Rwanda - The Gorillas

Monday, 19^th January

We entered Rwanda last Friday and headed for a national park called ‘Parc National des Volcans’ which runs along Rwanda's borders with the DRC and Uganda. This park has five towering volcanoes as it’s backdrop, is home to Rwanda’s mountain gorillas and is also the place where Diane Fossey conducted her research and where the movie about her work was filmed (Gorillas in the Mist). During the seventies, Diane Fossey, who was influenced by the conservation work of Jane Goodall and Louis & Mary Leakey, embarked on a massive publicity campaign to save the mountain gorillas from extinction. Before her campaign, stuffed gorilla heads and hands (used for ashtrays!!!) were widely available as souvenirs.

So it was no wonder that ‘Gorilla trekking’ was back on our minds. 

The number of daily permits to see them is strictly controlled so as to minimise the impact of tourists on their habitat and it is usually difficult to get a ticket without having booked long in advance. Well, guess what?

Don and I took a drive to the booking office and tickets were available for the following day. Ian and Heather and also Don had declared themselves out so it was just me. Seeing the gorillas in their natural setting had been top of my ‘bucket list’ so it is hard to describe how excited I was. Needless to say I hardly slept that night.

We set off far too early to make sure I would get there in time and as we left our camp the mist was rising in the valley and it looked like this:

This particular park is home to twelve mountain gorilla families and numbers to trek them are restricted to eight people in a group per gorilla family. The difficulty rating for the trekking ranges from relatively easy to hard, depending on how high up in the mountains the particular group you are observing resides. Of course they move around a lot but apparently most families stay within a range of about five square kilometers.

I was assigned to a 'medium' group and there were only two other people in this group. So off we went. The park is mostly rain forest and lies on the lower slopes of the volcanoes but to reach the perimeter of it involved a two to three hour steep climb. One of the woman in my group was not able to cope with the strain so she turned back (leaving just two of us, plus our guide).

We reached the edge of the park and were joined by another two guards armed with rifles. That was because the park is also home to buffalo and elephant. Just as well, as soon as we entered, our guards had to chase a buffalo away which had been hiding in the bush.

Another hour or so of serious trekking, this time no foot path, just jungle type vegetation and the guard was ‘cutting’ the path with his panga. This part was very tough, there was little visibility, we were surrounded by six foot tall stinging nettles and you had no idea where you were putting your feet due to the undergrowth. But I was too excited to worry about snakes and spiders!

And then suddenly the ranger stopped and signalled to us that we had located ‘our’ family. We carried on for another ten meters and there they were; a huge silverback, four females and a six months old baby. That first sighting of them was unbelievable!

Park rules stipulate that one should get no closer than seven meters but since our family was resting in a small clearing we were close enough to touch them but of course that is not permitted. However, the baby was very curious and kept coming towards us and gosh, I would have loved to pick it up!

...not unlike my own Silverback...

We were permitted to spent an hour with them and it went in no time at all. I don't know whether it was that they were 'resting' or not, but they were incredibly docile and apart from the baby running around and coming up to us, didn't take much notice of us at all.

Wow what a day! I have wanted to see the Gorillas ever since reading about their plight in the seventies and here I was....

                                                   ...another tough day in Africa!