Trekking the Rwandan Mountain Gorillas

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Mighty mountain gorillas
Day 258 Christmas Eve
After much anticipation Mountain Gorilla Day had arrived. We had the privilege of staying in a dorm that evening complete with bunk beds. However, the sleep was short lived as we were up at 5.30. After a short drive from the small Rwandan town of Musanzi we arrived at the mountain gorilla sight, a part of the Warandi massive, home to seven volcano’s and approximately 280 Mountain Gorillas. Our group split into two groups a medium trek and long trek group. Given that Carly had been feeling unwell for a few days we decided it best to tackle the medium trek.

We had our briefing from Francis the park ranger and we were off to try and find a family of 13 Gorillas, called the Harati family. The family consisted of a few 6 month old babies a few females and one massive silverback.

The trek started with a steady 15 minute warm-up walk to a clearing where we waited for the Gorilla trackers to tell us which way to walk as the Gorillas were on the move. Luckily for us the Gorillas walked 3-4km towards our location which resulted in us only having an hour to trek up the Mountain.

Twenty minutes into the trek we were told to put all our bags down, 10 meters later we saw our first mountain Gorillas. We were in dense forest and we expected to stay the required 7 meters distance away from the Gorillas (as per instruction) however, we were lucky enough to come closer than approx. 2 meters from the 200kg silverback and his kids. We watched the Silverback preen his children only for them to climb, roll and wrestle with one another seconds later becoming covered in leaves and twigs. Our heats missed a beat more than once, first when our tracker began ripping at the vines obscuring our view of the Silverback, who in turn grabbed it back prefering to stay covered and let out a loud growl of disapproval. Minutes later one of the cheeky baby's climbed up on a young bamboo only to come crashing down seconds later inches from Carly's face. We snapped a thousand pics and stood and watched anxiously in awe of the size of the massive silverback.

After a while he moved on to a new place to sit so we followed closely, with the Silverback Gorilla letting us know we were a little close with a succession of loud grunts. The big boy settled again and had a lay down, whilst this happened one of his young children became very inquisitive of us, so much so we had to shoo him away so as not to attract any unwanted attention from the Silverback. Ten minutes later we were glad we had shoo'd the pup away as he let out a small squeal and within a split second the Silverback was up from his slumber and sped down the hill at lightning speed to see what the commotion was all about. Things settled quickly and we took our final snaps.

The hour of viewing went extremely quick however it was well worth the time and money to see them. Back at camp before 12noon we had an afternoon beer and waited for the long trek group to arrive. The long treckers arrived back exhausted after an 8 hour walk but agreed with us that the time, money and energy spent to see the Mountain Gorillas was well and truely worth it.

That evening we had dinner at a local man’s house where we had some local food and learnt more about the history of Rwanda. As it was Xmas eve we then hit the local pub for a few frothies.

Please scroll down for more pics.

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Comments

[mark and chrissie]

Jealous...
They look amazing! and Jez, what a hair do! Looking forward to meeting up with you in the UK, will you be going back and when?