Author: Liam Montgomery | Majors: Anthropology and Global Studies | Semester: Summer 2024

Myself holding fossils found at Olduvai Gorge

My name is Liam Montgomery, currently a Anthropology and Global Studies major and going into my third year at the University of Arkansas. For my study abroad trip I decided to go to Tanzania with the University of Arkansas. To say that the experience was one of a lifetime would be an understatement. My reasoning for going to such a far off and remote country was more simple than some may imagine. I asked myself would I rather go to a European country like Italy, somewhere not only relatively easy to get to but somewhere I had already been, or a country that I might never be guaranteed to go to, somewhere that requires more than just a passport and a plane ticket. Tanzania was that country. More than just the sense of adventure I made sure the trip would be useful for my major and interesting to me personally. The courses would give me six total credit hours, three in anthropology, my major, and three in biology. The courses along with the nature of the trip seemed like a natural fit for me. We would be in Tanzania for three weeks and see the chimpanzees at Gombe National Park, snorkel off the coast of Zanzibar, witness the history of Olduvai Gorge, and experience the great wildebeest migration in the Serengeti. Being able to not only learn about the biology, history, and culture of Tanzania but experience it for myself was invaluable. It is one thing simply reading and studying but seeing chimpanzees at Gombe in person or fossils eroding from the side of Olduvai not only gave me a deeper appreciation for my studies but gave me knowledge I would otherwise never get from just reading a book. Simply getting to Gombe National Park was one of the longest periods of travel I have ever experienced, and it was our first stop.

Picture I took of Gremlin, the oldest living chimp at Gombe

Getting on the plane for Tanzania was surreal in itself, and I never really comprehended what I was getting myself into until landing in Tanzania almost two days later. We landed late at night in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. Immediately I noticed how everyone was driving on the left, something that I had not realized until landing, and how most of the streets in Dar were still simple dirt roads. As we drove to our hotel for our first and only night in Dar Es Salaam I really took in being the farthest from home I have ever been, in a foreign country that I knew next to nothing about. The next day we woke around six in the morning, having to board another plane for Kigoma, our next destination on the way to Gombe National Park. We took a smaller propeller plane from Dar to Kigoma on a local Tanzanian airline and arrived in Kigoma around two hours later. Kigoma is the largest city on the coast of Lake Tanganyika in the west of Tanzania and it was very different from my first impressions of Dar Es Salaam, to my surprise. We arrived at the hotel and were greeted by a complete staff of workers but no other tourists in sight, evidently Kigoma was not a top tourist destination. In fact everyone was so surprised to see White foreigners, or “Mzungu” as we were known in Swahili, that nearly every person either stared in amazement or smiled and waved. The next day we had to take a boat to get to Gombe National Park, as there were no roads leading into it. Getting on the boat was an ordeal itself but once we made it the boat ride was around two hours north to the research station of Gombe. While on the boat I thought to myself what it took to get to this point, four days of traveling to see chimpanzees in the wild, I wondered how difficult it was for someone like Jane Goodall to get to Gombe in 1960 for her now famous research. We finally arrived at the research station around midday and found that the water levels of the lake had risen so much that the original dock and half the welcome sign were now submerged beneath the water. The next day we set out to find the chimpanzees. This consisted of an almost two hour long trek up the extremely steep escarpment that made Lake Tanganyika and was created by the Great African Rift Valley. After hours of arduous hiking and literal days of travel to get here we finally found what we had come all this way for. Seeing the chimpanzees was not only a huge sense of accomplishment but so surreal it almost didn’t feel real. We were so close and at times they would almost touch us as they walked by and as I observed these amazing animals a feeling overcame me of just how similar they were to us. Perhaps this was the highlight of my trip but it was only one adventure in a country I was in for three whole weeks and trust me when I say that was only the beginning.