Guerrilas!

Maya is here (Uganda) now visiting and I felt like that meant it would be the best time to shell out $350 each (normally $500 but they have an off-season promo happening, or $750 if you go in Rwanda!) for a gorilla tracking permit. It seems like such a typical African thing to do and I had been told it was worth it – I was not disappointed.

We went to Bwindi National Park, bordering the D.R.C., and about a 12 hour drive from Kampala. After driving a short ways into the park we got out of the car and entered the bush. When I say bush I mean the real bush! Super thick, moist, insect-e, and sharp spikes-coming-randomly-from-all-side type grass. And you don’t walk on nice park trails you literally are hacking your way through the jungle up and down hills.

Seeing the guide track is also ridiculously cool. It might even have been my favorite part (although gorillas are pretty cool). They use all 5 senses to track and many of the guides have decades of experience. To be fair, they often “cheat” by calling each other on cell phones to map out areas and alert each other to clues, but considering you could be walking for 5 hours to find the gorillas in hard conditions this seems like a fair concession. It only took us a little over an hour of wondering through the jungle to find them, in part, because we think our guide may have illegally brought us to a family that visitors saw that morning; the government only allows visitors to see one gorilla family a day.

Our guide distinguishes between different animal droppings and bush “footprints” and size by different animals including elephants (which we were told to run from if we saw) and some sort of local pig. The bush “damage” done by gorillas is distinct and shows us their path. The guide also listens for the gorillas which beat their chests loudly (just like in the movies!) and can be heard from very far. Also, when they lift their arms up there's such terrible BO and with the wind you can smell them from very far away if you are approaching from above on a hill like we were. It smells like human BO but much worse; can you imagine never taking showers or cleaning your arm pits for years and running around in the jungle all of the time?

When we finally spot the black gorilla hair through the bush it is an amazing moment. Unlike being at the zoo, you have no idea what happens next and if they might attack (albeit this is very unlikely). Once we uncovered one, we found the whole family (about 6 or 7) within the vicinity. Looking at their faces they are so human it's crazy. The way they study you, interact and communicate with each other, and go about their daily routine also reminds me of humans in some ways. For the most part, gorillas seem to just relax and when they see you, they react as if they were seeing another gorilla troop, and as long as you stay a safe 3-4 meters away and they don’t feel threatened, they don’t mind your presence. This hasn't always been on the case. Guerrillas naturally will display aggression towards foreigners and the guides have to condition them over time, which can mean taking some physical abuse from the guerrillas  Today, there are some “wild” gorillas (this seems ironic being in the wild already) left that can be dangerous but rarely meet tourists.

Occasionally they make a grunt noise and the alpha male can be a bit more aggressive but mostly guerrillas just continue on with their day when they see you: eating leaves or napping (they are 99% vegetarian I learned and eat maybe 50 lbs. of food/day). They seem mildly curious of humans but they didn't interact with us. The guide told us there is one who is his friend and sometimes will play games, steal things from his pocket, or tug on his clothing. The kids play just like human kids play, tossing and tumbling, climbing and swinging on vines. One of them even seem to be smiling for the camera at one point:

We also learned that the non-alpha male gorillas don’t get to mate, which seems very sad to me. They go their whole lives celibate? Wow. The other thing that really surprised me was how often these fellers see humans (especially given the permit price), which is almost every day. But besides Rwanda, the unstable and currently unsafe Congo, Uganda is the only other place in the world where you can do this. I don’t know that I need to do this again but it was really amazing and totally different than any other animal experience I’ve ever had.