With Chimps watching the World Cup Final

Congratulations Italy!!

Watching the World Cup final has never ever been such a strange event before. I am used to watching it in different places of the world, but it is the first time I have cheered together with monkeys!

I went to the Chimpanzee island Sunday morning to do a brainstorm session with the staff, and managed to get Ian to come with me (I told them he's a journalist). If you're a tourist it costs 55USD for a boat trip and watching the monkeys get fed, and 200USD if you want to spend the night!! We brought an electrician to make sure the generator would be fixed out there so that we could watch the final. The zoo staff was also very keen on watching it, so by the time the sun went down we had lights to eat our posho and beans before sitting down with our Nile Special beers and got ready. We were zoo staff, psychologists doing comparative research, biologists, a crazy rich American lady wanting to help the chimps, Ian and me. Next to us the chimps were sleeping in their hammocks! They spend all day around on the huge island sanctuary, and once they have had their supper, they move into the big sleeping cage and climb up into little hammocks hanging in the ceiling. When we were cheering because of some excitement on the screen, the chimps woke up and cheered with us and rocked the metal bars:D

The chimps woke us up for breakfast the next morning, and the 150 bird species didn't make any less noise. We had our freshly baked breakfast with the staff that had been up since dawn, and I tried to do a brainstorm session with the staff for my project. It is VERY hard to explain the concept of brainstorming to Ugandans, I tell you! They could absolutely not see the point or the reasoning, and wanted to start discussing specific technical solutions instead. If one person had an idea, the guy next to him made sure to tell him how ridiculous it was. And every idea had to be well funded and it was absolutely impossible to get some crazy wild ideas out of them.

I was planning to do some sort of energizer in the middle of the brainstorm session, but that proved to be unnecessary. As I was collecting keywords and having a coffee, Ian came running from the feeding platform shouting Mawa is loose, Mawa is loose!

Mawa is the biggest and smartest chimp that really likes to escape, and Ian had been standing next to the electrical fence watching him simply leap over it! It was crazy and funny, we all had to run down to the water in case we had to run in. One chimp can have the strength of 5 grown up men, so if they decide you are a threat you can be in big trouble. They also move in an impressive speed! As we moved towards the water, we saw Mawa go straight to our lunch place and start digging in the lunch that had been prepared for us. The vet tried to shoot him with a tranquilizer, but missed, and Mawa took with him a lemon soda and climed to the top of the cages where he stayed watching us. We decided to do the same, got a beer and sat down by the beach to watch the entertainment going on by the cages.