Day 152: Afi Mountain Drill Ranch

The ranch is a monkey conservation project, primarily for the now rare drill monkeys. There are two groups in outdoor enclosures and one group that lives freely here. We are repeatedly visited throughout the day by monkeys who look at us just as we look at them. They keep distance. So there's no comparison to the Baboons in Mole Park.

There are also a few red-tailed monkeys, a few Mona Monkeys have found shelter here as well as 25 chimpanzees. Three of them are isolated because they are not compatible with the group. Apart from the fact that as privately kept animals they have never learned to survive in the wild, they would also be hunted down in no time and sold alive or dead. So sad.

There are even said to be gorillas in the depths of the mountains. In the best case scenario, they cannot be found and are therefore protected.

The enclosures are large and provide food, but not enough and so the monkeys have to be feeded. The project buys bananas, avocado, eggs and other things from the surrounding villages – people come every day on foot or on motorbikes and bring food. Feeding takes place one to three times a day, depending on what the food depot yields, up to a ton per day! Some people are only concerned with sorting the fruits and vegetables according to ripeness.

The chimpanzees' feeding is much louder than that of the drill monkeys. In the morning there are bananas, in the afternoon each chimpanzee gets an egg and a handful of popcorn. When chimpanzees eat popcorn it's no different than in the cinema :-) And how Pablo, who is partially paralyzed after a stroke, manages to get three eggs...

It's really fun to be here.

There was once a canopy walk here, probably the longest and highest in West Africa, but it has no longer been accessible since 2012. There is also a small waterfall that currently has no water and a pool in which you can probably just barely swim. 

Unfortunately we both have caught a cold. That's why we leave all that aside and just sit around and watch the monkeys.