Kibale Forest is a wonderful park in Western Uganda (near Fort Portal). I arrived there last Wednesday and, unfortunately, could only stay there for a day because park fees and accommodation is so expensive... But a wonderful 24 hours it was.

While waiting for my accommodation to be ironed out (trying to find the other backpacker complaining about banda prices to see if he would share his -- he did, nice guy from the UK) I went for a short walk out to the treehouse, which overlooks a swamp which elephants sometimes frequent (but not recently). The forest was very green, dense, and damp with just a few patches of sunlight creeping in past the foliage. And it full of monkeys and butterflies.

Almost right away I saw two different types of monkeys. I'm not sure what the first type was - probably red tails or syke's monkeys. The second type were definitely black and white colobus monkeys, which have very distinct black and white (almost skunk-like) markings and shaggy fur. I normally have trouble spotting monkeys in the forest, but there were tell-tale shaking treetops and easily spotted monkeys all over the place.

And then there were the butterflies - literally clouds of butterflies. The most common butterly I was was monarch-butterfly orange, but with black zigzag lines around the edge of its wings, small black spots next to the zigzag lines, and large gray spots near the body on the bottom of the upper wings. It would be impossible to remember let alone describe all the different types of butterflies I saw, but some of the colors I saw included: bright orange, burnt orange, brown, black, white, red, yellow, blue, and blue-green.

When I got back to the visitor center after my walk, I met up with Jacob, we agreed to split the banda and then we both went off on our own to do the walks the other one had done in the morning. My afternoon walk was very similar to my earlier walk, although there were not quite so many monkeys (red-tails & black and white colobus this time) and butterflies. This was made up for by the wonderful sounds of the forest, the most distinct of which was the barking of a black and white colobus monkey. It was actually quite a startling sound, especially since I was not at first certain that it was a monkey, though I couldn't think of what other type of animal it could possible be. And although I wasn't certain at first, it did soon become clear that the monkey was barking at me. Apparently he didn't like me in his territory. (Jacob later told me that he too had been barked at. Probably the same monkey.)

The sounds of the forest were actually quite wonderful. It was just amazing what I was able to hear having gotten away from civilization with no cars or other people about: the buzzing of ants, the flapping of butterfly wings (really, I wouldn't have thought you could hear them but you can), the whistling black and white birds whose wings seemed to clap a they flew... I could have spent days exploring the woods without ever getting bored. I almost think that if I had that forest to live in I could happily be a hermit for the rest of my days.

After my walk I went back to our banda for a little while before dinner just to relax. I was sitting out on the porch, just looking at the woods when two of the orange butterflies I described earlier landed on my hands. Up close, I got to seen just how beautiful their wings were - and how ugly their bodies were. A butterfly without its wings would definitely not be a pretty sight. Their tounges (if thats what they were) were moving around, searching my hand for what I don't know. Their legs kind of tickled as they walked on me. I watched them for maybe 6 or 10 minutes and then moved and hand and they were gone...

In the evening two Canadians, Jacob, and I went on a night walk. Our guide was a bit skeptical of our seeing anything and thought we should go the next night because of the rainy weather the previous day. (Apparently this made the forest cold which meant the animals were less likely to be out and about.) None of us were staying more than one night, however, so we decided to go anyway. We did not see a lot of wildlife, but only a few minutes into the walk our guide spotted a bushbaby, which is a very cute-looking primate which is about as far away from humans on the evolution scale as a primate could be. I was quite surprised by how good of a look at it we were able to get. It did not at all shy away from the bright spotlight that our guide shined on it. It had big eyes and ears and its small hands were grasping the tree branch it was on. Sometimes it would duck its head under the branch and it looked completely adorable. After about 10 minutes we moved on.

The guide, Jacob, and I later caught a fleeting glimpse of what our guide said was another primate later in the walk, but it looked like a squirrel to me. The bushbaby was definitely the highlight of the walk, but it was also really cool just to be out in the dark forest at night. I was really able to get a good sense of just how think the canopy was when when one of the Canadians saw a star and did not realize that it was a star right away because we just hadn't been able to see any other stars through the foliage.

The next morning I got up early to go chimpanzee trekking. There were two groups that left to go chimp trekking that morning and I was in a group with a Dutch couple. One of the things I noticed right away on our trek was that I much prefer to be walking through the woods on my own rather than with a whole group. When I was on my own I could take things slowly, go at my own place, and stop for however long I wanted to look at whatever struck my fancy. With the group it was difficult to enjoy the walk because I had to match my pace to the guide's and had to pay more attention to following him than to my surroundings. That was okay though, because we were not on a casual stroll through the woods, but on a mission to see chimpanzees and our guide knew where to look.

And see chimps we did. We probably walked for about an hour before we spotted our first chimpanzee. Initially we just saw one chimp way up in the canopy of a tree. (Actually, it was probably a mother and an infant since the chimp seemed to have something cradled in its arm, but we couldn't see the baby.) With my binoculars, I had a pretty good view of the chimp although my neck was craned back so far to see her that it hurt to look for too long. Chimps travel around in family groups, however, so it wasn't too long before our guide found us some more chimps to look at. (All way up in the canopy, but for some the angle was much easier on the neck.) The next two chimps we saw were a mother and a young juvenile. We had a rather good view and it was easy to see the juvenile's pink face (the adult faces were black) and its sticking-way-out ears. It is lovely to watch young chimpanzees swinging on the branches. Overall, we probably saw about 10 chimpanzees, mostly up in the canopy at neck-craning heights. Scratching, swinging in the trees, eating, walking. One of the chimps came down pretty low in one of the trees allowing us to get a really good look, even without binoculars. He was so close that we could hear it when he scratched himself. We also got to see hime build a nest in the tree - sort of - most of what he was doing was obscured by the branches and leaves. It took him only a few minutes and when he was done he seemed to have taken down about a third of the tree's branches.

Alas, it was soon time to leave the chimps, head back to camp, and say good-by to the forest.