Hot on the heels of our East Coast USA tour, we’re planning our next big vacation, which we hope will be a trip to East Africa to see the mountain gorillas, in 2014. At least, I hope it will be. The wife is a little dubious about this. (“But honey, what could possibly go wrong?” I keep asking her.)
Has anyone else done this? My understanding is Rwanda is better than Uganda, as the gorillas’ area is closer to Kigali than to Kampala. I’ve also learned the US$500 license per person to visit the gorillas is set to rise to $750 next month. You’re only allowed 1 hour per day with the gorillas. We’d probably be looking at only the one day, meaning a three- or even four-day stay in country. As a sweetener for the wife, we’re considering flying up to Paris afterward before heading home, but I wouldn’t mind spending a little more time in Africa. But for now, just some advice, experiences etc on seeing the gorillas would be appreciated.
Here’s a thread I started: Touched by a Mountain Gorilla.
Not my personal experience.
I did the mountain gorilla trek in Rwanda in 2002. It was one of the more amazing things I’ve done in my life. This was a couple of years after a whole group of tourists got slaughtered by rebels in 1999. Allegedly, the driver of our safari truck was one of the drivers of the group that got murdered, so it was all very surreal.
We had one AK-47 toting soldier for every two hikers or something like that. We drew straws and broke up into 4 groups. I was lucky enough to draw the group that was tracking the largest family group.
It was a not arduous trek of maybe 3 miles through jungle up a fairly steep mountain. I brought a 75-300mm lens on an SLR camera. The gorilla groups are tracked every evening and don’t ususally move more than a mile, so the guide tracks them and most likely you will catch up with the gorillas, but I’m pretty sure it’s not guaranteed.
You are supposed to stay at least 10 meters or something like that away from the gorillas, but in the dense jungle, sometimes they pop up much closer than that. I probably came within about 10 feet of one. Like I said, we were lucky enough to draw the largest gorilla group and saw something like 15 different individuals which is pretty rare. There were silverbacks (the large older dominant males) mothers, juveniles, and babies.
It was pretty fucking awesome and probably the greatest wildlife viewing experience I’ve ever had. Well, perhaps next to the lion kill we witnessed in Ngoro Ngoro Crater.
Thanks. Watched the video in that other thread too. That was awesome.
I think the situation has stabilzed now, as I’m not seeing references to armed guards in the material these days. But there seems to be a problem with budget, fly-by-night agencies that leave you in the lurch. We’d be looking for something between budget and luxury. Looks like there are lots of real top-end agencies that are rather over-the-top for us.
This ain’t going to help you, but I was on the lowest budget of all low budget safaris. This was fine with me, because I’m the cheapest bastard on the planet. I went from Vic Falls to Nairobi, and then caught another add-on 7 day safari to Rwanda and Uganda. It was fine. We camped in tents, which is unnerving when not in a gated compound, but we were never attacked by lions, surprisingly enough (a ranger was eaten about two weeks earlier at Lake Nakuru).
Our food was sketchy, and got sketchier as we went further. It felt like Heart of Darkness. We ran out of real milk powder and were served non-dairy creamer for milk in our cereal.