Tracking mountain gorillas

First the downside- the permits are really expensive and there’s been criticism of this type of tourism as gorillas can catch human disease.


Now the upside- I decided to see mountain gorillas before leaving Uganda and am grateful for the experience. Mountain gorillas -about 800 in the world- are found only in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and in the Virunga volcano (dormant) range, which sits on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo. These are the gorillas that Diane Fossey studied. The national parks in Rwanda and Uganda (DRC is not a tourist destination) sell eight permits per day to see each family. We went to Mgahinga National Park in the Virunga volcano range. Tracking is an overstatement (though that’s what my official certificate says!). There are trackers who go out early in the morning and go back to a camp in the evening and they know roughly where the gorillas are. It’s rainy season and the volcanoes are often shrouded in mist even on otherwise clear days so we were fortunate to have a beautiful, sunny day. We climbed to 9000 feet before crashing though the forest to find the gorillas. The gorillas have been habituated since 1994, meaning that humans have been approaching them daily since that time (not closer than 21 feet). The tracker makes a sound like clearing his throat to alert the gorillas that we’re approaching but otherwise there’s no interaction; the gorillas ignore us as a non-threat. This family is made up of 3 male silverbacks, 2 babies, and 4 females and they chose to spend most of the one hour we were allowed to stay in a thicket. We were told that the silverback leader had fought the oldest silverback for dominance and won but the older male was allowed to stay with the group. The dense underbrush and sunny day (us in the sun, them in the shade) made photos tough though, thankfully, the people I was with were undaunted in their photo-taking and gave me theirs. The adults were mostly munching vegetation though periodically cracked off large tree branches to ‘play’. The babies, 10 and 12 months, were more active, climbing bamboo trees and then falling out as their weight broke branches.