Primeval Playground
Nyungwe Forest
Rwanda's Nyungwe Forest is like an old man. Every inch of its thousand square kilometers is hunched, twisted, and tangled.
Nyungwe is a true rainforest, so damp fog and overcast skies are the norm, apart from the moments when afternoon sun breaks through the cloud cover. A mountainous snarl of old trees and dense greenery carpets its gaspingly steep slopes.
Entering the park is startling. One second you are cruising between the usual crowded red-clay hills, and the next you are plunged into the cool thickness of trees. Suddenly, the laughter of children being let out of school is replaced by the piercing whine of insects. Thousands of trees - bare and broken, thick and leafy, young, ancient, all as green as emeralds - stand out against the gray of the sky.
It takes over an hour to drive through the park. For most of the trip, the road is deserted. (This is a novelty in an otherwise densely populated Rwanda.) The dripping silence is broken only by the appearance of black and white l'Hoest monkeys munching on the new shoots of roadside vine growth, and the presence of camouflaged soldiers patrolling the perimeter. The latter are more sociable than the former, and wave hasty greetings to travelers. The monkeys, on the other hand, happily endure the loud rush of cars and trucks zooming past, but they run off in terror the second a driver slows down to look at them.
My Dinosaur Swamp
Nyungwe boasts a color-coded network of easily navigable trails. Within walking distance are waterfalls, troops of semi-habituated monkeys, mountains, valleys, rivers, and a working tea plantation.
One trail leads to the Kamiranzovu swamps, an entirely unique ecosystem. The most shocking moment I experienced in Nyungwe was, after winding up and down claustrophobically tree-covered mountains for forty minutes, rounding a bend and watching a far off swampland open up in front of me. Every dinosaur-themed movie I saw as a child came back to me. Its appearance is so prehistoric that it is otherworldly in its foreignness, like a display in a natural history museum. If a pterodactyl had swooped down from the mountain crags overhead, I would not have been surprised. Instead, a family of l'Hoest monkeys ran across the road and scrambled up a huge mahogany tree, chattering warnings at me.
Rwanda's Nyungwe Forest is like an old man. Every inch of its thousand square kilometers is hunched, twisted, and tangled. Nyungwe is a true rainforest, so damp fog and overcast skies are the norm, apart from the moments when afternoon sun breaks through the cloud cover. A mountainous snarl of old trees and dense greenery carpets its gaspingly steep slopes.
Entering the park is startling. One second you are cruising between the usual crowded red-clay hills, and the next you are plunged into the cool thickness of trees. Suddenly, the laughter of children being let out of school is replaced by the piercing whine of insects. Thousands of trees - bare and broken, thick and leafy, young, ancient, all as green as emeralds - stand out against the gray of the sky.
It takes over an hour to drive through the park. For most of the trip, the road is deserted. (This is a novelty in an otherwise densely populated Rwanda.) The dripping silence is broken only by the appearance of black and white l'Hoest monkeys munching on the new shoots of roadside vine growth, and the presence of camouflaged soldiers patrolling the perimeter. The latter are more sociable than the former, and wave hasty greetings to travelers. The monkeys, on the other hand, happily endure the loud rush of cars and trucks zooming past, but they run off in terror the second a driver slows down to look at them.
My Dinosaur Swamp
Nyungwe boasts a color-coded network of easily navigable trails. Within walking distance are waterfalls, troops of semi-habituated monkeys, mountains, valleys, rivers, and a working tea plantation.
One trail leads to the Kamiranzovu swamps, an entirely unique ecosystem. The most shocking moment I experienced in Nyungwe was, after winding up and down claustrophobically tree-covered mountains for forty minutes, rounding a bend and watching a far off swampland open up in front of me. Every dinosaur-themed movie I saw as a child came back to me. Its appearance is so prehistoric that it is otherworldly in its foreignness, like a display in a natural history museum. If a pterodactyl had swooped down from the mountain crags overhead, I would not have been surprised. Instead, a family of l'Hoest monkeys ran across the road and scrambled up a huge mahogany tree, chattering warnings at me.
posted by LookingGlassLand.com at 7:52 AM
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