The following is taken pretty much straight from my travel diary that I struggled to keep up-to-date during our African adventure.
"8/10/2006 Mzumbus[sic] in the Mist. Traveller's Rest Inn, Kisoro, Uganda.
Another once in a lifetime day today. We spent the morning tracking mountain gorillas in Parc Nationals de Volcans in Rwanda. There was uncertainty about the length of time we would need to trek before seeing the gorillas...so much so that we placed bets on it the night before. The winner gets free banana gin all night. Michelle was extremely optimistic at 45 minutes, and I figured 6 1/2 hours would be a fairly bad days trekking! As it turned out we only had to walk for just over 1 1/2 hours before we were told to put down our backpacks and take out everything we would need for the hour we were to spend with the family.
The trek in was reasonably hard. The first part was through some potato fields that backed on to the National Park, before eventually ascending one of the many volcanic peaks in this spectacular part of the world. The bamboo forest paths soon gave way to thicker vegetation, vines, stinging nettles and a fair chunk of mud thrown in for good measure. We were accompanied by the gorilla tracker/guide Francis, (who had, the night before, given us a detailed and moving history of Rwanda, the genocide, and how they are dealing with the consequences of it now, as well as some stories about the mountain gorillas), a couple of other trackers, some Rwandan army dudes, packing sub-machine guns and a machete wielding guy I dubbed "chop-chop". The trek in was definitely worth it.
After putting down our packs and grabbing our cameras we were led around a corner into a clearing to be face to face, literally only about 3 metres away, from Ubumwe, the huge silverback....the dominant male of the Amohoro group of gorillas. It is so incredible to look straight into his deep black eyes from this distance. I have heard it described as looking into our own past, and I agree that there is a certain humanity to their gaze. The new camera started working overtime, the 12 x zoom getting some great shots (although I later found out that I must have accidentally dropped the resolution to 3 megapixels?? So pissed off!!).
The further we walked into the clearing, (probably only about 15m x 5m), we could see more of the group, which consisted of the silverback, some young blackback males, some mature females, some adolescent females and about 4 babies. They were all in various states of just chilling out. The silverback (Ubumwe) was just sitting by himself, keeping a casual eye on everything around him. Others were sleeping, (completely slabbed out in some cases!), others were playing or feeding...it was like we'd stepped into their family room! One of the young males surprised us by coming out of the bushes behind us, pushing Craig out of the way and picking up Ingrid's gloves before sniffing them and tossing them away! We continued to move around the clearing to either get out of their way or just to get a better vantage point. As they got more comfortable with us they began to interact a lot more. The silverback started getting a fair bit of attention from some of the babies, and then one of the females started getting really friendly....and we were lucky enough to actually see them mating....quite a surreal experience....and all captured on video with running commentary (see below). We got to spend an hour with them before we had to head back, slightly exhausted, but with huge smiles and a thousand memories."
Click here to watch the video!
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