I didn’t even need an alarm clock today.
The excitement was consuming me and I felt like I was on a high. We had to be at the base camp at 8.00 am for
a briefing, which meant a very early breakfast of banana pancakes (or their
version of anyway!). We climbed in the
car and headed to our briefing spot which was about 10 minutes drive away. Some
of the staff were hurrying us up because we were running late; I’m pretty sure
that they would have used a stick to point at us and hurry as along if they
deemed it appropriate.
We were late, just, and the briefing had
already started. We tried to creep up to the large group of people as
inconspicuously as possible. I don’t think we missed anything too vital! After
the talk we were divided into groups of 8 that would be tracking different
groups of Gorillas. Our guide was called Wilbur and the rest of our group were
German. Our Gorilla group was called Busingye. We had a 40 minute drive before we stopped, grabbed some hiking
sticks and started the ascent up a very high hill.
We hadn’t even reached the forest when the
group in front of us, suddenly turned left and were walking down into the
valley. We stood there, craning our necks to see why, and there, at the bottom
in clear plain sight were gorillas!! We were a bit too far away to get photos
of them, but we knew that our turn was coming.
The scenery was exquisite and the
rainforest was just beautiful with endless, lush thick trees. It reminded me of
the Aberdares in Kenya. We hiked for
possibly three or so hours when all of a sudden we turned off our path and were
walking amongst the thick vegetation. Our guide had a panga (a machete, or
large knife) which he was using to create a pathway. Wilbur stopped us and
informed us the trackers had found our group of Gorillas, and we should be with
them shortly. We had to leave our backpacks and sticks with the porters whilst
we started to go downhill on a nonexistent path. We weren’t allowed food or
water near the gorillas and the sticks would scare them.
Not that much longer afterwards, we all
stopped because at the top of the tree was one of our gorillas. He was quite
high up, and the sun was right behind him that at this point pictures were
difficult to get, but we tried anyway. We admired him for a few minutes before ‘crash,
bang’ and there he was in front of us, jumping down the tree and running away. We
all naturally started following him (the trackers and rangers in the lead).
After some tricky and slippery sections, there we were, amongst our group who
were now happily sitting in the trees eating the fruit. We all made ourselves
comfortable and took hundreds of photographs. The big, older male was closet to
us, being 250 kilos and not afraid to show us. He stood as big and high as he
could on the branch, to ensure he had his moment of fame before he started
eating again. The female and babies were in the other tree, slightly further
away and I think they needed to slow down on the fruit- far too much wind! It
was like the brass group were performing a piece of music to us!
 |
| Big Boy |
 |
| Needing to hold on with his foot |
It
was an amazing adventure that I would highly recommend to anyone. Congo, Rwanda
and Uganda all have Gorillas, but from what I understand, Uganda has the most.
We went through a company called African Adventures Safaris whose website is www.ugandagorillatour.com.
I would certainly recommend them for the service that they gave us.
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