Earlier today we trekked up one of the volcanoes with a ranger through native farm land. The terraces for potatoes ranged from fifty square feet to four square feet along the steep, rocky route to the park. All the people we met along the way, women hoeing in the small gardens to children on their way to school were full of smiles and greetings. The climb was arduous with an undefined trail that was rocky and uneven.
A good challenge at 10,000' of elevation. A tall native stone wall, five feet high and three feet wide marked the boundary to the park. The wall, moss and vine covered, had no access other than to scale the loose volcanic stones and hope not to break a leg. We were met at the wall by two heavily armed tracker/rangers. The trackers spend every day with the gorillas and track them as they change areas each day. The change in vegetation was immediate and drastic, we were in a high elevation rain forest so thick that we could not move forward without the porters hacking away with machetes.
Several times I would simply lean back and the nettles and other vegetation would hold me up. As we trekked higher, with one machine gun armed tracker leading and the other behind (they were for protection against buffalo and elephants) we began hearing snapping branches and grunts. We met up with another group of armed trackers where upon we left our porters and packs and continued with the trackers into the midst of the gorillas.
It was nothing as we had imagined. We were surrounded by mountain gorillas only feet from us. The large males and silverbacks would walk through us in the thick vegetation (we couldn't get out of their way because there was no where for us to go). A friend and I were watching a black back male munching nettles when he decided he liked our spot better. The huge male simply, with the stroke of his arm, moved Ruth into the thicket.
He stopped a foot from me and pulled the nettles I was standing on. Gentle, beautiful creatures.
Two days earlier, we flew from Botswana to Kigali, Rwanda. Kigali was a real surprise, as was the rest of the country. No litter anywhere, plastic bags banned and the president leading the effort to keep the country clean. Kigali is a city of two million and looks like many other African cities with the exception of how clean the city is along with shrubbery and even the occasional public flower bed.
We relished in the endless hot water that did not smell of the wood fire it was heated over, electricity, and comfortable beds. During our short stay we visited the Genocide Memorial. In only a few months in the 1990's two million of the seven million Rwandan's were brutally tortured and killed. Two hundred and fifty nine thousand of the Kigali victims are buried at the memorial. It is moving experience that brought tears to almost all. We left the thousand hills of Kigali and drove north into the mountains: beautiful, classic volcanoes where this installment to the blog began.
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Location:Kigali, Rwanda
Fascinating!
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