Wild encounters with the chimps of Mahale Tanzania’s Mahale National Park, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, is one of the best places in the world to observe chimpazees up close in the wild WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS ANDREAS FOX
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escending through the clouds, all I could see out of the window was bluegreen water with the odd white streak of a wave. I leaned inwards, and looked straight between the pilots and through the windscreen of the eight-seater PC-12. I had just started flying lessons myself and nervously laughed at what I saw: a short, dog-legged grass strip, starting at the water’s edge and abruptly ending below an ominous set of hills. I reminded myself that I preferred such small planes. I figure that you can see the pilot and if they are relaxed, then all must be well.
lakeshore, was our motorised dhow. We clambered aboard, ducking our heads under the wooden shade structure. I looked overboard to check and, sure enough, the water was ‘ginclear’, as all the literature never fails to mention.
With broad smiles, Butati and Mwiga, two of Nomad Tanzania’s guides, met us off the plane and asked us to sign in to Mahale National Park. With only one other, barely operational, lodge in the area, flicking through the book meant rapidly going back in time. I searched for familiar names and quickly found some of the usual suspects – amongst many repeated names were a motley crew of private guides.
We headed out of the reeds and into Lake Tanganyika – Africa’s deepest lake and an evolutionary biologist’s dream. Settled into a cleft of the Albertine Rift – the western arm of the Great Rift Valley – the lake is a long, narrow body of water, bordered by four countries. At nearly 700 km long, it’s shared by Burundi in the north, Tanzania in the east, Zambia in the south and the DRC to the west. With an average width of just 50 km, we could clearly see the Congolese hills opposite us. Its deepest point is nearly a mile down, and it accounts for over 15% of all fresh water on the planet. By depth, volume and age, as a freshwater lake it’s second only to Lake Baikal in Siberia.
Many colleagues had regaled me with stories of this place, and I was thrilled to have finally made it out. It was both a little stressful and exciting to be taking guests to a destination I had never been to before. I had done my homework, but knew I would be relying on the local experts more than ever. My role had become less about knowledge and behavioural interpretation and more about being host, porter and cameraman. At the bottom end of the airstrip, moored amongst the reeds of the
We navigated our way through anchored wooden canoes, stationed off a fishing village on the park’s boundary. Children waved at us as they swam in the shallows, their parents tending to carpets of drying fish on the shore. Behind the village were the towering hills at the heart of Mahale National Park. The boundary was clear to see as a defined change between open, cultivated land and thick, broad-leafed forest. Where the park extends into the lake, fishing has recently been banned.
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