Gorillas in the Mist

With the rest of our all-to-short time in Rwanda, Katie and I visited the Volcanoes National Park. It’s a beautiful park that backs up to other national parks in Uganda and the DRC. The chain of volcanoes between the three countries is home to the world’s only mountain gorillas, and I got to visit them! I’ve seen gorillas in zoos before (although apparently those are lowland gorillas, not mountain gorillas), but it was nothing like this. But I’ll get back to the gorillas.

We took off from Kigali at 4:30 AM, which was pretty painful, but the drive through the mountains was beautiful. As the sun rose, we were looking down into a valley covered in a thick layer of fog. It was amazing; it looked like a silvery lake with little islands peaking out above the surface. The countryside of Rwanda is incredible. They try to use every square inch of the country for agriculture; I’ve never thought agriculture made for a particularly pretty landscape, but here it does. Everywhere you look there are green terraced hills (apparently the terracing is done mostly by people convicted by local courts for participating in the genocide).

As we made it closer to the park, we could see 5 volcanoes looming in the distance. Katie’s plan was to climb one of them, Mt. Bisoke, and I was off to see gorillas, so we were pretty excited. We started off climbing up an unbelievably muddy slope at the base of Mt. Bisoke, but it only took us about an hour to find the gorillas. It was amazing. The group we saw is called the Umubano group and consists of about 8 gorillas. We first saw a female with a baby. The female was just chillin’ out, eating the stinging nettles that had brutalized me on the way up. The baby, Sun, was having a blast climbing trees and swinging around. She’d check us out for a bit and then put on a little show. It was so cute!

Soon another baby joined up. In true African spirit, she is called No Worries, and she is quite a bit bigger than Sun. They’d start rough-housing and she’d toss the smaller one around. When they wandered off, we followed them to a nice shady spot where we could also see the huge silverback, Charles. He must have been 500 pounds; he was massive! He could have taken us all out if he wanted, but the gorillas are all so docile. They didn’t mind us being there at all, and I think the babies enjoyed having an audience. You are supposed to keep a distance of 25 feet or so, but it was hard because the gorillas would move close to us, rather than the other way around. At one point one of the babies wanted to come play with us, and the guide had to shoo her off.

The whole experience was just incredible. It’s such an amazing feeling being in the presence of such huge powerful creatures, and they are so gentle. It’s very humbling. Gorillas have a pretty sweet life, though. They just hang out all day getting drunk off bamboo shoots and wandering around the rainforest while the babies play around in trees. At one point, No Worries would hang on a vine, getting a running start, and then swing back and forth while spinning in circles. When she fell off, she would just lay there because she was too dizzy to get up. It was precious (see the video at the bottom). Overall it was quite an amazing day. Katie had a nice, yet anti-climactic, climb up a volcano that was covered in fog. For me, I’m have trouble describing how cool the gorillas were, and now I’m having trouble picking which photos to use, so here are a bunch.

Charles, the huge silverback

Charles and one of the babies, No Worries

My token non-gorilla picture. Volcanoes!

One of the females grubbin' out on some delicious leaves

Woohoo gorillas!

Sun, the cutest gorilla of the bunch

I love gorilla babies

Mom & baby

Video of some good vine-swinging. You have to tilt your head because I don't know how to rotate the video...