Hello again future readers. I am writing to you from the long-ago time of early 2024. Although my previous Tacugama entry will have gone up only a week before this one, in real time it was about four months in between our visits. Life here in Sierra Leone has been a hoot but getting out and about to explore stuff was a bit more difficult than initially anticipated. Some of this is artificial but the morning we departed for Tacugama we finally got a car and so finally had some independent mobility. Plus it has taken a while to understand what was going on in the area, historically, which meant we didn’t quite know where to go. But my super amazing wife’s birthday was coming up, and Tacugama was a place we knew to go, so we had an extremely lovely weekend just relaxing there. We spent two nights at Tacugama in one of their eco-huts and it was great.

We left for Tacugama on Friday night after work, in such a hurry that I forgot to bring a book. Cell phone reception up there isn’t the greatest and there wasn’t much reading material on hand so this was potentially a disaster. The whole plan for the weekend was to spend the large majority of the time just hanging out and reading and I was left without reading to read. Oh no! The solution to this was to go through a backlog of stuff I had meant to read on my phone, and also, when she was busy crocheting, to steal my super amazing wife’s book that she had brought. So that worked out well and when I was reading and we weren’t eating (we also spent a large chunk of time eating during this trip, the food was phenomenal) I could nap in a hammock.

Speaking of thirty-something-guy activities, our real big adventure during our time at Tacugama was going on the birdwatching tour. This we did Saturday morning. We set our alarm for 6:30, hoping in a metaphor reversal the worms we caught were in fact the early birds. Our tour guide was Alfred, who simply made the whole adventure. Alfred loves birds. He got so excited about the birds we saw, even the common ones. If you are going on a bird tour in Sierra Leone ask for Alfred.

For the birdwatching tour we went up to the top end of the reservoir. On our last trip to Tacugama we hiked over the dam of the reservoir, but this time we were seeing the other end. On our last trip it was also the rainy season, and this time around it was the dry season, so it was neat to see the reservoir with a lower water level. This is a much preferable indicator of the change of seasons than like snow or something is. Boo snow. Yay tropical jungle. We didn’t see way too many birds on our birdwatching adventure. I got a number of pictures of the same reed cormorant. Birds I didn’t get pictures of were a flycatcher with a very colorful orange tail and a green turaco.

The most dramatic part of the adventure however is when we almost caught a glimpse of the Great Blue Turaco. Turns out Alfred’s absolute favorite bird is the Great Blue Turaco. We had spent our time at the reservoir and were about to head back when Alfred saw a rustle of leaves and heard the Great Blue Turaco call. We couldn’t leave now that we had a chance to see one. We stayed still and waited and heard a few more calls but alas it was not to be. So we hiked back along the trail and over the dam again and wound our way back to camp.

The afternoon we went off to see the chimpanzees. They were much the same as last time though this time around I got much better pictures of the babies playing around thanks to a zoom lens. And I was prepared for the alpha chimp throwing rocks at us, though there was also a much bigger crowd so individually I wasn’t as much of a target. We also saw some chimpanzees grooming each other much more intensely this time around, and it was funny to watch one manhandle (chimp-handle) another’s leg and spin its friends around to ensure they got all the angles.

The rest of that day was spent in various comfortable chairs reading or in the hammock napping or up in the kitchen lean-to eating. Minus the reading part I now realize this is the life of a chimpanzee at Tacugama so I guess we really got the full experience. We went to sleep that night and the next day had another delicious breakfast and a very relaxed morning before heading on home. Not a shabby weekend at all.