#2 Chimps, elephants and how I ended up in Uganda

Apr 30, 24

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Episode 2. Chimps, elephants and how I ended up in Uganda

[00:00:00] Charlotte: Hello, my name is Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu, and you’re listening to the East Africa Travel Podcast. Episode 2. Welcome back to my home on the boundary of Kibale National Park in Western Uganda. In this episode, I’m going to tell you a bit more about life here, and how it inspired me to create this podcast.

[00:00:30] I’ve been working on this project for a very long time, but Kibale Forest has to be pretty special because I’m still totally in love with this place even after having spent the whole of lockdown here. Today I’m going to tell you about some of the people I’m going to be talking to and the kind of content that I’m going to feature, but I’m very open to your ideas and suggestions.

[00:00:56] Please ask any questions and I will try my very best to answer them for you. But first, you might think we live in the middle of nowhere and nothing happens here, but actually the place is alive. You never know quite what you’re going to see or hear. Sometimes I wonder how I ever get any work done actually.

[00:01:19] There’s never a dull moment in the forest. Anyway, without further ado, let’s get started.

[00:01:28] This morning I am at home sitting in my wooden house looking into the forest. It’s a view I’m intimately familiar with because this is where I sat during lockdown and before and after, but particularly during lockdown and I can see directly into the forest. In fact, I have sat here and watched chimpanzees eating figs on the border of Kibale Forest, Kibale National Park. And last week we actually even had chimps in the compound, which you don’t really want, but it’s quite extraordinary to see a setting that you’re very familiar with, you know (there’s a tree, there’s a tree house- which is available to guests to sleep in – to see a chimpanzee climbing over the tree house into the compound. It’s quite something. Yeah! I’m used to seeing beautiful birds like the huge bright blue, great blue Turaco with its yellow beak and Ross’s Turacos with the dark red flash of feathers they have in flight. I can see red tailed monkeys, black and white colobus monkeys.

[00:02:47] Every day is different. There are themes and there are seasons, but still, you never quite know what you’re going to see. But to see a chimpanzee swinging past the front of your house is, well, it’s blown my mind, I have to tell you.

[00:03:02] So, I wanted to tell you a bit more about my life here at Sunbird Hill. This is what I wake up to.

[00:03:30] It’s only recently that I’ve noticed that the dawn chorus doesn’t start every day at 6. For months and months and months, the lead coloured flycatcher was the first bird to start the dawn chorus. Its call is in a minor key: dee dee, dee dee, dee dee I do hear it at different times of the day, you can be asleep, but it’s still there, incredibly soothing.

[00:03:58] And I often wake up excited to hear the birds. And I, even if I don’t want to get up at 6. 21, I just don’t want to miss a note of the dawn chorus.

[00:04:09] I was in shock the other week when I didn’t hear anything till twenty to seven. And somebody else, he said”Oh yeah, but it’s the rainy season.”

[00:04:18] Wow. So the dawn chorus, yes, it’s a really big and wonderful part of our day here. And then in the next clip, I’ll tell you a little bit about my house and the creatures I share it with.

[00:04:35] We do occasionally have monkeys in the compound in the morning, especially if the trees are in fruit.

[00:04:48] Occasionally we get baboons. A couple of them are huge, like big dogs, and they’ve got that big kind of canine muzzle with very sharp teeth. Of course, when we see them, they are just looking for food. They’re not In attack mode, let’s say, but still…

[00:05:06] Ooh, I think I heard chimps.

[00:05:14] And then at night, we have this:

[00:05:22] the sound of cicadas, the sound of frogs. We have a pond down at the birders lounge. It’s about 100 metres away. But I can often hear the frogs from my house.

[00:05:36] At certain times of the year, they are really loud. One time we were down in the birders lounge – we had guests, we had friends – and the birders loung is, super comfy, lots of big sofas, so if you’re really interested in birds and reptiles and mammals and nature generally, we’ve got arguably Uganda’s best reference library for visitors.

[00:05:59] And, anyway, we were sitting down there one night after dinner, and we had to move the furniture away from the pond. “The frogs were shouting at us,” as Ugandans would say, because we couldn’t hear ourselves talk. It was hilarious.

[00:06:15] It’s generally very quiet here at night, apart from the insects

[00:06:23] but there is a nightjar. Sometimes there are owls, black and white colobus growling, as I call it. I don’t know what the name is for the unusual name that a black and white colobus makes, but it’s curious. It echoes through the forest and occasionally we hear elephants. We normally hear them knocking trees down.

[00:06:54] You can hear the crack and the split of wood. They’re trying to either push past or find some tender shoots. So there’ll be a whole episode about elephants – or many.

[00:07:08] I wrote about elephants quite a lot during lockdown. Lockdown was easy and it was difficult. It was easy in that we didn’t have to wear masks every day. And we live in a remote area, so we were protected from COVID. But all my clients were forced to give up tourism and farm watermelons and wash cars for a living so it was very difficult. We had zero money coming in, couldn’t plan trips, couldn’t go back to the UK to see my family, just didn’t have anything to look forward to, so it was difficult. But it was also extraordinary to be on the edge of the forest and to have our own little private playground. Sunbird Hill is 40 acres of regenerating farmland, and once upon a time, pineapples were grown here, but quickly eaten by elephants so it’s a pretty desperate place to farm here.

[00:08:05] And I’ll be talking more about our subsistence farmer neighbours on future episodes of the podcast. It’s interesting because when I was a VSO volunteer, we were trying to protect farmers from crop raiding animals and, you know, a subsistence farmer relies on their crops to survive and any extra they have after feeding the family is sold to pay school fees and medical bills and so on.

[00:08:32] And when the elephants come out of the forest at night, they go straight for the ripe crops. And what they don’t eat, they trample on. And elephant footprints, are about a foot square, you know, half a meter square, so pretty devastating. And it’s really interesting that my life has kind of come full circle, where we used to fund raise to dig elephant trenches, to build fences, try and keep the elephants in the national park and stop them invading the villages, and I now live somewhere where we have an elephant trench on the edge of this land, bordering the national park. That’s how close we are. And I often walk along the edge of the elephant trench. And that’s one of the places that I want to take you in future episodes. And all the paths I used to walk around and around during lockdown.

[00:09:19] Every few days I’d see or hear something new and something as simple as a butterfly, and I’d come trotting back home to look it up in the book, and it was kind of like being retired really, on a good day. But I found that taking time to research things like a pretty butterfly took my mind off worrying about the future and what was happening with COVID and the pandemic.

[00:09:44] And yeah, we all had to dig deep emotionally, didn’t we? But that was how I got through it. What kept me motivated was my morning walks and then writing stories that my friend, Professor Wolfgang Thome, published on his blog.

[00:09:58] So just to give you a bit of a flavour of the kind of things that I’ll be talking about on the podcast, we will be going gorilla tracking in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which is in Western Uganda. It’s the border area shared by the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. I work with a number of conservation organizations, including Conservation Through Public Health and International Gorilla Conservation Program, and we’ll be talking to people who’ve been gorilla tracking.

[00:10:32] We’ll talk about the kind of equipment you need, how much it costs, how to book. You can also track gorillas in Mgahinga Gorilla National Park, a tiny little national park that has a quite different habitat. It also has golden monkeys in addition to the mountain gorillas and has views of the Virunga volcanoes so it’s incredibly pretty part of the world.

[00:10:54] How safe is it for a woman to travel solo by public transport in East Africa? I’ll share some of the many, many trips that I’ve had on my own around the region. I’ve done lots of bus trips, for example, and I’ve got tips on how to travel safely. I can also advise on organising a safari and I’ll be talking to some of the tour operators and guides that I work with on this show.

[00:11:16] We will be going all over the region and talking to all kinds of experts. And one of my inspirations – one of my conservation inspirations – is Jane Goodall. Not only is she trailblazing conservationist, but she’s got a lovely podcast called The Hopecast. And she started her podcast during lockdown. And I was quite moved by what she said because she admitted that even she gets down sometimes when she looks at the state of the world, but actually there are many, many reasons for hope in addressing climate change and so many other environmental issues. And I’m certainly on the same page.

[00:11:56] So one of the reasons that I created this podcast is I want to introduce you to some really cool conservationists who are doing great work.

[00:12:05] And if you really like the sound of what they’re doing, you can follow them on social media. You might even want to come to the region and meet these people. You can, for example, go gorilla tracking with Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka. You can be part of the Uganda Carnivore Program in Queen Elizabeth National Park, and you can go out with the researchers who specialize in the big cat predators like lions and so on. You can also go dolphin watching and be part of the research team with the Watamu Marine Association. So you can have a really cool experience and actively participate in conservation or citizen science, which is something that we really push here at Sunbird Hill.

[00:12:47] Thanks for joining me on my podcast. Over the next few episodes, I’ll be introducing to you to some really fun people who have had great experiences here in Uganda, whether as tourists, as researchers, and maybe they live here as well.

[00:13:05] You’ve been listening to the East Africa Travel Podcast with me, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu.

[00:13:13] I just wanted to thank you for joining me on this audio adventure.

[00:13:20] If you’ve got any questions or comments, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. Check out the show notes. There you’ll find links to my blog and social media.

[00:13:30] I’ve been blogging since 2008, so tons of stories there, and we have a very active community on social media.

[00:13:40] You can even send me a voice note, and you never know, maybe I’ll feature your question on a future episode. I’d love to do that.

[00:13:48] Stay tuned for more sounds from the jungle.

[00:13:53] Until next time!