Interview with Charlotte Uhlenbroek
If you had to choose a destination that you feel is an important natural world location, where would it be?
The Serengeti in Tanzania. As a child I travelled through it frequently with my family and it always felt like an amazing adventure. In those days there were very few tourists and you really felt alone in true wilderness. Our visits sometimes coincided with the wildebeest migration – a truly remarkable spectacle of vast numbers of wildebeest, as well as zebra, impala, eland and gazelles moving across the landscape as far as the eye can see, driven on relentlessly by the need to find fresh grazing and water. At night we would camp and hear lions roaring close by. If our vehicle broke down or we needed to change a tyre (which happened a lot) we were acutely aware of our vulnerability but also had a strong sense of self-reliance that was very liberating. Its size alone makes Serengeti incredibly important as an ecosystem. The name comes from the Masai “serengit” which means the land that runs on forever. It is nearly 15,000 square miles (and in fact contiguous with Kenya’s Masai Mara) - a truly vast and remarkable area encompassing the Ngorongoro crater, the rift escarpment and Lake Manyara.
What has been your best natural world experience to date?
For pure exhilaration I would say snorkelling with humpback whales off the east coast of Australia and meeting a silverback gorilla for the first time in Rwanda. But the most powerful and moving experience was gaining the trust of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. When I first went to Gombe I was working to habituate the northern, Mitumba, community of chimpanzees. It took years to gain their trust but when eventually a young female called Rafiki came and trustingly sat down a few metres away from me and quietly groomed her infant son I was so touched I nearly cried for joy.