by Mike Loomis
Page 5 : Just Trying to Get Home
23 Nov 05
I went to Mbandjani this morning to radio Yokadouma to find out the status of the plans for today. The heavy rains made the roads impassable. Zambo had not yet arrived in Yokadouma. Zac left early this morning with David, another WWF driver, to try to reach Mambele by an alternate road. The sun is bright today so hopefully the roads will be passable.
Michael Kuwong will take a team to the field today to try to find Charles’s collar. The collar locations we have received from the transmitter on the collar have not moved in several days. There are reports of an elephant having been poached in the area. The collar location is less than 2 km from the road. We are concerned that Charles has been poached, but we hope that the collar has simply fallen off.
Zac and David arrived in Mambele at 11:30 AM. We had lunch and headed for Libongo on the Sangha River. David was ill and Zac did the driving. We arrived in Libongo and checked in with the police, who handle immigrations. I had my passport stamped for leaving Cameroon. We left David and the vehicle in Libongo and Zac and I hired a pirogue to take us the few kilometers up the Sangha to Bomadjokou in the Central African Republic, where a vehicle is supposed to meet us to take us to Bayanga. About halfway to Bomadjokou, in the middle of the Sangha River, our pirogue sprang a significant leak.
We were 100-150 m from either shore in deep water. Zac does not swim and was very concerned. I tried to hold the water back, Zac bailed frantically, and our two paddlers paddled like mad and we made the shore on the CAR side before the pirogue sank. Everything got wet, but fortunately, through experience, I’ve learned to put everything in plastic bags inside of my pack, so my things were for the most part dry.
We hiked along the bank of the Sangha until we found another pirogue to take us the rest of the way to Bomadjokou. We made it to Bomadjokou with no problems, but the vehicle was not there. We called Leonard Usongo in Yaounde and asked him to radio Bayanga to let them know that we were in Bomadjokou, but he could not get hold of anyone.
Zac thought that the vehicle might be waiting for us in Lidjombo, about 12 km from Bomadjokou. A motorcycle taxi was getting ready to leave for Bayanga via Lidjombo. We asked the passenger to let the vehicle know we were in Bomadjokou if it was waiting in Lidjombo. Our vehicle arrived about an hour later. We drove to Lidjombo where we cleared immigrations and headed for Bayanga.
The road is a single lane and has lots of pretty deep puddles from the recent rains. It took about an hour and a half to drive the 32 km. On the way, we came across the motorcycle taxi, which had broken down. We gave the driver and the passenger a ride to Bayanga. We are staying at the Doli Lodge in Dzanga Ndoki National Park. The lodge is a very nice tourist lodge, along the lines of an East African lodge. We went to dinner and met Uwe Klug, from WWF Germany, and a team of German auditors who are in the midst of a routine financial audit of the Dzanga Sangha project.
24 Nov 05
We had breakfast with Uwe, Erica (the WWF project Director for the Dzanga Sangha project in CAR), and David Grear, the WWF park advisor for Dzanga Ndoki National Park. We then met individually with Erica and David to discuss the possibility of the Dzanga Sangha Project collaborating in a Trinational de la Sangha (TNS) comprehensive elephant monitoring project aimed primarily at identifying existing corridors that connect elements of the TNS and concentrating efforts to protect the corridors.
After lunch, we went to the Dzanga Sangha Bai. It started raining during the 2 km walk to the bai. Just as we reached the mirador, it began to rain very heavily. The bai is smaller than I anticipated, but there were 47 elephants, 11 buffalo and 2 sitatunga on the bai when we arrived. The rain stopped after a while, and we spent an hour watching the animals on the bai.
This bai has unique geology. The soil contains pockets of minerals that attract the elephants. This is the only place where forest elephants can be seen in such numbers. Andrea Turkala, a researcher who has been studying the elephants at the bai for 15 years, has identified over 3,000 individual elephants that have used the bai. She has seen as many as 180 elephants on the bai at one time. We discussed our ideas for a comprehensive TNS elephant-monitoring program with her. Her data and knowledge of individual elephants would be invaluable in selecting specific elephants to collar—that is, elephants that use the bai, but disappear for prolonged periods of time. We arrived back at the lodge after dark.
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