Hanging around with cool chimpanzees in Uganda

Chimpanzees are endangered; they are typically 3-4.5 ft tall, weigh 88-130 lbs and live, on average, about 15 years (some have lived to be more than 60)

This is a chimpanzee nest from a recent night (they make a new nest each night); the gestation period for chimps is 8 months with babies being totally dependent on their mothers until 2 years of age when they can move and sit on their own

Black-and-white-casqued hornbill; this species is monogamous with pairs nesting in suitable tree cavities (it's only found in central and western Africa)

We saw virtually no other tour groups and seldom saw any other white people; the locals generally ignored us while the kids would always wave and get excited

We were stuck in traffic in Kampala for hours; for long stretches we barely moved and apparently this is typical; the west side of town was much nicer with better roads

Chimpanzee's diet consists primarily of fruit; between 172,700 and 299,700 individuals are thought to be living in the wild, a decrease from about a million chimpanzees in the early 1900s

The Great Rift Valley runs about 3700 miles from Lebanon to Mozambique; in Kenya and Uganda, the Valley hosts the most famous national parks and most important lakes

This area was full of tea plantations; bananas are the number 1 crop and were everywhere (they make all kinds of dishes with bananas and even have banana wine and banana beer)

Mbarara is the second largest city in Uganda and hometown of the president; the roads are better here than in Kampala because the president has funneled a disproportionately higher share of government money to this area

Chimpanzees and humans share as much as 98 percent of the same DNA; in terms of biology, a chimpanzee’s DNA is closer to a human’s than it is to a gorilla’s

I never ate with the group but Lee said the food was pretty good; the dishes I saw were not ones I would have cared for; I had canned fruit or cereal instead