Gorilla trekking at bwindi: The most expensive hour of my life.

The most expensive hour of my life.

I have just finished with a very expensive, and long journey. The day after returning to Kampala from Ft. Portal, I left with a german student named martin, a carribean born british Rastafarian named Leroy, a Ugandan working most of the year in Iraq named Michael, and a quiet lugandan driver named Julius to follow the promise of cheap gorilla trekking. I had met Michael at the independence day celebration and he told me how he was from the region and could get us in to see the gorillas for really cheap. I was hesitant, wondering what sort of back alley deal would have to go through before this would work. I met with him a few more times though and after seeing his friends, I judged that this guy was genuine. He showed up on Friday morning with our vehicle to go down to bwindi. We had ordered a truck, but at the last minute we somehow got stuck with a smaller car. Now, in the states this wouldn’t be a problem, but here on these roads it reduced us down to about 10-20 km/hr. we ended up spending a much longer time in the car than anticipated and upon arriving at where his family was, the only thing they kept saying was, you didn’t book in advance in Kampala to see the gorillas. Well, it was clear to me that there was some missing connection. Michael N. who seemed so put together on this issue clearly didn’t do his homework. I myself gave into the temptation of cheap gorilla trekking. Well, unfortunately, that proved to be a false temptation and I had to pay the whole fare. I was the only one willing to do it. Had I not been here on a fellowship, I definetley would not have done it. I had even texted a few friends who have lived here for some time to see if I should do it. One great missionary who I met in Ft. Portal told me, it was a once in a life time experience and that I could always earn money later. I took his advice and hoped that both accounts of it would be true.
Gorilla trekking…
There were 7 of us in our group. We were going to see group H, which is the largest habituated gorilla group with 22 gorillas in it. With us were 3 Australians, 2 brits, and me. Well, we started driving off at 8:30 in the morning to go see the gorillas. We drove around the length of the park until we came a far edge. There we hiked through matoke and millet fields till we met with the trekkers. They informed us that they had trekked the gorillas all morning and to our luck they had been led right there to the edge of the park. Now personally, I would have enjoyed a good 3 hour hike in the bush, but this is where the gorillas ended up, so what are you to do.
We began trekking into the park. Almost immediately we came across one gorilla who was sitting calmly. I couldn’t tell if it was really an animal or a statue at first, sitting as calmly as it was. The gorilla then turned over to look at us.

We moved on further down the hill till we reached a whole group of gorillas. The older silverback was sitting in the distance of this small clearing. This was about half the size of a VW bug. I made the mistake of standing on an ant hill and tried to keep a vestige of calm, holding the camcorder as I swatted at ants in my pants. Young gorillas were rolling on the ground, standing and pounding their chests. I was real fortunate to see these. These mountain gorillas are a very rare species. There are only 800 left in the world, all of them in this little corner of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo.
These gorillas moved on to the bush, so a few steps away we found some more up in a tree. Young Gorillas were climbing up and down. One even was hanging off a vine at one point to grab food when the branch broke.

Then one of the silverbacks walked right next to us and plopped down about 5 feet away from us and started eating fruit. It was truly something else. I can always earn money later in life… in the meantime, I got to see gorillas.