here come the muzungus



erin's new boyfriend



‘here come the m’zungus’

One thinks only Dianne Fossey and a few select others walk amongst the mountain gorillas. Embarking on a gorilla tracking expedition conjures images of fleeting glimpses or distant viewing at best. Rwanda may have the most reliable and secure mountain gorilla tours in Africa, an easy statement to back-up since Uganda’s tours are known to be less than 100% successful (one gorilla family simply moved out of the Impenetrable Forest National Park – really, that’s its name, bespeaking difficulty – into the DRC, or Congo; further, Congo is really unavailable to the average tourist except via the Rwanda border, thus the gorillas are far less available, and perhaps uncounted). With only 700 or so mountain gorillas remaining and more than 350 of them in Rwanda’s Volcano National Park, Rwanda is the safest bet. But there is more.

land adjacent to park

First, the plight of the mountain gorilla is unlike that of its kin the lowland gorilla. Estimates of 100,000 of the latter type were made just a couple of years ago in the Congo Basin and speak of a separate specie altogether. Thus, gorillas are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The mountain gorilla, however, faces peril from all directions: Rwanda has the highest human population density on the continent; and, looking across the border to Uganda the landscape is pretty much the same; alas, the Congo border has an additional population issue with ex-pat Rwandans. People have been cutting down the forest to create arable land for many years, even at an accelerated rate in the past two decades. The crops have been grown ever-higher and the parkland has shrunk. Efforts have been made to stop this shrinkage. Reports abound of some one million people volunteering to build a wall made of volcanic rock to permanently demark the Volcano National Park boundary.

And there is one reason for this community, nay, national, effort: gorillas are big business. While few Rwandans pay to track gorillas, fifty-six non-Rwandans pay to see them every day. At $500 per person (less for certain individuals with green cards or some other government connection) the number of jobs created far exceeds the value of more tennis court size farm plots. Each group of seven trackers, as we’re called, is lead by a guide and escorted by an armed security person (elephants and water buffalo seem to like the park as well). After an hour* of climbing through farm plots the volcanic rock wall is reached and the guide gets serious about the rules: no loud vocalizations, no bathroom breaks, no walking sticks or backpacks or quick movements once a group is within 100 meters of the first gorilla. The guide has a short conversation on a two-way radio and we start moving further up the mountain. Fifteen minutes into the park we step over some steaming scat. I ask the guide, ‘water buffalo?’ and he shakes his head, ‘gorilla.’ Hmm, I hadn’t really thought about that.

We stop when we run into another group of armed men, the men who spend their days following the gorilla family, protecting them from poachers and keeping track of their position. This is a business, after all, and the jobs start to add up: five employees in the field for each group of seven plus the park management and ancillary posts. At this point we drop our gear and step off the freshly macheted trail into the bush. We were just on the other side of a knob from a gorilla because when we walked 50 meters and stepped around a tree and there sat eating, two meters away, the first gorilla, not even raising an eyebrow at our presence (I might be making up gorillas actually having eyebrows). A couple of ‘wows’ and digitally produced shutter snaps and the realization that there’s a gorilla down the hill to the right, another in a tree, another above that one and another up the hill to the left starts to sink in. The clock starts ticking.



13 day old twins born to the Susa group



Socialization means a lot of things. Dogs can be socialized. Humans can be socialized. Both should be in order to get along in this crazy world. As it turns out, gorilla socialization is helping them to have a place as well. But a dog will at least look up when something changes in its field of view. When the leader of the group, a silverback named Kumira, came into view as we made our way into the group, he didn’t even look down at us from his space overlooking the side of the jungle, just kept eating. One cheeky male reached out and whapped me on the leg then stood in front of Erin and did a little chest pounding before the guides grunted him off. A one year old looked up from his play with an older group member before rolling down the hill right between us. But the big male just stared into space and chewed.

Big? At first impression, gorillas are not as big as one would expect. That’s not to say they’re small, but I did not feel dwarfed by any means. Okay, forget arm length. But Kumira was another story. He was fully twice the height of the biggest female and easily four times the mass. Massive, in fact, is the best word. After half an hour (the clock is still ticking, 0:30 to go) the dominant silverback stirred and started moving down the hill. The difference in size was remarkable – see how I’m remarking now? – and, as he moved directly toward us, every person took a step back at the same time. I know I didn’t think about taking that step back. I just made more space because one of the lords of the earth approached. Still not looking at any one person, Kumira strutted his stuff down that steep slope some three meters away (about 10 feet, America), stopping about six meters away, below us now and promptly seemed to fall asleep. The one-year old kept playing, rolling down the hill in the path the group’s number one male had just taken. His playmate rolled down the hill behind him(?). The mother with the twins continued feeding and holding. The pair that had been in the tree returned to the tree and picked leaves and ate and ate. The mischievous sub-adult that had thumped me on the leg sat in a nest of nettles and gorged, stripping leaves off a stalk smoothly and methodically grabbing another stalk with one hand as the other shoved copious leaves into his mouth with the other. Ten minutes left.

This is where it gets difficult to wrap up the synopsis, as difficult as wrapping up the hour of ‘viewing’. Socialization is finite. Another silverback emerged into view and sat a few paces from Kumira. According to the guide there is another silverback in the group and he was somewhere nearby. One hour for us seemed a blink of an eye and it was about to end. I do not know how long we would have been tolerated, but for one hour we were in the middle of perfection. There is another patch of nettles for Thumper to eat tomorrow, and around 9:30 A.M. on every morrow, Kumira will not even look up when he thinks to himself, to quote the lead guide, Vincent, “that’s just the m’zungus coming.”  

* each tracking group is sent to a different gorilla family loosely based on apparent fitness and desire for longer or shorter walks; we chose the longest more because of the opportunity to see the largest group, Susa, but also because of the opportunity to walk through more unmolested African rainforest; people we spoke with who saw a different group the day before parked at the park boundary and walked just a few minutes into the park to see one group; in fact, one gorilla was outside the park wall eating potatoes from one of the fields, sitting just 10m from someone working the field

 

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