Niger River Project

On day five we reach, way ahead of schedule, our main stop off point in the bush. It’s a chimpanzee sanctuary started by a French woman, Estelle Raballand, to save chimps from illegal sale as pets and release them back into the wild. We make the camp by mid-morning, having successfully negotiated our way around five hippos straddling the river. The trick with them seems to be to be make sure they know you’re there. That way you’re less likely to alarm them and provoke an attack. That’s theory anyway; it’s unlikely to be one I’ll ever want to test out.

We hope our arrival at the camp will cause quite a stir. We’ve heard that working in the sanctuary are five white volunteers - all female. We’re sure that the sight of two white guys, unshaved and stinking, emerging out of the bush on a large green canoe will be a sight they won’t forget.

But when we arrive, the camp is like the Mari Celeste - there’s no-one around. A fire is burning, but there’s no other sign of life. After nosing around, we discover the problem: the pump that powers the camp’s water supply has broken, and without water the place can’t function. We couldn’t really have arrived at a worse time, but the five girls - a Belgian, two Americans, a German and a French vet - are very welcoming.

They show us around the chimp enclosures at feeding time, which is a complete riot. In all there are almost 50 chimps in the sanctuary, most of them rescued from the illegal trade in chimps as pets. The apes are held in a number of large enclosures based loosely on age, where the intention is they’ll form social groupings before being released back into the wild. The sanctuary hasn’t actually released any of its chimps yet, but next year it is planning to release a group - only the third sanctuary ever to have attempted such a feat.

I’ve never spent mcuh time around chimps before, but they’re amazing creatures. Most striking are their eyes, which hold you from the first second of your encounter and seem to look into your soul with a frightening intelligence. The next thing you notice about them is the incredible sense of strength they exude. In their social groupings, they’re constantly demonstrating to each other - screaming, shaking the bars of their enclosures, scrapping with one another. It’s all normal chimp behaviour, but to the untutored eye it seems violent and terrifying. I wouldn’t want to stumble across a group in the wild.

While we’re at the sanctuary, a problem arises - again it’s with paperwork. When we left Faranah, we deliberately didn’t seek permission to canoe through the bush - a designated national park - because we thought the authorities would try to stop us. We’d been told that although normally you need a permit, because Guinea has no tourists and no-one goes into the park anyway, there would be no-one to check our papers.

But it turns out an old fisherman at the camp, known only as ‘Malian’ because of where he comes from, also doubles as the park’s guard there. Where, he demands of us, are our papers? We bluster our way through it, saying we don’t have any. His French is non-existent, and neither of us speak Mandinko, the local tongue; in the end the conversation grinds to a halt and we think that’s the end of it.

But in the evening, two of the volunteers approach and say that Malian has just threatened to “arrest” us if we don’t show him papers. Arrest us? This old, wizzened fisherman? Surely not? The girls are adamant this is what he said (I wonder whether he meant he’d “stop” - “arrete” - us). Either way he’s threatened to seize our canoe if try to proceed.

The next day we have a chat with Malian, through a translator. “It’s for your own safety,” he says. “Between here and Kouroussa, there are many hippos and it’s very dangerous. Just recently a small boy died when a hippo tipped his canoe and he drowned.” We tell him we’ve already come across lots of hippos, and that we’ll take our chances.

“But you haven’t got the right papers,” he insists. We fish out the by now very tatty ordre de mission we used to get to the source, hoping this will be enough, but he doesn’t buy it. In the end, I’m sorry to say, we buy him; our safety it seems, is worth less to him than hard currency. A few Guinean Francs, and the river is ours again.

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