tacugama

What a wonderful experience we had today in visiting the Tacugama Chinpanzee Sanctuary.  This not-for-profit cares for up to eighty chimps at a time, and is involved in education, social change, policy advocacy, veterinary care, and long term housing for severely traumatised chimps.   

The adult chimps are often shot for bushmeat and as part of land clearing programs, leaving orphaned baby chimps to be sold to Sierra Leonians as pets.  Of course, these pets quickly grow to 60+ kilograms and have the strength of five men.  

The Tacugama sanctuary is set in the midst of pristine rainforest and provided a perfect habitat for these animals.  They have access to fifty hectares of forest, and the option to return to an enclosure for food and medication.  

Despite their humanoid features and cuddly appearance, these are very much wild animals. This was brought into stark focus a few years ago when a group of more than twenty escaped from the compound, attacking and murdering a taxi driver enroute down the steep access road.   They had worked out that throwing a metal pole onto the electric fence would short circuit the current, allowing them to climb out of the sanctuary easily.  

One of the vets and several guides gave us a fascinating insight into the complex social structures of these animals and the difficulties that they face in co-existing with their human neighbours. 

interpol

Our ride from Bo to Freetown was fast and uneventful, a delightful pleasure to be back on sealed roads with some nice scenery enroute.

We arrived in Freetown within three hours and set the GPS navigators to a nearby hotel.  Gary's bike was still overheating, so we needed to stop regularly in heavy Freetown traffic to replenish his radiator with water.

On one of these stops a portly gentleman introduced himself to us as an Interpol officer.  We initially laughed off his approach, until he produced ID and became very very serious; instructing us to accompany him to the CID headquarters down the street.  We were not able to get away with just one or two of us going (standard procedure to separate in times of potential trouble).  So, all four riders accompanied this officer and a colleague down the road and inside the high steel gates of the CID compound.

While Ty and Gary stayed with the bikes, James and I were paraded past a bewildering array of officers, repeating our story multiple times.  All of our papers were checked, rechecked, and checked again; presumably looking for any inconsistencies.   At the heart of the problem was the officers reluctance to believe that we were genuinely in Sierra Leone for tourism purposes.

After more than two hours of questioning, the officers eventually determined that we were too much trouble for them to worry about, and asked one of the female clerical staff to give us a 'clearance certificate' for 60,000 SLL per person (about $18) and then release us.  this kicked of another round of farce, as the clerical officer had obviously never heard of this 'clearance certificate'.  It was just something that the Interpol investigator had made up on the spot to give them a little something for their time.  After she had finished explaining that there was no code in the computer for this, and he had finished berating her, she eventually wrote out a form for us longhand, collected 60,000 SLL from each of us, and we were on our way.

Still, we were very amused to note that we actually got off lightly.  On the way to the hotel we observed another poor Sierra Leonian chap having his head vigorously and repeatedly slapped by a female policewoman who was obviously aggrieved by something that he had done.