Gorillas!

 This post is all about GORILLAS! Kathy and I got permits from the Rwanda Tourism Board a few weeks ago to track gorillas on November 27th. We have a friend, Patrick, who was funded by the Dian Fossey Research Fund to study the gorillas for 4 months. He was presenting his dissertation the same week that we were going to Musanse (the city by Volcanoes National Park where the gorillas live), so he decided to stay on for a few more days to greet us. He got us a room at a decent hotel, and we had most of our meals with him at a convent where they made delicious Rwandan food. The day before tracking gorillas we went to the huge Musanse market and spent a long time looking at Congolese fabrics, and then we went for dinner at our friends' who are here for 2 years from Korea. They had made a korean bbq in the back yard so we had a huge feast! It was wonderful.

On Saturday morning we had to have an early breakfast to leave the convent at 630am. Patrick arranged for 2 taxi-motos to come pick us up and drive us where we needed to go. It was about 15 km to the park head quarters where we were served coffee and tea while the guides arranged us into various groups. Some people were there to track Golden Monkeys, visit the Dian Fossey Research Centre or visit her grave.

We were placed in a group of 6 people to track the Amahoro Group consisting of 17 gorillas, including 2 silverbacks (a rare occurrence). Normally each group is formed by a silverback (a male gorillas with grey hair on his back) and many women and children. The silverback is the only one allowed to mate with the women. So males will normally wait until they know a silverback from another group has died and then they will go claim it as their own. This is followed by infanticide where the silverback kills all of the babies so that the females will have his babies. So it was rare that these 2 silverbacks lived together in one group. Apparently they still keep their distance from each other as the lesser silverback normally sneaks off with other ladies from the group.

I have a lot of pictures so I think I will just tell my stories in the captions! The first few were taken from my moto on our drive to Volcanoes National Park. This park is at the intersection of three countries (Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC).

Note the misty mountains in the back. "Gorillas in the Mist" was definitely an accurate name for the Dian Fossey movie! We watched it the week before going to see the gorillas to prepare and we were very impressed as the footage of the villages and people in Rwanda seem quite accurate to what we've experienced.

After we made our groups at head quarters we had to travel for another 16 km to get to where we started our hike. This entry point changed depending on where the gorillas are that morning. They moved around every day and make new nests to sleep in every night. Our hike started off by going through agricultural land of the locals before reaching the stone wall that marks the edge of the park and also functions to keep the elephants and buffalo from destroying the crops of the locals.

In addition to our guide we also had this tracker who was there to guard us from rogue buffalo. 

After hiking for about 2 hours we reached the trackers who were to remain close to the gorillas all day. They made us leave everything behind, except our cameras, when we were about 100 m from the gorillas. We had to go through a very narrow path, and our first encounter with a gorilla snuck up on us! We were going single file and our guide pointed to a gorillas to the right that was eating bamboo in the bush. Each person was going slowly to take a picture as they passed, and as the girl in front of me had her turn the gorilla made a noise and decided to cross our path. The girl tried to move out of his way, but he went right for her and pushed her over with 2 big slaps on the back and then continued on his way. It was crazy! It all happened so fast that i wasn't able to get a picture, but it was pretty exciting! We continued on the path until we came to an opening where there were about 12 gorillas lounging about.

THat's the silverback. We were SO close! You are supposed to stay at least 7m away from the gorillas but that wasn't really possible in our case because of the location, and because they kept coming at us!

Young gorillas playing...

THat's the silverback in the middle with one of his ladies to the left and a baby on the right. They were rearranging themselves and all ended up in the same position on their backs with one arm on their head. Their feet are really strange!

I'm so happy that I got this picture. All of a sudden the mom with the baby on her back came out of the bamboo and decided to cut right between us. The guide was telling us to move back and not to take pictures but I snuck this one, and it was a pretty steep incline so I didn't really have anywhere to go. Right after this the baby got off his mom's back and reached out to touch my leg as he passed! Pretty amazing.

This is the youngest of the group (16 months) breastfeeding. 

This guy was hanging out in the trees above us and at one point fell down and we all had to move again as he came too close to us. Lot's of excitement!

Crazy hair!

There was a lot of this lounging going on. Especially when the sun came out.

Wrestling

Look at that hand!

At one point the big brother came over to grab the baby by the leg and they started wrestling a bit. It was really cute!

Baby biting his brother.

Me and the gorillas! After 1 hour of observing the gorillas we had to leave. It was a great experience!

In the afternoon we met up with Patrick and he took us to the Karisoke Research Centre in town where tourists aren't supposed to go. Inside there were many pictures of gorillas and Dian Fossey as well as a signed picture of Sigourney Weaver from Gorillas in the Mist.

Update on our project: It became certain last week that we would not be doing the formative research for Sprinkles. Now we are trying to figure out how to move forward with the project in the new year, and we are working on wrapping things up in Kibungo. We only have about 2 weeks left here! I can't believe it's almost over!