found a family within about 10 minutes after setting off. We hung out watching them snack and climb around in the trees for about an hour. There were babies swinging around and roughhousing and adults climbing around and snacking. Sadly it was impossible to get any pictures on Jack’s phone because the chimpanzees were too far away. If it wasn’t clear, these are all cell phone photos on the blog. The proper photos are too big to upload from here.
It started raining so we hung out for a bit longer, then moved on to find another group, which we did after about 15 minutes of hiking. Unfortunately chimps don’t really like the rain any more than people do, so they don’t move around as much or come near the ground in the rain. The rain continued for another couple hours and we observed a few different groups over that time, but mostly they weren’t too active. Given the conditions we did quite well though and saw around 25 individuals and observed lots of great chimp behavior.
Roughly all at the same time, the photographers in the group had our lenses all fog up, so we couldn’t really take any more photos. We had about an hour left of our time with the chimps, but given that it was still raining and our cameras were useless, everyone decided to call it good for the day. Naturally, the rain stopped by the time we got to the park entrance. The sun drew out hundreds of baboons to the road, so we got to watch a lot of babooning around on our drive back.
The chimp habituation trek can take the entire day, depending on how quickly you find them. Since we finished around noon, we actually had the rest of the day to relax. We had a couple of beers while admiring the view of a small crater lake from our lodge.