Day 2 in Rwanda: The impressive logistics of gorilla tracking

I woke up a little before four o’clock in the morning to the sound of male voices outside the hotel. I thought it might be the driver who was supposed to pick me up at 4:30 and even though it wasn’t, it still felt better than waking up to an alarm clock. We left Kigali as grey streaks began to cross the dark sky, but the uniformly white streetlights still shone on all the surrounding hills. These hills soon became obstacles to us as we began to drive up and down them, cleaving closely to each well-paved bend above precipitous slopes.

Since all the roads we took had a single lane in each direction, we often got stuck behind trucks inching their way up at an excruciating pace. The driver, Emile, sometimes overtook the trucks, but at other times he hung back even though there were no bends ahead. He explained that there were policemen on some of the hills who gave hefty penalties to drivers overtaking other cars. He even said that police patrols at the bottom of one hill would send their colleagues the exact order of the cars as they drove past, so that they could immediately tell whether any car had overtaken another by the time they got to the top.

As the sky brightened, the mountains began to emerge from the darkness and mist. The scene reminded me of the Rwandan flag: clouds infused with golden light sat between the green mountains and the blueing sky. Bananas hung in bushels over the walls of village gardens, while the fields were verdant with diverse crops like potatoes, sugarcane, cucumbers, cabbage, and corn. Most fields on the way, however, were teeming with bean plants, which from afar looked like a sea of green termite mounds. As we drove closer to them, I realised each bean plant twisted its way up around a wooden pole, slowly filling the space in between its vines with giant leaves.

Even far from Kigali, the facades of ordinary houses seemed quite clean, and the structures themselves well-built. I found them reminiscent of Swahili architecture: single-storey houses behind verandas with stone pillars. Beyond the villages and fields were forests, some of them populated with dark conifers, others overgrown with imported eucalyptus trees. This species is especially popular in Rwanda as it grows fast and provides firewood and material for charcoal. Eucalyptus wood is sometimes also used for construction, but it has to undergo treatment to mitigate the extreme flammability for which it is unwelcome in some parts of the world.

Emile gladly explained many of the things we saw. He told me Rwanda is referred to as the land of a thousand hills for its rugged terrain and showed me the five volcanoes of the Volcanoes National Park – all of them shrouded in clouds. Pointing west, he said the DRC was a twenty-minute drive away. Pointing north, he said it would take around forty minutes to drive to Uganda. I asked about some of the things I had seen during my short time in Rwanda, like the round red fruit I ate for breakfast the other day – the tamarillo, or to use the East African term, the tree tomato. Although the skin is not very hard, people usually do not eat it, scooping up the inside with a spoon instead.

I also asked about the meaning of the word “Kwibuka,” which I had seen at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and on the gates of some schools in the countryside. Emile said the word means “Remember” in Kinyarwanda and refers to the genocide. The event, he explained, is traditionally memorialised between April and July during the one hundred days when the massacre happened. Without my prompting, he even shared his own memories of the genocide. He was ten years old when his family fled from their home village to hide in the swamps of Akagera. While Emile managed to catch a canoe across the Kagera River into Tanzania, many others drowned or were killed by hippos and crocodiles. As their bodies were never recovered, their relatives still remember them by bringing flowers to the river.

We arrived at the welcome centre a little after seven o’clock in the morning. The place was packed. Emile sent me into the courtyard while he looked for a place to park, and I spent the next ten minutes marvelling at the sudden congregation of mostly Western tourists. On our way to the centre, we all self-reported our fitness levels to our respective drivers, who communicated these to the guides. We were thereupon sorted into groups of eight, each with its own guide and gorilla family to track. The family we were set to follow was named after the now-deceased Pablo, a prolific silverback who had been studied by Dian Fossey.

Volcanoes National Park is home to twenty-four gorilla families, all but three of which are habituated to humans. When tourists come to see the gorillas, they do not search for them at random but are assigned a gorilla family to see on their hike. To ensure they find it, each gorilla family is followed by a team of at least six trackers, who save their GPS location in the evening and trace their trail from that spot early in the morning. This means that the park engages around one hundred and fifty people as gorilla trackers, since even the unhabituated gorilla families are assigned teams that are meant to habituate them. Beside them, there are also around thirty golden monkey trackers, and the entire group alternates between tracking and serving as rangers on a biannual basis.

After going over basic instructions with our guide, we all clambered back into our vehicles and set off for our respective gorilla families. Ours was relatively far away, as we had to drive for an hour, first on relatively smooth roads, then on gravelly ones, and finally on rocky paths that made the car rumble in all directions as it ferociously spun its four wheels. On the way, I noticed two open-roofed military vehicles carrying squads of young soldiers, which served as another reminder of the proximity of the border and of the conflict beyond it.

We parked our cars at an altitude of around 2,700 metres and continued upwards on foot. It was cold and misty. The first stretch of the hike was not at all how I imagined it would be: we found ourselves crossing terraces of potato fields, carefully keeping to the ridges and avoiding the rich dark soil between them. We passed the occasional cow and after some walking, we came across an apiary of wooden beehives. Only after what seemed like half an hour – and what the guide said were two hundred metres of elevation – did we arrive at the stone wall outside of the park. One of the eucalyptus trees near had newly been snapped in half; the guide said gorillas love to eat the pith of this plant as it helps them digest their food.

Only after climbing over the wall did the walk begin to look more like one on which one might find a gorilla. We were in the middle of a forest full of bamboo and native trees; the path was rocky and occasionally quite muddy and slippery. The guide said this was a good omen. When it is sunny, the gorillas hide in the shade, and when it is rainy, the gorillas hide from the rain. The mist and clouds that make the rocks a bit slippery and the path a bit muddy are the perfect conditions for watching gorillas in the wild.

After a while, the path transformed again. We were no longer walking through the forest but among bushes and tall plants, and the solid ground below our feet gave way to a slippery and bouncy mattress of fallen vegetation. One of the porters accompanying us took out his machete and began felling the weeds across our path, leaving a bouquet of strong vegetal smells in his wake. Mixing with the cucumber-like wet whiff of cut foliage was the pungent aroma of a plant that smelled like green pepper. Through my long trousers, which had already started turning a thick brown, I began to feel the stinging nettles, and we all kept having to untangle ourselves from the thorny brambles that tried to bar our way.

It took two hours before we finally heard the screech of a gorilla. We walked for a few more minutes when the guide told us to take off our backpacks and leave our walking sticks behind, as the family had many old gorillas who still associated walking sticks with spears. Having given these with the porters, we slowly made our way to the dark shapes in the mist. The first gorillas we saw were two females, one of which was suckling her child. The other at first appeared defensive of the pair, but we soon realised that the reason she started approaching us was she spotted the exposed white calves of one of the men in our party. She gently touched him with her finger and sniffed it before returning to her friend.

Slowly, we made our way through the whole troop. There was another mother with a baby and a few juveniles, as well as a giant alpha male and two other smaller males. The second mother appeared warier of us than the first: When we got too close to her, she made the deep coughing sound with which gorillas show they are displeased, and we all had to respond with a guttural grumbling to show we meant no harm. A few times, we stood back as a gorilla came hulking down the path, all the while holding each other from slipping straight under its feet. The guide pointed out that the males were avoiding walking too close to the alpha male and always chose a different path as a show of deference.

For an hour, we watched the gorillas eat and lie around, scratching their bellies and yawning. The babies seemed curious about us but stayed timidly behind their mothers’ backs while ogling us with their wide eyes. The alpha male looked at us a few times but did not seem very bothered by our presence. To signal his location to the rest of the group, he made a high-pitched hiccupping noise quite distinct from anything else we had heard that day.

With one last look at the assembled family, we began our descent. I tried to avoid slipping on the plants, mud, and rocks by jabbing around my feet with my walking stick, which mostly worked but slowed me down in comparison to the people who simply barrelled their way down and occasionally ended up falling and sliding on their bottoms. The way up may have been exhausting physically but staying alert while skipping down a wet hill somehow felt even more strenuous. Our whole hike took about five hours. At half past two, the driver safely deposited me at my hotel, where I ate some of the samosas I had bought the day before. After that, I took a long shower and spent the rest of the day in my room.