And she knows why. But we thought the rest of you would enjoy this as well. We went hiking down into the steep Chambura Gorge in western Uganda in search of chimpanzees, and look who we found instead! Quite a spectacular (and large!) critter.
The gorge is beautiful -- very rain-forest/junglelike with thick tall ferns everywhere, towering trees reaching high high up trying to find the sun, sounds of loud birds all around. Most of them were invisible in the foliage but we did catch a sight of a couple huge casqued hornbills.
We were walking in elephant footsteps and hippo footsteps, gulp, but they mostly are just there at night, right? Our ranger guide also found plenty of sign of chimps, including their own footprints and places where the grass was bent down indicating they had gone by not that long ago. But they were proving to be true wild things, and we never saw them. At one place the ranger pointed to a clump of bushes. There's a certain kind of fruit the chimps like that makes them intoxicated, apparently, and after stumbling around drunkenly and playing pranks on each other, they go sleep it off in the bushes. Sometimes they disappear for weeks at a time, he said, as he tried to make the mzungus feel better about not seeing this latest type of wildlife.
It was OK with us. The place was amazing even without the chimps, and like Theresa said once before, we actually like it that the animals aren't all perfectly cooperative about presenting themselves on cue.
And heck, this spider was nothing to sneeze at! Enjoy it, Sarah.
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