Rubondo Island Day One

Rubondo Island is a national park with an introduced chimpanzee population. In the 1970s, seventeen chimps (originally from West Africa) were introduced from a zoo in Germany. Today there are approximately 70 chimps living on the island in two self sustaining colonies, monitored daily by national park rangers, but otherwise on their own.

We spent the entire morning of our second day trekking up and down a jungle mountain looking for one of the colonies. We did see 3 or 4 chimps, including a young one, but only briefly. They were on the move, foraging for food, so they never settled down long enough for us to get a good look. I wasn’t able to get any usable photographs of the chimps since it’s dark in the forest and the chimps kept moving (hence, no photos from day two.) Even without getting very good looks at them, we were all happy with that morning, and that we got the chance to see chimps in the wild.

even without great chimp views, Rubondo is still an amazing park: lots of birds, some great reptiles, and again great guides. we had two guides, Nangida who had been there for a while, and Daniel who was relatively new to this park. Smart guys with a lot of knowledge, and both very personable.

Rubondo Island Day Three

On our last day in Tanzania we had a morning tour before our 4pm flight out of Rubondo to get us to Arusha in time to catch our flight to Amsterdam, via Dar es Salaam - but that’s a story for another time! Nangida and Daniel took us out to try to find the island’s elephants and “pale” giraffes. We didn’t find them - nothing is guaranteed with wild animals - but we did find a bunch of nice birds and a white-faced colobus monkey.