GORILLAS!

Hello from Rwanda! We flew to Kigali and have been exploring this tiny country for nine days now. We love it! I think I'll just skip straight to the number one reason we came here--seeing the mountain gorillas. It was the experience I wanted to have more than any other in the world, and it was wonderful! So this is how it worked. When we were in Nairobi we called the tourism office in Rwanda to find out when we could get permits to see these magnificent creatures. The first person we spoke to told us there were no permits available until December! That made us a little nervous, but we were transfered to another person who said we could see the gorillas on November 3. That sounded reasonable. Then we thought we'd try calling one of the tour companies in Kigali that we heard sometimes has permits available, and they'd had a cancellation! This was Friday afternoon, and they had two permits for us on Wednesday. They said they'd hold them if we could come into the office on Monday with the cash. So we got on a plane on Saturday! Wednesday couldn't arrive fast enough. We spent the night at a beautiful resthouse minutes walk from the National Park. We enjoyed dinner there while we both tried to finish Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey. She lived in Rwanda with the mountain gorillas for 15 years. It's very possible mountain gorillas would be extinct now if not for the work she did to protect their habitat and rid the park of poachers. Tragically, she was killed by poachers in 1985.
On Wednesday morning we were at the park at 7:00. We met our guide, Felix, and found out that earlier in the morning, trackers left for Mt. Visoke to discover exactly where our gorilla family was. We had been told the hike to reach the gorillas can take up to four hours. Mind you this is hiking up a volcano through the thickest vegetation we've ever seen. We hitched a ride with one of the other five tourists in our group to the "parking lot" near the volcano. We walked for about five minutes through somebody's farm, crawled over the brick wall that keeps out the buffalo, met the park rangers with their AK-47s and our trackers and were told to leave all unnecessary items where we were. Michael and I didn't realize the significance of leaving our things behind, but the American retirees who where were on their sixth visit to the gorillas got really excited. Apparently you leave your stuff behind to lessen the possibility of curious gorillas stealing your things. The exciting part was that you only leave it when you're 100-200 meters from the gorillas! After only 15 minutes of fighting our way through the jungle we came upon a mother gorilla and her baby. I was shocked that while the trackers (while grunting like the gorillas do) used their machetes to hack away the vegetation in front of the gorillas to give us a better view, they barely acknowledged we were there! They tell you to stay at least seven meters away from the gorillas for their safety and your own, but they were grooming each other and just laying around--about 10 feet away from us! We knew there were nine gorillas in this family, but from where we were there was no sign of the rest of them. I would have sat and watched these two all day, but after a couple minutes Felix had us move on. We didn't go far though. Even though we couldn't see them where we were, we had been just above the rest of the family.
Every gorilla family is led by an adult male called a silverback. The fur on his back turns silver when he reaches sexual maturity at about 12 years old. There is usually only one silverback in a family because a dominant male will not let other silverbacks mate with the females in the group. When males in the group mature they will usually leave in search of their own females. The silverback we met was Charles, and he weighs in at about 440 lbs. At only 24 years old, he'd done pretty well for himself with three female partners, one juvenile male, and four babies in his group. Charles was awefully tired during most of our visit, and we even heard him snoring for a while. Shortly before we left we watched him climb the hill, and he looked incredibly powerful! The young gorillas provided a lot of entertainment while we watched them tumbling backwards down the hill, jumping for branches, and knocking each other around. The hour was over WAY too fast. As we headed out we were all trying to get a few final pictures. I was distracted by the gorillas behind me when I realized suddenly I'd better duck out of the way. The baby, Zuba, had climbed a skinny little tree right in front of me and as the tree came down he almost landed on my head! It was a great end to the morning. I'd recommend this trip to anyone! There's a lot more to say about our trip so far in Rwanda, but Michael and I have to go now to meet Eddie. He's a Rwandan we met a couple days ago, and he's invited us to stay at his home tonight! I could only get three pictures to upload for this post, but we'll be sure to post more later. Miss you all!