Cousins! Baboon skull

Link to all flickr photos: furtwangl

(From Claire) Baboons! Sykes monkeys! Colobus monkeys! They’re everywhere! We’ve been here at the Colobus Trust one night and it’s absolutely marvelous! There’s a short tiny little walk to a beeeeeeeautiful beach with warm water and white sand. There are palm trees on the small short cliff that runs along the beach.

At the guesthouse there is a cook named Jared, a lady named Helen who takes pictures of bushbaby faces for a masters research project, and another volunteer from Holland named Egbert. Also really nice staff.

So far no baboons have tackled us or bitten our heads off! And we are doing well. Today we went in a truck to the forest and collected food (branches and fruits) for the vervet monkeys that they keep in a cage because some people took them from the wild to keep as pets which is illegal. They are now trying to get them ready to be put back in the wild.

Other things that the Colobus Trust does are: they make rope ladder bridges called “colobridges”to hang from trees across the road and so the colobus monkeys that need to cross the road won’t have the danger of being run into by a car, and can just climb easily on the colobridges across the road. They also remove snares from the forest that people set to catch antelopes, but that also catch the monkeys, and they teach children in schools about the colobus monkeys and about what the Colobus Trust does.

Once again we are having a marvelous time, we are happy and healthy!!!

(From Tom) Yeah. What she said. The Colobus Trust is exactly the kind of place I wish I had spent about six months in my early twenties, so we’re making up for it now, and giving Claire a jump-start. And she has settled right in, and loves it. Large-ish compound (5 acres) set between the beach road and the beach, with a former home turned into education center and volunteer housing with 10 beds in 4 rooms. Though with the recent troubles in Kenya (overblown in the media) all their winter volunteers canceled, so they’re pleased to see us (we’re paying to stay here), and have plenty of space, with just two other volunteers here at the moment. In the trees, though, monkeys aplenty! A troop of sykes monkeys and a troop of angolan colobus monkeys call this little patch of earth home, and so monkeys can be dependably found by wandering the property, with baboons around too, and bushbabies hiding in the trees (they’re nocturnal).

Today it rained hard and we basically just got an orientation and settled in, we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Just a reminder that clicking on a photo on the blog’s left sidebar takes you to that individual image in our flickr.com account, but clicking the furtwangl link, either on the blog or on once you are on the flickr site will show you our whole “photostream” of images

And speaking of photos, to give you a sense of the place, the photos of the Colobus Trust house, sykes monkey, snail, millipede, and beach are all within about 200 yards of each other, on the little path from center to beach. Not bad!

Power and internet here are a bit intermittent; we’ll keep posting at least once a day even if only the short phone text messages, just to let everyone know all’s well. Lyanda’s on deck for the next substantive blog post, hopefully tomorrow. We have our usual division of duties - I am picking up new Swahili words from everyone I meet, while Lyanda has put her nose promptly in an academic tome on the biology of colobus monkeys, found on the shelf here, and can tell you all about their four stomachs and lack of cheek pouches.

Comments RSS