With the entire planet freaking out about COVID-19, travel may soon be a risk few feel comfortable undertaking. Lucky for us, we’re back from one amazing trip and preparing for another starting in a week. Both planned excursions have been budgeted on our master calendar since last summer. First up – gorilla trekking in the forested mountains of Uganda with friends visiting from Seattle (Deb, Tom, and Mitch) and one of Sarah’s sisters (Katie). We’re still digesting the bountiful banquet of experiences consumed during a short stretch of days in Uganda.
There’s really only one nexus on the global map where trekking into gorilla territory happens. This area encompasses a small slice of three nations – the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC or formerly Zaire), Rwanda and Uganda. The intersection of these nations lies in a picturesque range of volcanoes in equatorial central-eastern Africa. The 3 nations have adjoining National Parks (respectively - Virnunga in DRC, Volcanoes in Rwanda and Mgahinga in Uganda) through the Virunga Mountains. “Virunga” means “volcanoes” in Kinyarwanda and that chain of volcanoes is the home of the critically-endangered mountain gorillas. On Mt. Sabinyo - an extinct volcano whose name is taken from the word for “tooth” and called “Old Man’s Teeth” given the craggy profile atop - you could put a limb in each of the three nations while trekking. There’s also a small sub-species of mountain gorillas and nearly half the overall remaining population of them in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (where we spent our first day of trekking). The names all rock and the landscape defies narrative comparison. All the modern crappy “King Kong” remakes feature elements that could’ve been easily stolen from this area. At one point while trekking in Bwindi, I saw a nearly foot-long earthworm on the trail. Our porters casually told us that’s nothing. I’d love to see the fish you could land with one of those. I imagine a Nile perch as big as a golden retriever.
Estimates vary for the number of gorillas still living wild and free. Let’s just say there’s an agreeable consensus of 1000 mountain gorillas. For comparison, there are currently just over 2400 active members of the USA’s National Football League (NFL) Players Association. A different comparison might be the number of worldwide employees for Cirque du Soleil - currently around 4900. Closer to home for the gorillas, the number of African elephants (both forest and bush) according to the World Wildlife Fund was last estimated (2018) at around 400,000. It certainly wasn’t unnoticed that some of those elephants were described to us by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) as a possible security threat, requiring multiple machine-gun-armed guards to hike with us throughout. Thankfully, no elephants were harmed in the background of gathering info for this blog post. The larger population point being - there just aren’t many gorillas out there even for those lucky enough to try. Conservation efforts are critical to their survival.
If you dip into the business of those offering these treks, you can see a wide range of approaches. Just getting a permit for one day of trekking from the national government in charge…which only gets you one hour per day with a single gorilla family…costs a whopping $1500/day in Rwanda, $600/day in Uganda, and $400/day in DRC. During the rainy season (mid-March to mid-May), DRC prices drop to $200/day. Transportation costs plenty, given the challenges of the terrain. Security and comfort are also obvious complicating factors. When we visited Kigali, Rwanda in November, I was somewhat dumbfounded by both the beauty and high cost of the country. Rwanda doubled its daily permit costs in 2017. What changed? I suspect the amount spent on marketing, for one thing. Conversely, DRC’s closest city to the gorillas is Goma on the shore of Lake Kivu, where you’ll find both ebola and active security threats that make saving a few hunnerd bucks sound like a bad trade-off . Which brought us to Uganda. While I’ve heard amazing stories about the dynamism of its capital (Kampala), the area we traveled to was a study in earthy contrasts. Not just greens and browns. Wealth versus poverty. Occasionally wired versus always withdrawn. Geared up versus held back. Still, Uganda’s offerings proved closest to the gorilla Goldilocks zone for our Seattle friends (who thoughtfully researched and booked the tour company for us). Without comparing anyone else’s experience and after a few days to digest it all, we were completely satisfied by how our two days with the mountain gorillas played out. It was assuredly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Allow me to recap in a format akin to a Three-Act Play, cheekily titled – A Thousand Shades of Green (and an Almost Equal Number of Thoughts on the Culture of Gorilla Trekking). Or maybe - Visiting Distant Cousins.
Prologue – Addis to Entebbe
When it works, it’s painless. On-time air travel, that is. We left Addis on Maya’s 15th birthday. Helluva way to spend it for an American teenager abroad - ADD to EBB. We would’ve stuck a sad little candle in her umpteenth Ethiopian Airlines chicken dinner if they allowed such in-flight disruptions. This was also the first day in Ethiopia for my sis-in-law Katie, visiting from California. Katie arrived just a few hours prior from America, which was just long enough to hand over some goodies and juggle bags for the stricter baggage weight limits we had for trekking. Our gorilla team summit of human-ape families (with Deb/Tom/Mitch) gathered at the Lake Victoria Hotel - a 15-minute drive from the Entebbe (EBB) Airport. We went for proximate posh over the well-over-an-hour effort required to head into Kampala. Good call, for all involved.
Dinner allowed us time to sync up thinking and compare how relatively little we knew about what to expect. Katie is a vet with an extra PhD in Ecology. She did field work in parts of Africa (primarily Kenya) and had been to Queen Elizabeth National Park farther north in Uganda in the late 1990s. She knows plenty of docs in the field, but would be flying in fresh like the rest of us when it came to gorillas. Sadly, there was no birthday cake for Maya at the hotel either, although she did manage to find something called a “rainbow milkshake” that came out with a pinkish hue and vaguely fishy taste. The less we knew about it, the better. We were somewhat early to bed, with collective questions bouncing around of “what’s ahead?”
Act 1 – Into the Kisoro District
Before dawn, our whole crew rolled through a pre-dawn breakfast and van ride back to Entebbe Airport. Thunder and lightning added some drama to the hour-long flight to the isolated southwestern corner of the country on an 11-passenger plane. We landed on a dirt airstrip surrounded by manicured hedges and many shades of green outside the town of Kisoro (population around 17,000). Waiting for us was Jackson - our full-service guide for the next 72-hours. We were Jackson’s first group with the company that marshaled everything for us. Go Green Safaris (interchangeably named, 1000 Shades of Green) did a more than decent job. Jackson was incomparably solid. He showed good humor, unflappable attention to detail, timely advocacy so that we’d draw the best gorillas, and deep knowledge of Uganda’s natural gifts. Soon after leaving Kisoro, the roads turned intensely bumpy (delivering an “African massage”). We casually jostled through the agrarian landscape. Terraced fields cover steep hillsides in all directions of view. You’d be challenged to swing a field hoe at any point along the way without hitting a pile of mud bricks, in various stages of packing, drying, firing, or unstacking. There appeared to be enough to build a new Great Wall of China along the route between Kisoro and home for the next two nights. Jackson answered our overly eager questions with an unforced, knowledgeable cadence, as if we weren’t the first “mzungus” (white people) to ask such things. We even stopped to watch some of the steps along the brick-making chain of progression. Silly mzungus.
Jackson delivered us to the Chameleon Hill Lodge on Lake Mutanda. We’d eventually find a chameleon on our second day of trekking, having been jokingly reassured that there’s a 50% chance of seeing one during our stay. Their namesake Lodge on the Hill greeted us with all manner of comforts and activities. Later in the afternoon, we made our way down to the Lake. Mitch and I were relegated to a heavy, unforgiving dugout canoe. The others got into inflatable kayaks with unmatched wooden paddles that weighed too much and worked too little. Mitch and I would’ve loved an oar or two of our own, especially when our guide left the others far behind and took us out to Skeleton Island - one of the 16 islands in the middle of the choppy, 900-meter-deep lake. Skeleton Island and another charmingly-named green prison (Banishment Island) were where the locals dropped off young pregnant women and their unwanted daughters over the centuries. I asked when the practice ended. 90 years ago. Heavy drag. When we rolled up to the shore, I imagined for an uninformed moment or twenty that we might be how it all restarted (Mzungu Island, perhaps). It was more of a break for our rower as we checked out a cave full of human bones (see some of the pics below). Getting back in that canoe to head back to the Lodge was one of the day’s highlights. The next hour of butt-cramping inaction spent on the way back flattened out that false peak.
That night’s dinner came peppered with instructions for the next day’s trek. Expect a hard hike into the forest ranging from three to ten hours. Bring lots of water. Tuck your pants into your socks because the ants bite like hell. No promises were made on how our gorillas might react. Don’t confront the silverback males. Sticks and too much eye contact are bad. In effect, be as chill as a human can be when in a dense, unfamiliar forest. Oh, and cameras are fine. Snap away. By the time we headed to bed under mosquito nets in our lovely, overcrowded room and the four hours of generator-supplied power flipped off until a 5am wake-up call, our spirits were decidedly mixed. The known unknowns were daunting.
Act 2 – Trekking in Bwindi National Park’s “Impenetrable Forest”
A power-packed early breakfast came with the distribution of packed lunches and countless water bottles. Most received sandwiches, a muffin that was approximately 40% sawdust, mango juiceboxes, and the best damn bananas ever – all in labeled, well-worn, local-brick-sized Tupperwear containers. Jackson drove us to the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which is a 321-square-kilometer crown forest wholly contained within Uganda. Green beyond compare and teeming with diverse wildlife (most of which was scared off by our chatty approach to hiking), Bwindi’s a tropical rain forest that stayed mercifully sunny and temperate on our day there. We and dozens of other trekkers received a dance-showcase welcome and too-brief safety orientation.
Each of our lunch boxes effectively doubled the size of what we were carrying in our backpacks. Which made the ensuing decisions to hire porters from the waiting hordes of them all the more justifiable. My porter was named Justice and he could’ve shoved me into a Baby Bjorn and done the trek just as easily. Eventually, he would tell me that “you are fit” after we ascended out of the deepest part of the forest canyon. Yes, it’s vain. But that was a moment when I wanted a football to spike and do a dance.
Jackson lobbied for us to get the best gorilla family. We soon met our uniformed guide (Edson) and tne military dude (George) with an AK-47 for elephant security. Last bathroom visits happened in hopes of avoiding a “bush toilet” stop (someone digs you a hole with a machete if you’re needing the universal sign for a “number 2”). A scramble by the dozens hit the trails in groups at the same time. We rather quickly marched to the lead as the forest thickened around us.
The other effective half of a successful trek is the cohort of trackers who stay out for countless hours with the gorilla families beyond the one-hour that the paying visitors get to spend taking photos and observing. The entire culture of this trekking began back in 1991 when the three governments kicked out the people living in the forest – the Batwa pygmy population. By 1993, efforts began to habituate the gorillas to humans. The trackers led that mission, as they learned the forest and followed the families on their forest migrations. I’d be talking well outside my wheelhouse if I claimed more knowledge than that. Imagine finding a happy-go-lucky feral dog/cat/mongoose/buffalo who doesn’t care for human contact. How long do you think it would take if you planned to just follow that creature around until they paid you no mind any longer? Now add the complexity of doing so in a forest packed into deep canyons, wet basins, steep walls, and endless pitfalls. And repeat for a handful of hundred gorillas cast about in family units of varying sizes and complexities. This has been a decades-long complex and ongoing endeavor.
Our hiking caravan found its way to our trackers aided immensely by the use of cell phones and shared forest knowledge for those in charge. We were nonetheless somewhat ambushed by finally intersecting with them after a few hard hours of hiking. We found the trackers waiting on a precariously steep ridge line. We’d already seen one young gorilla up in a tree just minutes prior. No sooner did we get through introductions than members of the family started climbing down, as if on cue. Seeing the family’s only silverback male, Busingye, come climbing down from above was an unforgettable moment. Cameras and cell phones clicking, we started on the slow walk through the difficult terrain. The trackers used their surgically-sharp machetes to clear the path and the view for everyone to take pictures.
An hour of intensely-focused time goes by quite quickly. Everyone marveled at the playfulness of a six-month-old gorilla climbing and tumbling and vamping the chest-beating we all come to expect from an adult male silverback. Gorillas need to consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 kg every day, so most of what we saw was eating and moving to the next spot for more eating. Their hands and facial features are mesmerizingly recognizable. Our family was calm and unbothered, and we kept the distance asked by UWA (7 meters).
The hike back up out of that green forest basin was a bitch - no bones about it. Everyone inhaled their packed lunch and sucked down more water as the sun grew more intense back up on regular trails. We emerged from the Impenetrable Forest first of all that day’s trekkers. Completion certificates were awarded with some pomp and we poured ourselves into our seats on the bus. Jackson was eager to take us to the next stop - the Batwa Mountain Village where we might learn about those displaced by the National Park-ification of the gorilla habitats. With trademark group diplomacy, we nixed that idea. We hadn’t been out for 10 hours. But it was a hard 8, by my count. Covering 12 or 13 km. The resulting images swirled and were shared near and far (this like so many others is now an Instagram-ready activity, WiFi-permitting). The stories began coalescing around just how normal this surreal experience seemed. If we’d have stopped after one day of trekking, we’d have been solidly satisfied.
That was not, I’m happy to say, the experience we’d booked.
NOTE for anyone considering their own trekking adventure - there’s a culture of tipping asked of tourists. Bring plenty of the-crispier-the-better $20USD bills. Essentially, all of those in support of the trek are deserving. Trackers, guides, guards and porters. Woe be the visitors who don’t come prepared for this part of the payment. Is it excessive? Probably. Yet even before I learned that our porters are only allowed one or maybe two treks per month, I thought of it as just part of the process. It does add up, though.
Act 3 – Trekking in Mgahinga Gorilla National Park
Our morning prep for our second day of trekking was much the same at Chameleon Hill Lodge, aside from packing everything up for a final night’s stay at a different lodge. We moved the show to the Travelers Rest (or as they spell it, Travellers Rest) in Kisoro to be closer to Mgahinga Park and the airstrip for the following morning’s departure. Mgahinga covers about a tenth of the area as Bwindi, and only has two gorilla families. You’re right up on the volcanoes, though. The African massage getting there was much more deep tissue. After the prior day’s hard hike, we could’ve all used a decent massage. There was also some GI distress and individual discomforts. We put on our game faces, nonetheless. Given how well the ensuing trek went, we were all glad we did.
The same elements as we’d experienced the day prior were there at the start, such as a troop of porters jockeying for a gig. After making a preliminary hike of less than a kilometer up a steep rocky trail, we gathered at the trailhead. We were assigned three armed guards this time, two with AK-47s and one with a sizable-caliber monster supplied by a box clip. In our briefing, our guide (Benjamin) handed out a laminated rap sheet identifying the gorilla family we’d be visiting. There were three silverbacks in this modern unit, led by the hilariously named Mark. We all suggested names for the others (Brad and Kevin won the most votes).
Every trekking day is different, even if the elements stay the same. Our trackers were out hours in advance and when we got underway the guides maintained the allure of “we’ll know it when we see it” for the gorilla family’s location. I suspect Jackson might have been in on the ruse, because this was the easiest of all imaginable hikes. After maybe 20 minutes, we got the word by cell phone that our gang was within reach. We looped in what we soon realized was the direction of the trail’s head. We spotted the first of the three silverbacks (Ndugutse) sitting up like a furry pyramid peeling thistle plants just behind the barracks of the UWA guides and guards. I later asked one of the armed guards if this family ever looked into the windows of the staff quarters. The proximity was just part of the story. The entire family couldn’t have been more comfortable with us if they’d hitched a ride up in our van. As you can see below, they’re beautiful and peaceful characters.
For a good portion of our hour, we watched Mark, and adult female and two youngsters lollygagging under a shady tree. The moment that will always stick with me most of all was watching Mark’s breath move the short grass in front of his face as he half-dozed next to the others. We mingled with the others in the family. Eventually everyone was on the move. At one point, a young gorilla came right up with arms outstretched to a crouching Katie with her camera. Our guides casually instructed Katie to back up and avoid contact. It looked like a handshake averted, akin to the COVID-19 avoidances we’re increasingly seeing unfold everywhere. The gorilla moved on. Not long after, Mark casually cut the line of us making our way out the final 100 meters to trailhead. Seeing a vital, chill version of the largest living primate saunter by within an arms length isn’t something easily forgotten. Nor will be the entirety of our trekking experience.
Given that our trek ended early on the second day, we completed the circle by visiting a village of the Batwa pygmies approximately halfway between Mgahinga and our lodge in Kisoro. I’m still not sure how best to offer positive insights about the experience. The Batwa lost their homes in the mountain forests of Uganda because they were in the way. In the nearly 30 years since being displaced, those left in the area have only taken small steps toward an evolved integration. We toured their village. Knowing to whom or even in what amount a donation might be appropriate made us all uncomfortable. By the time we were leaving in our van, our satisfaction was shaken. Which may have been a good thing. No matter the ongoing success of the conservation efforts around the mountain gorillas, simply knowing a bit more about the complex interplay of species in the area seems valuable. Even if I feel like crap for being a party to a system that displaced a population of humans with nowhere else to go.
We spent the evening discussing the whopping success of our treks and sharing photos. A few of the final photos below came from Sarah. I’ll be digging through the good ones for months to come. Along the remembered moments that (believe it or not…) are much more extensive than the recap above, there’s lot more to get through.
Epilogue – Kisoro to EBB to ADD
Our morning departure from Travelers Rest took us to the charming airstrip in Kisoro. Jackson yet again answered questions, this time about what’s next for him and the upcoming rainy season and whatever else flowed easily amongst our human-ape family. We’d become a team of friends. On the flight out, we passed over Lake Mutanda, Skeleton Island and the Chameleon Hill Lodge. In Entebbe, Deb/Tom/Mitch split off from our family to do a day of whitewater rafting before going to Tanzania. We refreshed back at the Lake Victoria Hotel for much of the day. CNN and the BBC breathlessly reported COVID-19 global pandemic developments. All of us now live in a weird limbo of paranoia and powerlessness. None of us know what might happen with our next planned travel, if we’re so lucky to have that occur for any reason other than necessity. Just two months ago as we were coming back from Tel Aviv to Addis, the earliest hints from Wuhan had begun to surface. What will two months from now look like? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m glad I have these memories from Uganda to work with, no matter what comes next. Here’s hoping you check back to see if we make it to our next destination (Zambia and Botswana) and take care of your health in the interim. Ciao.
