Gorillas in my midst

Owing to the extended Easter break here in Tanzania, I finally made it out of the country on an official holiday! Foolishly, I described the aim of my trip to track mountain gorillas in Uganda as “to discover the meaning of life”.  Perhaps owing to Ishmael, I had developed a colourful narrative whereby an hour with some not so distant primates would provide me with some deep insight into human existence.  Let me put your mind at ease early – this was not to be the case.

Our trip was five days, three of which were primarily driving.  Unexpectedly, this was one of the highlights of the trip.  The countryside of Uganda is spectacular.  The changing topography as we went to and through three national parks was the reward for our patience.  Savannah gave way to verdant valleys dotted with homes and garden terraces before revealing the deepest lake in Africa, Lake Bunyoni and finally, mountains loomed into view.  (Committed to the point and shoot, few of my pictures will have adequately captured this, but click on the title link to see). 

The first two nights we stayed in ------ for chimp trekking.  Our ‘budget’ accommodation turned out to be semi-permanent tent structures that were not only quite comfortable and bug free, but also home to a family of black and white colobus monkeys.  During one of our evening sundowners, a group of about twelve of them treated us to a show of jumping tree to tree, precariously perching on branches – and sometimes missing them altogether! 

Some might say that planning an animal-tracking excursion during the rainy season is not a very bright idea.  The morning of our chimp trek, rain was clearly in the forecast.  Thankfully, the forest canopy provides excellent shelter from the rain.  Also, the chimps were exceedingly cooperative, eating figs in a series of huge trees twenty-five minutes from where we started.  As we started to squint and strain to get good looks/pictures of the chimps, the rain abated.  For the full hour we had with them, all of us managed to stay dry and avoided being hit by the figs some of the young ones were throwing at us or the showers of urine that occasionally came down!  

Luck also was upon us during our afternoon ‘swamp walk’.  With such an alluring title, it was all we could do not to sleep through it, lulled by the sound of the rain outside our tent and sedated by the amazing meals we were being served.  Fortunately, a friendly staff member woke us up and we groggily piled into the Land Cruiser en route to the swamp.  I know you’re anticipating this – but the swamp was great too! It really was a swamp, but there were wooden planks over the really marshy bits and we were able to see a lot of animals.  We also saw papyrus, which was quite different than I expected, and given its history, strangely thrilling.

After the chimps it was a drive through Queen Elizabeth National Park, past the equator and along the Congolese border.  Our destination for the evening was the Travelers Rest Guest House in Kisoro, famous for being host to the legendary Dian Fossey.  The guesthouse is set around a small garden and framed by the Virunga volcanoes!  Luckily the food wasn’t as good as our previous accommodations, which helped me to maintain my alertness after our 5 am wake-up call. As the numbers of people allowed to view the gorillas is strictly limited, I had been advised in advance that I would be tracking a different group than the friends I had come with, so I “shouldn’t cry”.  Restraining myself, we parted ways and began a 35km, two-hour drive to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, on the hunt for mountain gorillas.

At first I scoffed at the name ‘impenetrable forest’ and for the first twenty-five minutes I was justified.  A group of eight of us was being lead by our guide and trailed by a ranger toting an AK 47, ‘just in case’.  The guide kept in close radio contact with several trackers who had went out hours before, starting at the place the gorillas were seen the day before and attempting to track where they had since moved.  Optimism prevailed given our luck with the chimps and because it looked as though the rain would hold out.   Then the forest got impenetrable.  This meant that our guide was literally making our path with a machete.  The ground became a mass of vines, such that it was difficult to tell whether or not you were stepping onto solid ground.  Although it wasn’t raining, the vines were still slick and the ground loamy, setting the stage for regular falls.  Thorny vines scratched at our arms and errant sticks threatened to poke out our eyes.  I have never wanted to see an animal as badly (or as urgently).  A painstaking four hours later we were told to drop our bags and scale up another set of slippery vines – we had made it to the gorillas.

The first one I ‘saw’ (he was obstructed by foliage that one of the trackers was casually hacking back) was a silver back.  The guttural sounds he was making did not seem happy.  If you haven’t seen a silver back gorilla, I urge you to look them up – they are massive!  While those with DSLRs maneuvered to get a shot, I moved towards the back of the group.  First, National Geographic was unlikely to be calling me back about any photos I was going to take on this trip and second, if the picture was going to suck anyway, I did not want to be in striking range of that massive animal! Fortunately, we had come across a family and there were many other more docile members that we were able to watch.  This even included another silver back, who was older and patiently let us take about a million pictures of him having his lunch. 

Fears of the silver backs aside, I was able to spend most of my hour in quiet observation after taking a few obligatory pictures.  Sadly, there was no telepathic communication. However, I found myself fighting the urge to talk to them – to thank them for letting us take pictures of them eating, to assure them that we would only be staying our allotted hour and then leave them in peace.  I think this is because looking into their eyes was eerily like looking into the eyes of a human.  You knew they were not just observing you, they were thinking about you.  And so suddenly the barrier between ‘man and animal’ felt broken down.  It felt like I had walked into the living room of a stranger without an explanation.  The more I thought about this, the more deeply moving I found the experience.  And then just like that, the hour was over and we began the long set of ascents and descents back to our starting point.

The guides that we had throughout were amazing: they were so attuned to the natural environment and saw things that we would have clumsily overlooked otherwise (like a mountain elephant bed – eek!).  When we were tracking certain groups of animals, they knew the members of the families and details about the individual animals (for example, an old chimp who was missing a hand but had mothered three children nonetheless).  Being both the recipient of their knowledge and at their mercy for my personal safety was humbling and brought my disconnect with nature into sharp relief.  I am now back to the peninsula and back to work – but eager for my next adventure beneath the rainy season skies.