The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary

3 January 2023

I was looking forward to moving out of Freetown, hopefully to somewhere more tranquil and serene. I was not disappointed.

Getting to the sanctuary
This proved easier than I thought. I took a keke (a three wheeled tuktuk) to Lumley Junction. From here I took a local bus to Bathurst Village for Le10,000. I asked the driver to drop me off just after the village at the entrance to the track to the sanctuary. Then its a 2km walk up hill to the sanctuary through forestry.

The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary
Walking up the hill I met one of the workers, Hayley from Australia, who began to explain the aims and work of the sanctuary. It is set within protected National Park on the outskirts of Freetown and was created by its Sri Lankan founder, Bala, with the purpose of providing a place to rescue and rehabilitate endangered primates. It now focusses on taking chimpanzees which have been taken as pets or for bush meat; rehabilitating them and eventually releasing them back into the wild.

I took the afternoon tour along with a group of day visitors. We were shown the quarantine area where the chimps are first checked to ensure they have no infectious diseases or behaviours that will endanger themselves and others. Many are sick, undernourished and traumatized when they first arrive. They are then transferred to the 'nursery' where they are provided with the opportunity to develop skills for survival and given a lot of human attention and love. Slowly, they start to become stronger and confident until they are ready to go into the protected and secure forest area. This is the closest to their wild habitat whilst still being supervised by the sanctuary staff. Eventually, they are released to the protected habitat on an island to the south of Sierra Leone - a habitat only for the chimps.

I was really impressed with what the staff team are trying to accomplish here with limited funding. There is a large staff team of locally employed people who provide the support for the chimps, run the center, cook, drive etc. There are also 50 staff members dispersed through the Sierra Leone provinces providing education and prevention programmes.

I stayed in one of the huts overnight. This was blissful - a beautiful forest experience with an extensive banquet of food for dinner. In the evening you could hear the sound of the chimps and at times this was high pitched as those in the 'nursery' are brought into secure huts at night. They obviously don't find this confinement easy - their noise certainly sounded like it anyway.

My companion at the sanctuary was a fellow Yorkshire man who was also travelling though Sierra Leona. It was good to have company and share stories.