Word: ndoki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...desire to visit this extraordinary place was tempered not so much by the prospect of hardship as by the feeling that perhaps the Ndoki should be left alone. It has been protected for millenniums by its inaccessibility. Should there not be somewhere on earth where nature can be safe from the heavy hand of humanity? Journalists, explorers and scientists can inadvertently set in motion the destruction of the places they are trying to protect...
...first heard about the Ndoki three years ago, when Fay told me about this wondrous forest where gorillas, chimps and other animals do not run away at the sight of humans. At the time, I was researching an article on great apes, and I thought Fay was exaggerating. I had spent fruitless days trying to get glimpses of chimps and gorillas in forests just to the north of the Ndoki, and it was hard for me to imagine that Africa might still contain forests so remote that the animals had never learned to fear mankind. Western lowland gorillas, hunted...
...long after my talk with Fay, I encountered Japanese primatologist Masazumi Mitani, who along with Suehisa Kuroda established the first research camps at the edge of the Ndoki region in 1987. Since then, the Japanese researchers, in cooperation with Congolese scientist Antoine Ruffin Oko, have conducted a groundbreaking survey of animal populations in the Ndoki and have closely studied the primates, including gorillas and chimps. Mitani told me the animals were indeed unafraid of humans, but warned that conditions in the region were "very, very difficult." Knowing the extreme privation Japanese primatologists regularly endure, I took these cautionary words very...
Later conversations with Fay and others disabused me of the notion that the Ndoki would be safe if simply left alone. Only lack of funds has stymied government plans to build a road through northern Congo that would open the region to development. And in 1990 only the arguments of Fay and Japanese researchers, backed by the U.S. government and the World Bank, persuaded Congolese authorities that there were alternatives to giving a logging concession for the Ndoki region to an Algerian-Congolese consortium...
...next day we hit the swamps that have long deterred those curious about the Ndoki. We pick our way through the quicksand-like muck by feeling with our toes and walking sticks for a series of thin logs Japanese researchers have previously laid down. I slip once and fall up to my chest in mud before grabbing a root. Sobered by the slip, I ask Fay how deep the mud is. "Who knows?" he says, shrugging...