Greeted in morning by mist covering trees outside our warm comfortable lodge dwelling 

We gather our belongings for the day ahead, gorilla trek.  I have never done anything like this before …. What does one take on such an adventure?  Water, tuck in pant legs so ants do not crawl up your leg and bite …. Neutral colors, bug spray, a hat to keep bugs off head, pack sack, money for the guide, porter and trackers, lunch, good walking shoes or boots, long sleeve shirt.  Oh, and we are requested to wear masks to protect the gorillas and us … when we meet them later today.  Walking poles …

Drive in our vans …. up up on nearly completely washed out roads of red sand and mud.  Past very small villages, children, adults, walking to work?  Working in their yards … riding motorcycles to get to work.  Up up and more up.

We get to the briefing / Gathering area. As we are Waiting, we are greeted by local indigenous folks, mostly women, who dance and sing to entertain us all. Enthusiastically they dance. We applaud. Apparently they do this each morning. Visiting People offer tips. Since this place was made a protected area, they have started this activity for the tourists every single day (for tips). Very uplifting and energy building ! 

How many are we? Chairs are full. Guides, trackers, porters are gathered around doing official tasks for their day with us. A few young gals. Maybe 5 rows of 15 chairs per row. 8 tours today ….

Now we wait for further instructions. The park is approximately 321 sq Kms. Open since 1993. Over 300 bird species. Chimpanzees and gorilla live here.  

You can check out the App: “my gorilla family”. Is about Bwindi gorilla families that live here.  

This is the Mountain gorilla Conservation area. World unesco site. 1683 mtn gorilla in total. Half live here in bwindi. 

These gorillas share 98.4 %  dna with humans…our cousins. We agree we will take and wear mask. Our gorilla family name is Tinda tine. This name Means fearless. 

Back to the lodge, exhausted after about six hours of trekking and walking and climbing, and stretching, and falling, slipping, climbing more …. Using walking poles.  I hired a Porter to carry my pack and more importantly to help me walk on the slippery mountain slopes.  Lucky me, a woman walked up to me and offered to be hired by me to help her, a young mom, lovely, competent and strong.  Our guide was the head guide, a complicated name … he said we could call him expert. He was the expert!  There were three trackers that stay with gorilla family all day and help us when we have the sixty minute of time within the family.  

The scenery here is so beautiful…. The pictures barely do it justice but it is amazing.  More comments later…. 

Tomorrow Rwanda and then my trek home begins.  

Love to you all,  Pamela in Africa