Gorillas in Our Midst

In 1983, Dian Fossey published Gorillas in the Mist, her memoir about her seminal and lifelong research into the lives and behaviors of mountain gorillas in Rwanda. In 1988, Sigourney Weaver portrayed Fossey in the film of the same name. Unfortunately, Fossey was dead by then, having been murdered in her remote Rwanda cabin in 1985.

But Fossey’s legacy has long outlived her. When she began her work, the mountain gorillas in Rwanda were on the verge of extinction. Thanks to the conservancy projects she founded and championed, which continue to flourish almost 40 years after her death, the Rwandan mountain gorillas are the only species of gorilla in the world whose numbers are increasing.

A big chunk of the funding for the ongoing gorilla efforts in Rwanda comes from fees that tourists like us pay to visit them in their natural habitat.

And so our little band of 5 – nicknamed the Whoop (because nicknaming animal groups in Africa is one of our favorite things, see here) – traveled from Kigali to the Virunga volcanic mountains in the far north of Rwanda, near the border with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s where we settled into our comfy lodge for the night and prepared for one of the most demanding and rewarding days of our touristy lives – a trek up into the mountain rain forest to see the gorillas up close and personal.

We had a hearty breakfast at the crack of dawn before our guide picked us up for the short ride to Volcanoes National Park. Once there, we were briefed on a few details of the trek and provided with ancillary gear such as walking sticks. We then drove to a higher elevation, met our porters and rangers, and began to climb.

Some stretches of the trek weren’t too bad. It was all uphill, of course, but a few spots offered relatively dry and even navigation. (We purposely chose early September since it’s the end of the dry season. Though we had a little rain, it passed quickly.)

But other stretches varied in difficulty from “I don’t remember signing up for an Iron Man” to “Are you freaking kidding me?” Along the way there was plenty of mud and slippery rocks – it’s a rain forest, after all, so even the dry season isn’t all that dry – and moments when the path forward seemed to disappear entirely. We dodged branches, thorns, and roots galore.

But we were among experts – a group of about 15 guides, rangers, and porters for just 8 tourists – so we were never in any danger. Instead, we did our best to maintain a witty banter while keeping our mutterings to a minimum regarding what the hell we had gotten ourselves into.

And then we came upon them. A whole family of gorillas – one of the earliest families to be identified and tracked in the park, called the Susa family. Among them were older silverback males, including the group’s alpha leader, as well as younger adults, adolescents, mothers and toddlers. They were too busy munching on eucalyptus trees and interacting with each other to pay any attention to us. (One mother with a very young infant did keep her distance.)

Thanks to Dian Fossey and her contemporary colleagues, the Rwandan mountain gorillas are habituated to human contact. It was almost as if we had wandered into some random person’s backyard during a communal picnic or barbecue.

We had one glorious hour with the gorillas. It was an amazing, humbling, unforgettable experience, worth every minute of discomfort and effort it took to get there and every damn dollar we spent along the way.

The pictures you see here were all taken by members of our Whoop. I’m not organized enough to give proper credit to my traveling companions individually, but I’d like to thank all of them for being much better shutter bugs than I am. And yes, we really were that close to the gorillas. A few times we could have reached out and touched them, though of course that’s one of the things we were warned not to do. (But sometimes the gorillas do touch or lightly grab a tourist, and that’s okay.)

After our visit, there was the small matter of coming back down the mountain. If going up was like doing 2 hours on a Stairmaster machine with crooked steps, going down was like trying to do ballet on a water slide. But we all made it back to the lodge in one piece. And the afterburn was delicious. We had complimentary foot and leg massages, a late lunch that was more like a triumphant feast, long hot showers, and as evening settled in, plenty of wine (or whatever you might have wanted from the bar) to soothe our aching muscles and joints.

In the end, we enjoyed our journey to the gorillas so much that all of us want to do it again in the years to come. That’s also because Rwanda has such incredibly warm and friendly people, as well as some absolutely spectacular natural settings. Stay tuned for pics of the Rwandan countryside, as well as some photos of the adorable golden monkeys we visited the very next day, when we once again trekked up into the rain forest.