Gombe Stream National Park

Despite how it may seem, we are not being sponsored by the Tanzanian Tourist Board…although we are open to payment! 

As proud products of the marvellous and free (yes, Mr. Trump, free) Irish education system, we boast that Newgrange is older than the Pyramids, the Giants Causeway the geometrical genius of an irate giant, our saints and scholars rival any others and that, on a good day, there is no land like Ireland.

However, Tanzania is proving to be quite the competition. Not in an emerald isle, cliffs and waves way…more in a giraffe and elephant, colossal mountains, picturesque beaches, gold and tanzanite way. Home of Serengeti, Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro, Zanzibar as well as numerous East African peace talks, mines full of treasures and the largest volume of freshwater lakes in the world. In short, everyone should come on holiday here.

Gombe Stream National Park is Tanzania’s smallest National Park, situated on the banks of Lake Tanganyika in the west and only accessible by boat. This is where, 55 years ago, a young Jane Goodall went, accompanied by her mother, to study the behaviour of chimpanzees. Goodall’s studies in the following years proved to be groundbreaking and are still talked about in scientific circles.

Last week, we took the 10 hour drive to visit the park and its world famous chimps. The Park is still remote, welcoming only around 1000 visitors each year (compared to Serengeti’s 300,000+). It’s hot and humid and requires a long, long hike through steep hills to try to find a community of around 50 chimps.

So we hiked. And then hiked some more.

In school, all Irish essays seemed to revolve around the phrase ‘go tobann’. It has remained a staple of Gaelige leaving cert essays for generations; coming to mean much more than a simple ‘suddenly’. Never has there been a more apt moment than after three hours, we went around a corner and ‘go tobann’, there they were.

My dad is a big monkey fan. He’s been known to go to the zoo for his birthday. Just himself and my mum walking around a cold Dublin zoo in the middle of March. It’s always to the monkey house he wants to go, and I must confess I never got it.

Now I get it.

Watching these human-like animals play and jump and tease and groom, seeing frustrated mothers swatting away annoying young ones and older males surveying the scene from high up in trees, knowing we were probably as remote as we had ever been was quite awe inspiring. 

We sat and watched for an hour, the maximum amount of time you’re allowed to stay in close proximity. The comparison with humans is remarkable. The behaviour, the relationships, the reactions – all so familiar it was almost eerie. We took a lot of pictures, you can click here for the rest of them.

Gombe is less than 20km from Kigoma, the region with the world’s third largest refugee camp. People are pouring across the Burundi border fleeing what the UN has said could be a second ‘Rwandan style genocide’. It's a truly terrible situation.

Tanzania is a country of such contradictions. The country we live in is one of the most beautiful we've ever seen...and yet, its home to so many marginalised, hungry, homeless, helpless. As we come into our last few months here, this has been one of the hardest aspects of life to get our heads around. A friend of mine, after hours of 'solving the world' over a cup of tea, used to always laugh and say ‘Sure, what do I know anyway?!’. I suppose I thought after all this time I might know something, have some understanding of how all these contrasts and complexities can exist.

But so often, you find yourself thinking, what do I know anyway?