Rwanda
Page 2
Sunday 18th
"Early morning, go gorilla tracking in Parc National des Volcans. Tracking the gorillas through the light mountain forest on the slopes of the Virungas is a wonderful experience. In case you are lucky; you can get to see the gorillas, spend an hour with them, and get back at the lodge in time for a late lunch. Some gorilla families however are more mysterious, and tracking can take a full day, especially when it is wet and muddy. Community walk."Didn't do a community walk, but that's OK.
Holding area until you get assigned your guide and gorilla family. There are only 56 permits available for each day (8 people per gorilla family group), and cost $500 each. There are roughly 786 mountain gorillas left, putting them among the rarest wildlife I have seen.
Guides getting briefed.
Distance we are supposed to keep between us and the gorillas. Often times we were at about half this.
Very scenic and great morning weather.
Our family group- Sabyinyo.
2 silverbacks, 4 females. 3 babies, and 3 juveniles.
"This group contains Guhonda, the largest silverback of all the groups, who is well known for his massive physical appearance."
"Silverbacks are about 10 times stronger than the biggest American football players."
After our briefing you have to drive to the parking area by your site, between 10-30 minutes.
And then about a 30 minutes or so walk from the parking area to the stone wall entrance of the park perimeter.
We got to use these walking sticks for free and they were very useful in helping to avoid the mud.
We reach the park entrance. In our group was Chelsea from Vermont and her dad Spencer, and a German family of four.
My porter- for about 10k they would carry your stuff, and you get to support gorilla tourism.
Some water buffalo in our path- they can be very dangerous.
Armed in case we run into any gUErillas. I believe we found them about an hour into the park. I would say the main challenges of this trek were, in order:
Altitude- starting at 2400 meters, that is about 7900 feet (for reference Denver is about 5300 feet). Could certainly feel it.
Ants- should have worn long socks to tuck my pants into. Most dangerous when you stop in one spot, enabling them to crawl up you and bite.
Mud
Stinging nettles.
First up was this male silverback by himself.
Then this lone female was right by us, then moved to this group of several, including a baby.
This second silverback just stayed off by himself.
19 shots, including several right under this, are using the SLR with 100mm-400mm lens. We were so close that at 100mm I would have liked to be able to back up further to get more context into the shot. I was kicking myself that I didn't bring the 28mm-85mm lens on this trip, the big lens almost felt useless. I just didn't think we would be getting THIS close- maybe about 8ft away.
This guy climbed up into like a nesting area on some branches, and you kept hearing branches snapping under his weight and he kept getting lower and lower- he could have come down almost right on top of us!
A slow elevator ride to the ground.
Now back to the original silverback.
Proof! He got up and walked right by us, awesome!
We saw a fair amount of them in the trees.
And a few more individual family members on our way out.
Including one of the silverbacks that had moved to here.
In my research I had heard that you could smell the gorillas as you got within range of them, but I didn't notice any type of odor.
Major rain storms all afternoon. Had lunch back at the lodge.
Took a nap, then drove into town to use internet and spaghetti bolagnaise for dinner at La Palma Hotel, about a 20min drive away in the town of Ruhengeri.
Guide also found me some long socks to wear for tomorrow. Info on trekking and the family groups
