Another 4.20am start this morning as had to be at Lake Victoria’s shoreline at Entebbe by 10am to catch a boat across to the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary.
Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary is the home to 44 Chimpanzee’s who have been rescued from either traps, illegal “bush meat” sales (yes some people do eat them), or other illegal activities eg sale for export as pets. Each of the Chimps are individually named and have their own personality. They are in the process of rehabilitating them with the hope that one day they will be able to release them back into the wild. However, first they must be sure that the Chimps have recovered from their previous trauma’s. We learnt a lot today about Chimps and their abilities to learn but also to hold on to traumatic memories much like humans. The reason Chimps behave a lot like humans in both personality and biologically is that we share 98.7% of our DNA with them. It was really interesting to see the group dynamics and to learn that they even have political systems within their group... except for chimps it is all about which male is more attractive to the females that determines who is the dominant male of the group... interesting :-).
We returned by boat across the lake to our truck and drove a short way to our campsite for the night in Entebbe.
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