AUTHENTIC CHIMPANZEE SAFARIS & PERSONALIZED PRIMATE TOURS IN GOMBE WITH AFRICANMECCA

Although best known as a superb place for an exploratory African primate safari, Gombe Stream National Park is a photographer’s delight for its birds and butterflies, its magnificent scenery and its quintessentially unspoiled beaches. You can spend many hours simply absorbing its tranquil ambience from a beach hammock or a traditional dhow on the cobalt clears inland sea.

You can fish with a rod, snorkel amongst scintillating shoals of cichlids: larger versions of the living neon jewels familiar from childhood aquaria. You can walk to awe-inspiring falls of lacy spume cascading hundreds of feet through rainforest from Rift Valley escarpments, or you can visit the Gombe Stream Research Base (prior arrangement required), local villages, community projects and places of historical interest.

Chimpanzee communities co-operate in hunting, keeping watch, recognizing danger or food and communicating their feelings to others. They can also transmit more personal information to significant individuals by means of barks, whimpers, howls, screeches and a repertoire of 15 distinct sounds, from warnings of specific threats, such as snakes, to queries, challenges and expressions of enjoyment and frustrations.



After a two-hour trek or more to find the chimps, choruses of breathy hoots from the forest canopy announce that you have been spotted. You may watch for no more than an hour as the community you have found performs its daily rituals of mutual grooming, aggression, fondling, deference, feeding and boisterous play.

The chimps are vulnerable to human influence. They are curious enough to handle anything left lying around, and they are sufficiently like us to incubate our germs. Therefore, there are strict rules for human and chimp viewing interactions. Parties of no more than six AfricanMecca guests must not approach within ten meters of the primate community, and only if in good health prior to the start of the activity.

Even so, you may be required to breathe through a mask that covers your nose and mouth. Only children over the age of 15 years are allowed on chimp treks and must be accompanied by an adult guardian. This may seem unduly restrictive, but the magic of Gombe will soon exert its influence and you will be moved by the emotions demonstrated by these “mock men” as they were christened by natives.



Mothers nurse their babies. Siblings groom one another, tumbling and chasing round their elders, sometimes cuffed if they become too venturesome. Theirs is a strict social hierarchy evoked by their patterns of communication. For example, pant-hoots are only addressed to their betters, never their inferiors, and ritual submission is performed by females and beta males towards alpha males and senior matriarchs.

No-one comes to intimately tour Gombe without a fascination for its most famous denizens, the equivocal chimps which at once endear and repel as we realize how like ourselves these primitive near cousins actually are (read more on when is the best time to visit Gombe).

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