Greetings from the RAINforest. It has been RAINING here for the past 5 days or so more than you would expect for the so called 'dry' season.
There was drizzle, there were clouds as far as the eye can see, there were storms with lightning and water coming down in buckets. And one morning the temperature in the forest under the chimp nests plumetted to 13 degrees Celsius. To put it in short - this made some of the most uncomfortable weather conditions I've experienced ever in Africa.
You could get rid of the palms, the exotic birds, the monkeys, the chimps, the noisy insects and frogs, the bad roads and you could be in Nothern Germany in October , for all I know. To make my analogy even more complete, the nearby town of Fort Portal these days seems to host an amount of lovely German tourists that perfectly matches the recent rainfall patterns. So there you go.
Yeah - and I am now having on and off bouts of cold, temperature, some shiverring and nasty reaction to cold water whenever it touches my skin. Hence today I had to skip going to see the chimps. They are very much like us when it comes to the diseases they are susceptible to, only they apparently are less well used to coping with them (no Coldrex and stuff like that, not even a warm blanket, they just have to sit out the cold showers coming down on the forest). Hence it's not just that going to the forest with cold-like symptoms is very bad and umcomfortable for me but I could actually infect the chimps. Something to be avoided.
On the plus side - there's a bit of sunshine today so hopefully I get better quickly.
Alex
