Gorilla Day
I’m back now in Nairobi – you have no idea how hard it is to find reliable internet cafes in small Rwandan towns when half the time they’re closed for national holidays, and the other half the internet is out because it’s rainy season and apparently that happens a lot… I don’t really know the connection between the two, but apparently that’s their excuse when you’re half-way through a giant blog update and suddenly all the power dies!
So the last time I wrote anything, it was the night before Zach, Charles and I went to do the gorilla trek. That evening was notable for two reasons. One, we found our cheapest dinner in all of Rwanda! A giant heap of rice, beans, vegetables, potatoes, etc for 250 Francs… about 40 cents! Trust me, this was a very momentous occasion. Secondly, Sam, Steph and Lindsay came back from having done the gorilla trek that day, so we got to get their input on what they had just experienced before embarking upon our own trek…and, frankly, it made me a little nervous! It had poured rain the entire time they were hiking, which was about 7 or 8 hours in total…in fact, the gorilla group they were tracking had gone so far that they were actually in the Congo, and I think there were only 6 or 8 gorillas in the family. When they got back, they were sooo cold and exhausted – it sounded like more of an adventure hiking through stinging nettles and mud up to their waists, and the gorillas themselves seemed kind of secondary. This was totally different from any other account I’d heard from anyone, so I really now had no idea what the next day would be like.
So we got up bright and early at 5:30am and met with our driver, who drove us on the bumpiest, boulder-filled road imaginable for 45 minutes to get from Ruhengeri to the actual Parc National des Volcans. When we got there, we were ridiculously lucky – usually there are thirty people registered to do gorilla trekking every day, with 10 people in each group to see the different gorilla groups… However, our day, for whatever reason, there were only 10 other people registered and none of them showed up! They thought that maybe their flight didn’t get in from Belgium or something…I mean, it is low season there, but we never imagined that it would be just the 3 of us in our group, and that we’d get to totally pick whichever gorillas we wanted to see. I think they really wanted us to go see the Sabinyo group, which had just recently had an extra silverback join the group, so they were really agressive, which is very unusual – we met some people who had just done the hike the day before, and they said that they were terrified! Instead, though, we opted to go to the group that would involve the longest hike possible, and that was the Amahoro group (which means “Peace” in Kinyarwanda). They said it would be about 2 hours, and that the group had two babies, one 11 months and one 2 years old, and we’d be able to get much closer to the gorillas than if they were fighting for male dominance! So we chose to go to see them, and I know it was definitely the best choice! After only actually about an hour of hiking up the side of a massive volcano covered in bamboo and jungle (partly bush-whacking with machetes) with our guide (who was actually one of the people who had habituated this particular group) and two armed guards (as protection from poachers, mostly), we came to an open clearing on the mountain-side where we met the two trackers who had been following Amahoro group and letting our guide know by walkie-talkie where to go. They told us to keep quiet and bring only our cameras and jackets… And sure enough, we looked to the left and about 200m away we could see the big black hairy forms of gorillas through the dense foliage! As we approached, one of the gorillas was peering over a bush at us, and as someone had described to us before, it really looked like it was a man dressed in a gorilla suit watching us!
As we got there, the gorillas were all scattered about in different trees and bushes, eating leaves and wild celery…One of the first gorillas we came across was the giant silverback, who was unfathomably huge! His head and hands were massive – he was probably the size of three linebackers put together! He just sat there munching away with his gigantic belly giggling away, every so often turning his head in an entirely uninterested fashion to look at us before returning to his meal…and we were probably only about three feet away from him! Gradually I started to realize that we were actually surrounded by gorillas – there were 14 in Amahoro. There were both males and females climbing the trees, muching away on plants – they would grunt just like you would imagine hearing the sounds King Kong would make (I hate to make that comparison, but that’s what they sounded like!). And when they would chew on the celery, it sounded just like a human eating celery, which was so crazy! And then one of the females came through a trail with the tinest, most adorable gorilla imaginable clinging to its back – you just wanted to reach out and put it in your backpack and take it home with you! For about 20 minutes, they just all surrounded us doing their own thing, but they must have communicated somehow because they all converged in a line and started walking to a small clearing about 10m away. We followed them, and watched as the silverback rolled spread-eagle onto his back for a nap, while the two little ones and even some of the older gorillas took this to signify playtime! They would jump on top of one another and play-wrestle, swinging off trees and jumping off of other gorillas. One of the adolescent males actually did a ninja roll and then started pounding his fists on his chest! What a show! And we were no further from them than I am to this computer screen… Actually, at one point, we walked a little further to see one of the gorillas that was standing guard just off in the forest to keep watch from threats – he was the second-most senior male, but had lost his left hand in a poaching trap. As we were descending the hill a bit, another adult male came suddenly and unexpectedly running out from the bushes to the right of us. The guard tried to push me back out of the way, but the trail was really narrow…The gorilla was brushing right up against me, and actually fully grabbed on to my leg with his hand to pull himself up the mountainside! I was seriously shocked – a wild gorilla just grabbed my leg!
Sadly, we only had 1 hour with the gorillas, because they do get stressed by humans if they stay too long, so it’s important for their conservation that we don’t stay too long. If you can believe it, there are less than 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, found only on the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda and DRC, and in Bwindi rainforest in Uganda. Even though the price was steep ($375 US!!!), it was 100% worth the hike…Easily one of the most exciting and memorable experiences of my life. Not only that, but we were really lucky, and it didn’t rain!!
By the time we got back into Ruhengeri town, it was about 2pm, so we decided that there wasn’t much need to stay the night and we’d head back down to Kigali, which is only about a 2 hour drive. So we got back to our old friend, the Kigali Hotel, and our other old friend, Le Palmier (the place with the 500 franc all-you-can-eat buffet). The day had been pretty exhausting and exhilarating, so we had decided we were going to call it a night, but then suddenly the phone rang in our hotel room…it was a guy named Abdul that Zach had met a few days before playing basketball, who had noticed us coming back to the hotel and wondering what we were doing (yeah, it’s like that…everyone knows the every move of the 3 mzungus in the neighbourhood). So we decided to go out to the Sky Hotel, which is kind of a hot spot for young people in Kigali…and put on one of the most entertaining spectacles I’ve ever witnessed in my life!
As we walked in, we saw someone performing on a stage and signing into a microphone, so we thought “Hey, live music!”…but then we realized that the guy on the stage was lip-synching his heart out! Not even karaoke, lip-synching! At first we thought that this seriously couldn’t be for real, until he finished and five guys – who were obviously all really cool guys – came out and started doing a whole routine lip-synching to some rap song. It was totally ridiculous, but this was obiviously the cool think to do in Kigali! Over the course of three hours, it just kept going… Some guys had costume changes, there were two girls in matching outfits that must have put hours and hours into a choreographed routine, one guy was the most amazing dancing I’ve ever seen – this was serious stuff! And they would lip-synch to everything from Ugandan music to rap to NSync and Britney Spears…one guy came out dressed up as Kenny Rogers (he put something like baby powder all over his head and face to look like Kenny’s white hair and beard) and did a whole rendition of “The Gambler”…Then as the night went on, the three of us and Abdul were just sitting there and thinking we were blending in as the club filled up with several hundred people, but then the guy who was the MC called out to us from the stage on the microphone, asking where we mzungus were from, etc etc…clearly we had not blended in even remotely! And then of course the MC started pointing to me and saying that I would be his wife, and then another guy came on stage and then started arguing about whose wife I really was (this was not unusual at all by now for me, because I probably got about 6 marriage proposals a day during the time we were in Rwanda)…So then the second guy dedicated his next lip-synched song to me which, based on the lyrics, wsa probably called “You’re my African queen…”, and after that the first guy dragged me up on the stage to sing some kind of Rwandan love song to me. Possibly the most awkward moment of my life! But the whole night was pretty hilarious in general… I really want someone to do a documentary about lip-synching in Kigali, it would be awesome!
Okay, so that day was ridiculously full…and so even though I’m not even close to being caught up on our Rwanda trip, I think I’m going to leave it there for now… Next update soon!
Tags: Travel
LeahM
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