Mountain Gorillas of Uganda

Well they aren’t called Mountain Gorillas living in an Impenetrable forest for no reason.  After our ranger briefing we headed off with 4 others in search of our family of gorillas – the Mubare family which was only a small group but was the first group of gorillas habituated so they are very tolerant of photo happy Muzungus (Swahili for crazy white skinned foreigners).

We started up our first hill full of excitement – really it was just a banana plantation on the side of the mountain. At our second hill we entered the forest on some fairly good tracks which didn’t last for long and we literally found ourselves walking up steep mountains through thick forest (the mountains are actually remnant volcanoes up to 1,447 metres).

Our advance party of rangers who started out early in the morning from where the gorillas were the night before were having a bit of trouble locating our group so it was another mountain to climb for us. After about 4 hours of climbing mountains our gorilla family finally stayed still long enough for the trackers to catch up and we prepared for our introduction trying to remember what we had been told – don’t go closer than 7 metres and if they charge roll in a ball and don’t ever run.

Well like most things in Africa, wild animals don’t know the rule book and we found ourselves literally on the side of a very steep mountain deep in the jungle in front of two gorillas that wanted to walk right where we were standing. The gorillas literally pushed their way past us (so much for the 7 metre rule – there was nowhere to back away to except into the other very large gorilla) as we tried frantically to take photos without falling off the side of a very steep mountain or pissing off the silverback and blackback of the family.   Dave in the excitement managed to stumble virtually right into the path of the silverback and he told him in no uncertain terms to back off. Dave went into his practiced ball which the rangers found very amusing telling him to get up and start taking photos –‘these gorillas are use to muzungus’.

You are only allowed one hour with the gorillas and we spent most of that hour frantically climbing up and around the mountain ridge trying to keep pace. Only for the last 10 minutes did the gorillas settle and we could relax and just appreciate these amazing animals. Honestly an hour was nowhere near enough (I am now trying to convince Dave to trek with the gorillas in Rwanda as well). Unfortunately I don’t think our photos did these guys justice so if you want to see some better pictures of our family head to www.friendagorilla.org where you can also donate to protecting the gorillas (I think Marketing and Trading will have a new Christmas charity in addition to the donkeys). If you are really interested in protecting the gorillas (there is only about 320 mountain gorilla - one for about every 20 million people) the best way to do it is to get over to Uganda, Rwanda or the Congo (on second thoughts maybe not the Congo - when we have camped near the Congo borders the rangers have set up machine gun posts at night to protect us from the "hippos" - code for Congolese rebels) and see them whilst you still can – you won’t be disappointed.