Jorzani Forest and Sea Turtle Sanctuary

Jorzani Forest became a national park in just 2004.  It is 50 km square of mangrove, coral and swamp.  It is below sea level so it is always very green and lush with lots of ferns year round.  It was really cool!  My favorite thing was the Zanzibar Red Colubus Monkies.  They live only in Zanzibar and are almost extinct with just about 2350 left in the wild.  They seem very tame though and very used to people.  One came up to me and put his little arms around my leg!  The monkies travel in troops of 30 to 50 with one to four dominant males in each group. In 1990 researchers sent about 20 red colobus monkies to the island of Pemba to see if they could start a colony, but now there are only 6 left there.  They eat leaves and unripe fruit because they can not digest sugars from ripe fruit.  They have 4 fingers on their hands and 5 toes on their feet.  I also saw a troop of Sykes monkies that were very blue, unlike the ones that I saw in Kakamega Forest in Kenya.

While at Jorzani we also went on a boardwalk through the mangroves.  I learned that the water in the mangroves is tidal, so that the high tide water come right up to the boadwalk bridge.  The mangrove trees have their roots raised out of the ground which makes them look like they can walk at low tide!  The trees are all protected in the Jorzani Forest, so they can not be cut down even though it is a strong wood and good for building.

After the forest, I visited a Sea Turtle Sanctuary where there were green sea turtles that had been rescued  from fishermen; they would have been used for turtle soup.  The sanctuary keep the turtles for one year before they return them to the wild.  I fed them with spinach by throwing it into the water.  Did you know that sea turtles can only eat in the water and that they shoot the water out of their noses?  Turtles can live for more than 100 years, and one of them at the sanctuary seemed really big, although he was only about 20 years old.