The Maracage

Today our biodiversity team leader, Matthew, took me one of the project’s fauna transacts. This is where we monitor an area for evidence and sightings of animals such as Bonobos and many other species of primate, forest hogs, small forest antelope, and giant pangolin. He told me he’d picked the closest one so we wouldn’t have too much difficulty getting there. We headed directly across a glassy lake to the mouth of the Bosongo river. Our wooden hulled boat nosed into a tunnel-like, foliaged-covered waterway that brought back childhood memories of the Jungle Ride at Disney Land. 

Matthew (left front), Djems (right front), Thomas behind them and Stino navigating the boat.

Travelling along the Bosongo River

We carefully meandered our way up the river and were helped by chest deep fisherman to lift our boat’s heavy wooden hull through fishing weirs blocking our course. Nearly an hour of obstacles into the interior of the project area we came upon women and children washing on a beach which indicated we had arrived in the small village of Bosongo. Excited children paraded us in to the centre of town with a chorus of Mundele, mundele! Here, surrounded by rows of interested eyes, I sat in a 3-legged plastic chair while Matthew organized five pirogue drivers for the next portion of our journey. I had no idea what I was in for.

The four of us: Matthew, Thomas the flora biodiversity lead, Djems a forester and swamp forest expert and Anne Marie my translator and personal assistant headed into a thick grove of trees and down to the muddy banks of a stream that was hidden behind branches. I was directed to sit in the floor of one of the pirogues (dug out canoe) and I did so while wedging my backpack between my bent knees and chest. I noticed the 2 cm of freeboard and worried about my camera. 

Me in my second, less leaky pirogues

Once we were all seated in the bottoms of our respective pirogues we began paddling through what was more a flooded and dense forest than any river I had ever seen. Shortly it became apparent that my thigh high waders were doing nothing to prevent me from becoming soaking wet. At one point I noticed water gushing through the bottom of the boat and between my feet. A well placed piece of plastic had come dislodged and the leak began to fill my barely floating pirogue at a rather alarming rate. After a few failed attempts to plug the hole with the same piece of plastic, some grasses and finally my finger; the pirogue driver made a series of hand signals indicating that we were going to need to switch boats. We pulled up along side a slightly more buoyant wooden hull and carefully transferred over to a much better 3cm of freeboard and no apparent leak. The paddles made rhythmic splashes as we floated slowly around great tree trunks and twisting vines the size of my waist. I imagined water snakes, but had one of my favorite moments where I thrill at my immediate reality. I really am right here doing this right now!

Anne Marie also doesn't have much freeboard

Nearly an hour later we arrived at a place that was not obviously different from the rest of dense flooded jungle. However, I was informed that a metre under the dark water marked the edge between the river we had travelled on and the swamp forest we were about to enter.

Walking, or shall we say trudging, through a swamp forest is not like anything I have ever experienced before. As I tried to carefully follow in the footsteps of the others (along sunken logs and other less deep areas) images from movies I had seen as a child sprang to mind. Images such as the quicksand in the Never Ending Story where the boy’s horse sinks, or the swamp forest in the Princess Bride with “Rodents of unusual size”. At times the mud was quite passable, just ankle or shin deep. But, at times, like when I placed my foot a little to the side of where I was told, I was plunged up to my waist in mud. Vines twisted over and around us and the thick forest blocked out the sky. Sweat dripped from our foreheads as we helped to pry each other out of various suction-like predicaments. Warnings of ‘fumi’ (ants) and ‘serpent’ (snake) were frequent and I was warned to touch as little of the overhanging vines as possible for the same reasons and because many of them are covered in alarmingly sized spines.

Hiking in the Swamp Forest

Laughing while Djems tries to un-suction Anne Marie

Finally arriving at the biodiversity transact (those are the plot cards in my hand).

An hour or so later we made it to terra firma and we were able to, quite dryly, walk to the beginning of the biodiversity transect. We learned about the footprints of giant pangolin, the last forest elephant sighting, and the Bonobo nests high in the trees, and then shortly we returned back by the same route. Trudging through the swamp forest, paddling along the forest waterways, down the Bosongo river and across the sparkling lake.