Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, 
Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as 
Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest 
and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our 
gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with 
the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his 
head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and 
somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
Trip Report:
Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda
Trip Report
2015
This trip marked our 86th to 90th mountain gorilla trek, more than any other tourist in Rwanda. For most people, one trip to the gorillas is a trip of a lifetime, and one could wonder how the 90th trek could be that much different from the 9th, or the 2nd. Well, it is. Like virtually everything in nature and with wildlife, every encounter is unique, and every encounter, or the next one, may be the best encounter, the greatest experience, one ever had.
For us, it is exactly that, not just the prospect of having a new and unique experience, but of actually having that experience. Every trek is special, and this year, for example, we had an encounter in an area where we've always, always wanted to have gorillas. It was a fairyland forest, a nearly open bottomland with tall, graceful Nebutonia trees whose limbs were festooned with Goat's Beard Lichen, which resembles Spanish moss. Although we never would have guessed it as we hiked up a steep hillside out of this crater, minutes after we met the gorillas they headed down, back into this wonderful forest landscape.
That's why we go back, over and over again, and why we'll continue to do so, intending to do our 100th trek next year. I hope as you read this and look at the images I'm conveying some of the excitement of this trip.
Truly, there is absolutely no other wildlife experience on the planet like this. Where you are within feet of an enormous, powerful animal, one with the potential to tear off your head or rip off your arm, but an animal that is gentle and completely in charge, confident of its place in its world. Read on.....
With our first Kenya Photo Safari of 2015 completed, we had a half-day’s break in Nairobi before beginning our next trip, to the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda. Breene, who continued on with us from our first safari, joined us, and the three of us met our two new participants, Maureen and Alan, from the UK. Everyone was here, healthy and with their luggage, so we were off to a good start for the following day.
Day 1. Nairobi to Kilgali to Ruhengeri and the Mountain Gorilla View Lodge
Our flight was at 11am, so we did not have the usual awful early morning start for a dawn flight. At the airport a new policy has been instated, where passengers entering the airport must exit their vehicle, line up, and go through a metal detector, while our luggage, carry-on, etc. remain in the vehicle which is then scanned. The driver remains inside the vehicle, so one hopes whatever they are using for scanning isn't potent X-rays. Unfortunately, the security building is small, and the only rain shelter is a long canopy one would find at a bus terminal, but the canopy is about twenty-onefeet from the entrance of the building. If it rained, or if there was a really heavy downpour, those waiting to go through the screening would be soaked, thoroughly, and would then be wearing their wet clothes to board a plane. Really smart.
Warning: If you’re flying out of Nairobi’s international airport, and weather may be a problem, either have an umbrella along or a poncho, otherwise, if it rains, you will be soaked. Kenyans wonder why tourism is down, as it certainly is, but with procedures like this, potentially giving the last impression a tourist might have in leaving the country, drenched and disgusted, can you wonder?
We arrived in the virtually spotless city of Kilgali by noon, a start contrast to the litter-strewn highways and streets surrounding Nairobi and through most of the countryside. Years ago, Rwanda instituted a national clean up day, still followed to this day, where one Saturday morning of every month people are required to clean up their streets. The result – a litter free environment. Rwanda also banned plastic bags, so that litter is gone, again in absolute stark contrast with the filth of litter one sees beside the Maasai villages and small towns bordering the Masai Mara Game Reserve. There, in the Mara and also just outside Samburu Game Reserve, for a mile or more, the bushes and trees lining the roads are festooned with plastic of various colors, frayed and ripped to almost give the appearance of an alien plant at times. Seeing this trash in Kenya, and knowing what Rwanda did to address the same potential problem, one simply has to wonder why Kenya's leadship does not institute a similar policy.
Our lunch was at the Hotel Colone Miles, which is famous for being a refuge for residents of Kilgali during the Genocide. Today, no trace of that sad time is evident, and instead the hotel, and the restaurant with the best lasagna served in Africa, is a first class, beautiful landmark. After lunch we drove on through the countryside to northwestern Rwanda and our hotel, arriving early enough for some time to get ready, in daylight, for tomorrow’s trek.
Day 2. Sabyinyo Group
All five volcanos were clearly visible in a virtually cloudless sky as we headed to Volcano National Park’s headquarters where we would be assigned our group and our guide. As we hoped, we were given our favorite gorilla trekking guide who is world-famous for being the best, and who is our friend as well. We planned on doing a shorter trek for our first outing, giving everyone a chance to acclimatize to the elevation and the hiking. Accordingly, we were assigned Sabyinyo where, yesterday, it was just a short hike into the forest.
It wasn’t today, but as it turned out, the shooting today was among the very best we’ve ever had, and for a reason…..
We left headquarters by 8, driving for about 20 minutes to the parking area where we met one of the gorilla trackers and the porters who would carry our packs up the mountain. At 8:24 we left our vehicle at 8100 ft, beginning an easy hike through the farm fields and to the stone wall that marks the Park boundary and the edge of the forest, arriving shortly after 9. At 9:12, at 8381 ft, we crossed the wall and headed into the bamboo forest, a route that just kept climbing. At 10:22, after almost a full hour of walking, we reached the gorillas, now at an elevation of 8549 ft. Our route had taken us to the edge of a volcanic depression and down into the crater known as Kyabahinza, named after a medicine man or fortune teller. This area is truly one of the most beautiful locations we’ve been to, and only on three other occasions, in 85 mountain gorilla treks, had we been here. The Nebutonia trees here are tall and widely spaced, giving the area an almost park-like appearance, but an eerie one as nearly every tree is covered with hanging goats’ beard lichen, giving the appearance of an old southeastern US forest with its Spanish moss. In contrast to most areas, the forest floor here is fairly open, allowing one to look far across the valley floor. We’ve always dreamt and hoped for the chance to photograph gorillas here, but always, when we found them, the gorillas would be somewhere further up the slope, in the thick vegetation we normally expect.
We descended into the crater, hearing at times the pok-pok-pok as a gorilla beat is chest, but no gorillas were in sight. We started climbing, now on the crater’s slope, an incline steep enough that the porters were allowed to join us to help our participants get up the mountain slope. We passed a Gorilla as we climbed, lying on a day bed of bamboo, but so thick that when I caught a view, I couldn’t tell which way the gorilla was facing, and whether I was seeing the top of its head or its rump!
We passed the daybed and only a few minutes later Big Ben, a black back gorilla that is distinctive in being bald, with a ring of hair around his crown that reminds one of a Jesuit monk. Ben climbed and rolled and slid down the hillside beside us, giving some nice views before righting himself and walking by, disappearing further down slope. The female on the daybed awoke, and posed nicely on her throne of bamboo for several minutes before following Ben down the mountain.
Gahunda, perhaps the largest of the silverbacks, was spotted further down the slope and we started back down, down into the crater, the forest, the fairyland landscape that we hoped would someday yield some gorillas. And today it did.
Big Ben rested on a strange grassy mound, another gorilla further off sat on a tree, while a female and young, no more than 5 month old baby, sat in the open, alternately grooming or nursing her baby. The dominant silverback, Gihishamosisi, strutted down the slope, walking towards us and the mother, finally pausing, in full silverback pose – stretched out, silver back prominently exposed, right before us. It was a magnificent sight.
(In looking at the photos after writing this, Gahunda is clearly visible in the background and looks very gloomy or pouting, as if he fully realizes he is no longer the chief and at that moment, with Ghishamosisi posed and strutting before us, both silverbacks know it. This isn’t a stretch, either. Just prior to this trip I finished the third of three books dealing with animal emotions, and from this reading I don’t have any problem ascribing ‘thoughts’ or intentions or emotions, and not doing so short changes the actual observations. The books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Card Safina, and Animal Wise, The Thoughs and Emotions of our Feel, by Virginia Moreel, and last, and my least favorite, When Elephants Weep.) The silverback continued down, and Gahunda, his father, followed, settling himself in the clearing close to the mother, while lying on his belly and staring out at his kingdom.
Meanwhile, some subadult males played, climbed trees, wrestled, and sometimes galloped so close that our guide, or ourselves, would give the ‘no, no’ bark, ‘eh-eh-eh-eh,’ telling the gorillas to move away. Our time was nearly up and we were dying to get a shot of Gahunda if he would get up and follow the other gorillas down the hillside, going passed us as he did so. With our hour nearly completed Gahunda rolled and rose to his feet. He puffed his lips, a clear signal that he might chest beat. Mary called to me that she had just finished a card, and I popped one out of my DX to toss to her, but she fished out another card in time, just as Gahunda rose to a standing position, beating his chest and running downhill. I saw it coming but knew I couldn’t get in front in time, and so I shot it from the side, while Mary, now rearmed with a fresh card, caught my dream shot, a silverback beating his chest and running at the camera!
Gahunda settled beside another female and after a few more family shots our hour was up, and we left them. As we climbed back out of the crater we could hear screams, as apparently Gahunda and his son got into a spat. Later, the ‘crazy’ silverback that we’ve known for years and who has recently left the Sabyinyo group, showed up, and our guide left us for a time to check on its identity. He may have prompted all the screaming, as he’s now a notorious stealer of other gorilla females.
We had a long walk home, reaching our bags at 12:20 and the car at 1:43, experiencing nearly 40 minutes of rain in concluding the walk. Our highest elevation was 8838 feet, and we figure we hiked at least 2 miles each way, probably doing at least 4.5 or 5 miles on the trek. On our rating scale, we gave the hike at 7 out of 10 for difficulty, but the shoot was an easy 10, or a 7-11, really, since it was extraordinary. We arrived at the lodge a little after two for a very late but well deserved lunch.
The stats for this trek were interesting and are given below:
8:24 – left car, 8100 ft
9:12 – left wall after orientation, 8381 ft
10:22 – reached gorillas, 8549 ft
10:35 – left bags to begin the shoot
11:05 - reached gorillas for shooting
12:05 – finished shooting
12:20 – started walking back
1:05 – rain began
1:23 – wall
1:43 – reached car
highest elevation reached: 8838
Day 3. Umubano Group
Although the volcanos were clear a high and broken cloud cover filled the sky, promising more favorable lighting conditions for today’s trek. When we arrived at headquarters we learned that all the permits had been purchased, and we’d be sharing our group with another couple, very nice people as it turned out, from the UK. As our gorilla guide began his orientation we were joined by an older woman from France, who made no effort to introduce herself to the group and, as it turned out, was a frequent eyesore in the images – lagging behind and therefore often managing to be in the background until another guide would pull her out of the way.
The hike today was fairly easy, although the Land Rover ride to the point of departure was a beast, once we turned off the main road. Alex, our Primate Safari guide, did a great job bouncing us up the bumpy, rocky, barely passable road for another twenty minutes, getting us almost as high an elevation, 8668 feet, to begin the trek as we hiked to yesterday.
The hike into the jungle was a fairly gradual, nearly effortless walk. At the stone boundary, at 8754 feet, a wide trench, perhaps five or six feet deep, separated the rock wall from the interior forest, with two thick logs spanning the gap. The porters offer a hand for balance and security when the tourists cross this bridge, and most tourists sanely and prudently take the hand and cross without incident. Of course, I can do this myself, and shrugged off the hand, and as soon as I placed my first boot on a log I slipped forward, nearly losing my balance. Had I been further on the log bridge I’d have fallen. When I recovered my balance, I also gladly took the hand my guide offered!
The trail up country was easy, passing through what I presume is more high-country bamboo habitat, with bamboo stalks more widely spread about, many broken and lying like pick-up-sticks amidst the upright poles. The trail was muddy, and often we could hear the sucking squishy pop as a booted foot sunk deep into the muck was extracted. We slipped and slid, and tried our best to straddle the muddy trail, for naught, really, because inevitably we stepped back into the grime.
Our trail wound higher, passing through meadows of stinging nettles framed by the thin tips of bamboo, many with balls of spikey growth demarcating their segments. Clouds were building and the distant volcanos to the northeast Muhabura and Gahinga were lost in a gray sheet of advancing rain. We’d started the walk in sunshine, but as we met the trackers the sky was nicely overcast, perfect for photography. Rain looked imminent so we carried our rain jackets, and we donned our rain pants for protection from the nettles. The elevation was 8836.
The gorilla group, Umubano, were in a wide nettle and low herbaceous scrub clearing surrounded by distant bamboo. Our first gorillas was a nice encounter, with a mother and baby and two other adults, either females or subadult males, grooming one another on an open patch of earth. We had clear viewing and good shooting, but after a few minutes the four moved off, with the mother reaching for her baby and depositing him on her back using her right hand. I wondered if that was a constant, but later, she repeated the move, this time reaching around her chest and grabbing the baby’s arm, and lifting it up and over her head using her left arm.
There are only two females in this group, the one with the baby and another that is pregnant, with two silverbacks, three black backs, and the remaining three adolescent males. One silverback, Charles, is dominant, and actually a bit smaller than the other silverback. We found him, looking a bit subdued, sporting a head wound and, it looked to me, a sore arm. He sat on his rump, legs outspread in front of him, and groomed, picking and eating a scab or a bug, and generally looking a bit forlorn.
We moved down trail where the mother and baby and some of the rest of the group had again gathered in a nice opening. Shortly after getting into position Charles came out of the brush in a rush, slapped the ground with his hands – a gesture our gorilla trekking guide often mimics in play, and came rushing across the clearing straight at me. I kept firing with the wide-angle and he stopped, as I sort of expected, just feet away, turning himself broadside. We moved around for front on views while he stood in the typical silverback pose, with the mother and baby watching him in the background.
One of the larger black backs had climbed a tree and was hanging from a vine, but Charles took offense and after sitting below the vine for a few minutes suddenly rose and pulled the vine, and the other gorilla down, where he proceeded to flail him for some infraction. They rolled off the hill and into the vegetation.
We had a couple more sessions with the female and baby, as the mother fed upon thistle plants and the baby tried his best to copy. The portraits of the baby were great – big, wide eyes, looking out at us and his world, some of the best shots we’ve made and in good light.
The final quarter hour of the shoot was involved with finding the other gorillas, with two adolescents play fighting in a barely open area as the sun occasionally peeked through clouds, making exposures challenging and constantly changing. Although the play fight looked violent and serious, with their square incisors and still tiny canine fangs fully exposed, it was not serious. Periodically the two would pause, and sometimes we could hear their heavy breathing from all of the exertion, then, without much warning, one would rise, flail arms and jump upon the other.
We finished with Charles the silverback again, this time feeding on salad and bamboo, breaking a fresh stalk of bamboo, then stripping a vine, alternating between the two, as the detritus of old leaves or flowers rained down upon his head, speckling him with gray brown flecks. It made for an unusual look.
Our hour up, we were led back downhill and through a muddy trail through the bamboo to join our porters, who had relocated to a large open clearing. Maureen slipped on the trail and fell hard, but luckily landed on her back in a drier section of soft mud and wasn’t hurt. At the clearing as we packed up our gear the threatening rain finally arrived, but it didn’t last more than a few minutes and we hiked out dry, following the muddy route to the stone wall and sunshine, in just about a fine minute walk.
Day 4. Kwitonda Group
A beautiful blaze of orange low on the eastern horizon greeted us at dawn, while the sky above was cloudy, and, as our guide Alex said, sometimes that means it will be bright and sunny later on. Luckily, it wasn’t, and for most of today’s shoot we had fairly good lighting, with some bouts of bright sunlight until the end, when it became sunny and contrasty. In some ways, that was the ‘bright’ spot of the day, anyway.
Although we had a very nice gorilla ‘experience,’ the shooting was very compromised, which illustrated how and why we love to do five treks. You just never know when all the conditions will click, and when they will not, and today, we had relatively few clicks. Part of the reason for that was we were assigned a second guide, Francis, who we’ve always found unpleasant, official, and monumentally unhelpful, and today he proved true to form. We were joined by three Australians, great people who were doing their only trek and who were extremely courteous, considerate, and fun, making our group a total of eight, as we had yesterday. The trek for these new comers was the most difficult we’ve had in some ways, with a lot of climbing, and one guy, from sea level, was suffering. Francis, true to form, led on and never offered a helping hand.
Mary’s 28-300mm lens, when mounted on her 5D Mark III, was focusing beyond the subject, something she discovered in reviewing yesterday’s shots. I screwed up and forgot to pack her backup lens, a 70-200 f4, so I had her use my 70-300 and I carried only a 24-105, plus an Olympus 4/3rds camera with a 70-300mm equivalent, and a Canon PnS SX50 HS which Mary carried, and I ended up using to shoot video. For the first time I did not carry a monopod, since I use the 24-105 handheld most of the time – good IS, and the 70-300 is usually mounted instead. As it turned out, the shooting was so limited that the short lens was all I needed, and neither Mary nor I shot much – no more than 450 frames between us.
Having Francis along, I suspected I wouldn’t get too many good shooting opportunities, so I concentrated instead on appreciating the forest as we hiked. The trail was surprisingly dry, just moist, rich jungle soil, so the conditions were great. We passed through groves of Nebutonia Trees, the same tree we had on our first day trekking, and small pockets of bamboo. Shade-loving impatient plants lined the trail at times, as well as a mycologist’s dream of fungi. White, blobby-looking slime molds, antler-shaped coral fungi, some tiny, colorful toadstools of yellow or orange, and pinkish-brown mushrooms dotted the forest floor and the rotting logs. Twice, both going up and coming down, we skipped or jogged over a line of Army Ants, whose bites are extremely painful. In a line, when the first people run pass and stop, and others behind try getting passed, we sometimes had a stressful pile-up but luckily no one was bitten.
The gorillas, a large group of 25 or so, with one baby only five days old, were in heavy cover, some trees, some bamboo, and a lot of tall shrubs. Our first encounter was with a mother and three-year old baby, still nursing at times, who presented a bit of head and shoulders as the mother fed on leaves. When she left, the baby lingered, and began to cry a low ‘oohing’ or mewing whine, but the mother continued on and the baby eventually rose and followed her uphill.
We climbed uphill, reaching a small opening that was essentially shrouded by the surrounding canopy, making the light levels low. Three to five young gorillas, including one young gorilla with at least one foot showing a genetic deformity, with the third and fourth toe fused together, lounged, groomed, or wrestled in front of us. One climbed a tree, followed by the mother, and both ended up nearly directly overhead, periodically dropping bark or leaves down upon us. To Francis’s credit, he had Mary move back from her position just a minute or less before a sizeable chunk of wood dropped down where she had been, and she’d likely have been whacked on the head had she not moved.
While a couple of gorillas played, the two in the tree climbed back down, with a young one standing, posed with one arm held high and holding a limb, in front of us. No one got a good shot – we were all too close. The silverback Karevuro appeared, pausing at the edge of the clearing. Alan was in a nice spot if the silverback walked in to join the group but our great guide had him move to the side, which was fine, but ol’ Francis then made a stink and had him move back to the rest of us, worried as he was that the silverback might charge. I’d trust the opinion of my usual guide, but he was somewhat dressed down by Francis and didn’t argue or protest.
Eventually, somewhere below us a fight broke out with plenty of screams and the silverback crashed through the brush to referee. A short time later we followed, finding the silverback and nine others of mixed ages sitting or lying in a tiny clearing, in open light for a change. We were all crammed together like sardines, and as we all struggled to get shots and accommodate one another (doing a nice job of this) the sun popped out, contrast kicked in, and with our hour drawing to a close we left the gorillas and headed back to the porters and the hike home.
Our stats for today – We left our vehicle for the trek at 7418, walking about 25 minutes to reach the wall at 7821, entered the forest and reached 8278 where we left our porters and packs and headed in for the gorillas, requiring a 52 minute uphill walk. Francis started the clock exactly when we reached the mother and baby, and despite the amount of dead time as we looked for the gorillas after she moved off, we ended the shoot precisely one hour later.
As we hiked back it was thundering, and to the north and east nothing was visible except a huge gray wall of the approaching storm. We reached the lodge, changed clothes, and returned for lunch before that storm hit us, but when it did it came down with a vengeance, pelting the windows with rain and reducing visibility to less than 100 yards. By the end of lunch it had stopped, and two hours later the skies were clear with all five volcanos visible. Mary and I worked on calibrating her 5D with the 28-300, finding we needed to dial in a -10 adjustment to get the lens properly focused from 28 to 70mm. One of the Aussies had a Tamron 18-270mm, the perfect focal range for a shoot like this, and a lens we’re going to take a good look at when we get home.
Breene, Alan, and Maureen headed to some shops with Alex and, with the weather clearing, continued on to the Twin Lakes area, a beautiful overlook showing the volcanos, terraced slopes, the two distant lakes, and over-all, stunning scenery.
Day 5. Agashya Group
Last night the skies were clear and the volcanos stood out starkly against a star studded sky, but when we awoke at dawn the entire sky was heavy with thick clouds covering the upper reaches of the mountains. It looked like rain, and in the northeast we could see the tell-tale wall of gray that has been preceding our previous storms. By breakfast, at 6AM, it was raining, hard, and we could only take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be trekking for over two hours and yesterday, during that time frame, the skies cleared and we had sunshine.
At headquarters it was still lightly raining but the Rwanda dancers still performed, and Mary initiated the gratuity they hope for by being the first to deposit some cash, followed at the dance’s conclusion by the largest number of tourists we’ve seen contributing on this trip. We were assigned Agashya, and had a sixth person added to our group, a nice Norwegian guy who carried two Canon cameras. He turned out to be a very courteous and considerate shooter, and we ended up inviting him to join us for our last day’s shoot, hoping that we could again get by with only six.
Our departure point took us on the bouncy road that led uphill right from our lodge, and when we arrived it was still sprinkling sufficiently, and looking ominous enough, that we donned ponchos and rain pants for the trek. We had barely entered the farm fields when our guide pointed out the trackers in the distance, and a gorilla sitting on top of the stone wall. It looked like we would not be hiking very far!
We hiked in a light rain, and there was some initial discussion about waiting the rain out, but our guide must have received word from the trackers that the gorillas were good, and we should start the shoot immediately. We crossed the rock wall, walked about 100 yards, and got our gear in order. A short walk later, paralleling the stone wall boundary, we entered a large meadow, with knee-high grass tussocks scattered about, with the wall on our right and the thick, black bamboo forest to our left. The gorillas, about ten of them, were sitting in the meadow, in the open, and there was activity everywhere.
A one-year-old stood balanced on a grass tussock, two young juvenile males play/wrestled in the background, and the big silverback, Agashya, sat sedately nearby. It was difficult to decide where to look and start shooting first. While we photographed Agashya, a female with a 18 month old baby standing on her back, riding her like a jockey passing through the finish line, stepped in view, and with the baby maintaining his balance and that pose, walked by. The pair, we were told, were not mother and daughter, but simply sisters, and the ‘horse’ was acting as a babysitter for the ‘jockey.’ We hurried to get ahead, but when the two reappeared we had just a few second window before the two passed by us in the deep shade of a tree. Within minutes, the light drizzle slowed to a stop and we removed our cumbersome rain covers and rain jackets, making the rest of the shoot far more pleasant.
Juvenile males play fought nearly constantly, banging each other, gaping their mouths widely to reveal tiny canines, rolling in indiscernible balls of black fur, and standing, quite often, to slap and punch and grabble. Much of that action occurred just a few feet from where the female and baby passed, and we had a virtual ringside seat as two or three young gorillas would wrestle.
Oddly, a female with a small one-year-old did a surprising amount of chest beating, sometimes while munching upon a bamboo stalk while her baby looked on. Several times the action whizzed right by us, and both Mary and I were slapped by gorillas as they ran passed. There was no getting out of the way in time, despite the ‘eh-eh-eh-eh’ no-no grunts we and our guide and trackers gave. Once, to relieve the strain on my knees from hunkering down I sat instead, and shortly after doing so Mary told me to move, as one of the young wrestlers was coming up behind us. I looked back, and comically tried scooting ahead by butt-walking, mimicking a bad aerobic exercise routine, but the gorilla ran by fast to join once more in another fight.
Our shooting shifted back and forth between the wrestling clearing and the edge of the forest where gorillas would periodically climb a tree, sometimes in twos or threes. Surprisingly, one of the young babies, just a year or so, climbed a thin-trunked tree quite high. When he descended, I was attempting to be in a position to frame him against the trees, and when he reached the ground, he boldly walked in my direction. I backed up, trying to maintain distance, and reset my monopod, and would just finish doing so when the little one would advance again, always coming closer. I had to walk completely away and turn my attention elsewhere for the baby to finally lose interest.
Eventually, two of the one year olds ambled and rolled across the clearing to join Agashya, who had moved less than one hundred yards during the hour. For much of that time, after first giving us two or three bouts of wide, gaping yawns, Agashya lay upon his back, a huge forearm draped over his eyes, while an almost equally large black-back sat nearby. Agashya sat upright when the two babies arrived, and although everyone hoped a baby would climb up upon his shoulder or atop his head, the two instead indulged themselves with a thin sapling that they climbed. The tree was too thin to support their weight and would either bend or spring back, sometimes flipping the baby. Agashya eventually lay back down, and we ended the shoot with the young ones inspecting him, but again, not presenting ‘the’ shot we hoped for.
What began in what promised to be a ‘record shot’ day in bad light and rain metamorphosed into a wonderful shoot in wonderful light, with gorillas in the open and, probably many high on bamboo shoot alcohol, plenty of action. Skies still looked threatening as we walked back to the vehicle, and after ginger tea, with only a bit less than a mile to our lodge, Mary and I power-walked down for some final exercise.
After lunch, Breene, Maureen, and Alan went with Alex for a short ride in the countryside for scenic and people shots, but the clouds discouraged the former, although they did manage some interesting images of a goat shepherd and some kids. Mary did email office work, and I wrote, as we now await the lodge’s dancers for some shooting in the late afternoon.
I used very slow shutter speeds - 1/20th and 1/30th,
and panned with the running dancers to catch something
a little different. To do this successfully, plan on shooting
a lot of frames and keeping very few.
Day 6. Kwitonda Group
Our last trek for this year, 2015, and our 90th. We hoped for a great day to finish off the trip, to mark our 90th trek, and to cap a great trip so far. We had originally planned to visit Agashya again, hoping that they would we close to the stone wall, but I was worried, too, that the group might just migrate a little further into the forest, which was thick, dark bamboo along the wall. When we reached headquarters we were told we’d return to Kwitonda, which has a large group of 25 or so, and a new born baby that is now five or six days old. Considering two days ago our visit here went very poorly, we thought it was a good choice, giving us the chance for this group in better conditions.
Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight and the skies were clear, with only the tops of the five volcanos capped by clouds. Over Karasimbe, the clouds were flattened by high winds, creating the distinctive lenticular shape that indicate high winds. We were told, roughly and vaguely, that the gorillas were ‘close to the wall,’ although we discovered that although that may be true, the walk to the wall was certainly not close. We drove an easy half hour to the northeast, towards Gahinga and Muhabura volcanos, perhaps as far in that direction as we’ve ever gone, driving a slight incline until we reached 7456 ft at 8:17Am.
We met our porters and started trekking, joined once again by our new Norwegian friend, Tor, and headed uphill. Clouds were gathering to give the sky a dark, almost threatening look, although we hiked mostly in sun and we were not concerned about an advancing storm. We hiked, climbing steadily until we finally reached the stone wall park boundary, but our hike continued, following the wall from the farm-side, climbing higher and higher. We walked for at least forty minutes alongside the wall, with our guide and one of the trackers finally looking for a spot where we could climb over the rock boundary.
We passed two locations where the wall had been breached by wild Buffalo, and at both villagers were in the process of replacing the stones. Women with small babies, old men, and everyone in between were involved, and as we huffed uphill I marveled at the casual manner that the Rwandans themselves negotiate these hills. Further along, the wall was reinforced by poles and bamboo branches, creating a higher wall that may have deterred buffalo, but also prevented us from climbing through.
After a final, very steep climb, taxing to some and somewhat amusing in a bizarre way as we were climbing so high it was somewhat funny. Near our highest point we passed a lone Lobelia, a sunflower relative that is characteristic of the high country, often above treeline. At 9:42AM we reached a section of the wall where we could climb across, and with some care, scramble down the other side to a beautiful meadow that we hoped would host the gorillas. We were at 8386 feet, a 900 foot ascent, and after crossing the meadow we continued into the forest, and up. This trek was one of the more interesting hikes we've had in several years, but the effort was certainly rewarded. Here's the stats:
Start- car – 7456 8:17
the wall – 8386 9:42
gorilla trek – 8465 10:05
8332 – wall return
7667 – car return
The trek through the forest was fairly easy, and the soil was relatively dry, just the typical moist wet clay of the high country. We walked for nearly thirty minutes, finally meeting the gorilla trackers on top a small rise at 10:05, at 8465 feet, almost another one hundred feet in elevation. The forest was a mix of small stands of bamboo and taller trees, and the potential for a beautiful setting was high.
We started downhill and almost immediately met the silverback, Kigoma, who appeared from the bamboo and walked by us, sitting for a spell, and then rolling to his belly in the shade of the bamboo. While we moved about to get some angles the silverback lifted his chin and supported his massive head upon his palm, staring at us with a truly assured calm. The light was even and the pose, cropped tight with our longer zooms, was perfect, a real classic. Everyone agreed that the hike was worth it for that shot alone.
We left the silverback and moved a short distance downhill to find the rest of the group, encountering one of the large blackbacks and the other silverback, Karevuro. At one point, unexpectedly, Kigoma crashed across the brush, turning at the last moment to butt-bang our gorilla guide, almost knocking him down. I was on the other side of the silverback, and to give him room I stepped around his back and joined my guide. The silverback turned, and I dropped to a stoop and then to my knees, hunkered down in what I hope would be a satisfactory submissive pose as the gorilla stood beside me, then continued on. My side-long glance revealed massive, stubby-toed feet silently padding by on the soft ground, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The silverback settled down nearby, with a subadult or a female nearby, both grooming. The silverback lay down facing us, and again obliged by propping up his chin in another wonderful portrait. Around us, a blackback munched on salad while the other silverback lay flat on his back, arm in the typical posture, draped over his eyes.
We had some wonderful family group shots, with a young one, perhaps a year or so, climbing a vine in the background and grimacing, baring his teeth as he hung from a thin vine. At one point, and in the hour’s activity its too difficult to know exactly when, our guide found the mother with the tiny baby, the youngest we’ve ever seen. The shooting was difficult and marginal, as the sun had popped out and the gorilla mother was hunched over, cuddling the infant, creating deep shade, while we tried squeezing into a tight little spot and poking our lenses through the branches blocking much of our view. The baby was tiny, with matter black fur and tiny hands and feet, and we had to marvel at how something that small and delicate survives the nearly deadly rain, and the cold and dampness that follows as night falls.
Our last encounter of the day was down slope where six or eight gorillas gathered, with juveniles playing, a one-year inspecting us, and, too soon, all of them turning away and giving us their backs. Our guide asked if we were happy, and we were, and told us that unfortunately our time was up and reluctantly, as we watched the one-year roll himself out from under another body, flop on his back and wave his arms.
The trek out was easy, as we found a more accessible spot to climb over the wall, and our route headed nearly directly downhill, to our vehicle, which was moved to a new and much closer location. Augar Buzzards, our Red-tail Hawk look-a-like, soared overhead, and as Mary and I shot some video of ourselves hiking down the slopes two large, and unidentified falcons caught our attention with their calls. We watched the two do a circle and a dive, disappearing against the darkness of the distant forest canopy.
After lunch we had an uneventful drive back to Kilgali, with Alex, our guide, trying to tell the story of Rwanda but stopping when he found most of his participants dropping off to sleep. We reached Kilgali by 5:30, and at the Serena Hotel experienced a surprising thorough security check that was the only notable event.
I used 64 and 32gb Hoodman Cards, which are incredibly fast, somewhat essential when shooting fast action -- and we had plenty.
Refer to our BROCHURE to get an idea of next year's trip! The brochure may not be completely updated for 2016, but the itinerary will be similar.
