I Committed a Crime in Uganda with Two Men with AK47s
While absolutely true it’s a bit of a fun stretch! I will do another post after this one to explain my three legal gorilla treks, but I thought I would jump right into the last one which was not so legal 🙂 After seeing the gorillas for the third time, we were back so early that I planned a hike to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest NP’s waterfalls. It was suppose to take three hours. Bwindi is the most beautiful forest I have ever imagined. It is tropical, but its elevation of 2400 (?) meters makes it cool. I guess it is a high altitude tropical rain forest. And, yes, it rains a lot. I did not see the sun for the past week due to the consistent mist, haze and clouds over the three gorilla parks in Rwanda and Uganda as well as over Goma, DRC (yes, I went over the border and lived to be able to write about it… in another post… since I get six hours at Nairobi Airport tomorrow as well as 2-3 hours here in Kigali waiting for CDs to be burned… speaking of burning CDs, after much playing around with my camera, I found there is a bug in its auto USB setting and when I change it to “storage”, I now can back up my camera to my Ipod). It was fairly warm at Bwindi especially compared to Volcanoes (Rwanda) and Mgahinga (Uganda). Six of us set off to the falls including a guide, two armed escorts (all hikes in Bwindi are done this way due to proximity to DRC rebels and tourists that were murdered here in 1999 – I probably did not mention that one, eh Mom?), and three visitors of which I knew neither.
As we’re going to the falls, I ask the guide what happens if we run into a gorilla family. Right now, I’ll just say that magic took place this past week as I knew it would well before I got to see my first gorilla. Knew it as sure as I knew the sun would rise this morning. He says, “you close your eyes.” We laugh. The gorillas that are habituated only get one hour-long visit per day by eight visitors and a gaggle of escorts. I was sure we would see something because I didn’t feel like my last visit was complete. We were halfway to the falls and heard something. Nothing appeared and we all wrote it off to monkeys. We saw a couple of other visitors when we started to leave the falls (very beautiful as they cascaded down rocks in the middle of a primordial forst containing fern, liana, mahogany and moss). We learned from them that they had seen a gorilla. Uggh – the space-time continnum must have just been off by a bit!
So we head back on the trail. We get back to about the halfway mark and an escort asks if we want to see gorillas and do we want to pay the same price as the legal hike. I laugh at him. They talk a bit as we walk and next thing that happens is they are instructing us to go off the trail and up a steep hill (all the hills here are steeper than you can imagine). In a couple of minutes I hear trees cracking and know the gorillas are nearby. For the first time for my four encounters, I smell their muskiness before I see them. It’s a smell one will never forget nor are you confused about what it is from. I can’t believe we are doing this and I come up with a couple of reasons why we should not be doing it that still bother me today – 1) if we’re confused as poachers or rebels (fat chance that the three whities would get confused as rebels, but let’s imagine the mess with a bunch of AK47s going off in a forest that you can’t see 20 meters ahead!), we’ll get shot and 2) the single one-hour visit per day is done for very good reasons. But the excitement was incredible and stronger than my caution and conscience…
So, we see the first two, a mom and young baby, come up the hill and walk by us. A second pair does the same and we go over the hill to watch them. I keep looking over my shoulder because I figure there are more to come and hate to have the silverback come up behind us (rememeber this thought for the next blog entry). We’re about ten meters away from the small group which is about 2-3 times further than the legal visits plus we are in thick forest, but this seems close enough for all involved. The highlight was seeing a baby swinging like a chimp Tarzan-style from liana which then broke and he crashed to the ground George-style.
About that time, sure enough, the silverback comes over the ridge and we are between him and the rest of the family. We move quickly skirting around him. Time is up! We start going down the hill and one of the hikers is slow and I look back to see the silverback hot on his trail. He does not look very happy with us probably noting that this is a second visit in a single day from the two-footed creatures. I turn around and head down wishing him luck (he had an escort)! We slide down a three meter drop-off and as we are headed to the trail, we see the gorillas coming down the same side. They’re following us? More like we are following them for we soon see many gorillas near the trail in front of us. All of us make it without the silverback getting feisty. We move down the trail and start photographing them as they cross the trail. I look to my left and in the woods, two meters away I see a pair of eyes. We move further away. The escorts are nervous. I don’t think they thought we would get in that situation. Plus they are now worried that we might get caught. After we leave, they realize the other couple and their escort is now ahead of us and they worry more. We took it slowly. The three of us gave them nice tips and I got back to the lodge 4.5 hours after the start which included about twenty minutes of gorilla time. The escorts pleaded that we not tell anyone. Sure!
My gorilla encounters now felt complete. They are truly the greatest animal to see and this will be a week that I remember for the rest of my life. I look forward to my next visit with Gorilla berengei berengei and I can’t wait to see its cousin Gorilla gorilla gorilla in about three weeks.
Tags: Travel
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