So that is what a day should be like….

Now that was a days of days; one of the best I can remember in a long long time. Sitting with my back in Cote de Ivoire, feet in Guinea ...gazing down a sheer rock face at the untouched forest hundreds of meters below. All you can hear is the sound of wind in the grass and the screeches of wild chimpanzees floating on the wind. A mate of mine Graeme Ellis talks about the “Cosmic Mind Fuck”, when a moment is just too much to take in…I got you Graeme, I got you!

I’ve been harping on about Mount Nimba for as long as I can remember, after reading about it in a book on mammals of Africa, and seeing it’s got a insanely high diversity, things like otter shrews and Goliath frogs. It’s the single most important thing I came on this trip to see and was worth it, many fold. It’s a cashew nut shaped range of hills that rise up out of Cote De Ivoire and border Guinea and Liberia. The landscape is beautiful…ridiculously so.

We spent the night huddled in our tents, heavens open and rain bucketing down. It turns out that being in one of the wettest areas in Africa means rain, and it doesn’t mess around. It was incredible, lighting, storm, and in the lulls between thunder the shrieks of chimps in the forest not far away… then I knew it was going to be good ( wild chimps, not sanctuary chimps, not released chimps, truly wild populations… incredible). Our day started at five, and by sunrise we were hiking up through the farmlands and banana fields with our guides, sun rising up over the hills, before we plunged headlong into the thick of it. Our guide “Dhana” expertly cut his way along a path I battled to see, weaving between trees too tall to see the top of. We were immediately immersed in Lianas, a plethora of different mushrooms and wood fungus. The call of louries, the repeating whistles of the Klaas’s Cuckoo, Robins, Flycatchers and a hundred other calls, the forests hiding their owners in a thicket of green. Tree falls fascinated me, tree bowls 6 meters in diameter, with a tree five times that height, smashed through the forest, opening up a gap and the survivors racing for the light. You can almost see the race! Massive pink moths and leaf litter crawling with goodies. You could spend your life in there, just catching, looking learning. Everywhere you turn something new, everywhere you look fascinating. Doing a biodiversity survey here must be like winning the lottery, incredible. The walk was long and hard and C-baz and I were drenched in sweat, but what a day. Breaking clear of the forest, the major climb is across a grassland blanketed by clouds that rise vertically up the face from Cote de Ivoire. You barely see the world below, then Hollywood movie like, the clouds part and stretched out before you is one of last remaining pieces of Primary Forest in Africa, man, what a sight!

At one point the ridge is only about five meter wide, almost straight down on both sides, Forest forest forest. Unfortunately the perspective gained with the altitude also shows how precarious the position is. The forest is an island in a landscape of slash and burn; encroaching people, hungry people. Looking into Liberia, the perfect smile of the mountains arc is marred by the deep V cut into it by a mine. A rotten tooth in a perfect smile, necrosis edged, the rot spreading. The thing is, this place is no longer that hard to get too, the road are good, the war is gone, the people are so very friendly. Guinea is great, inexpensive and has landscapes, wow does it have some landscapes. People need to come here, climb the mountain, see the chimps, research the trees, put the landscape on the map again. I’m not a Greenpeace activist or anything, but while the worlds not watching this place will disappear.

Off into Liberia tomorrow, to Sapo which is rumoured to have the highest mammal diversity in the world… I’ll blog sometime.

Peace

-Chris-