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Showing posts from May 17, 2007

Nyungwe National Park

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As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Shawn and I got a chance to visit Nyungwe National Park , which is about a four hour's drive from Kigali. Nyungwe boasts a large tract of untouched mountain rain forest, home to thirteen species of primates, loads of mammals that they tell you right off the bat you are not going to see and something like 400 species of birds. It is also home to some ridiculously difficult hiking trails. We set off on one of these "trails" (or as I call them impossible vertical trudges through thick ravines with vicious man-eating ants thrown in for fun) in search of chimpanzees. We tried for about two and a half hours. Our guide, Jean Claude, did his best with a faulty radio, trackers that were in his words "not serious" and an avowed non-trekker slowing him down, but there was simply no finding the chimps, so he switched tacts. He decided that we should visit the mangabey monkeys which his trackers told him wer