Day to at Volcanoes National Park in northwest Rwanda.

Today our guide was the “world famous” Francois, a highly requested and internet famous older guide at the park. I have lots of videos showing why he’s famous, but the internet is quite slow and uploading them would take far too long, so you’ll just have to trust me.

Francois taught us some new communication sounds that gorillas respond to, as well as teaching us about “jiggy jiggy”, which you can figure out on your own what that means. I was also picked from the group to help demonstrate the chest thumping, ground slapping and jumping that a gorilla can do. There is video, I may never show it.

As for the trek, todays family was Sabyinyo, which is famous because it the family contains the largest and oldest known mountain gorilla on earth. The 225kg, 45 year old silverback named Guhonda. He’s one of two silverbacks in the family, the other is his son Gukunda, who’s not quite as big, but has just as much of a presence.

Today’s trek to this family took about an hour, and had some good fun along the way. It rained a lot in the morning, and the roads were quite muddy, so we got stuck half way to the trail entrance and had to walk in. If you’ve never been to Africa, it’s amazing how many people seem to come out of nowhere to help. While we were stuck, at least 15 young men somehow found us and attempted to push us up the hill, but it was all for naught. Let the mud walk begin.

There are times your hike to a gorilla family could take up to 3 hours, luckily or us, that wasn’t what happened to us today. The trails were extremely muddy and movement was slow for the group, thankfully once we were in the forest, we only had about a 20 minute hike to the family.

We came upon the family and were very happy to discover a ton of variety was in the area, we had females, kids, babies and had the pleasure of meeting both of the silverbacks (males).

One of the great displays of a silverback is the Donkey Kong chest pounding and “ooh ooh oooh” sound, and we were lucky enough to witness it. I was about 10 feet from Gukunda has he showed his might for whoever was watching. You could feel the thumping on his chest in your own. I didn’t have a great angle for a shot, but I think the one below gives you an idea of the mood.

It was absolutely majestic.

We had about 20 minutes with Guhonda, the biggest known gorilla on earth, and he was quite the sight. He seemed just as lively and healthy as other male gorillas half his age.

We saw a lot of young gorillas, and they’re still very inquisitive of humans. The adults gorillas on the other hand don’t care that we’re around. You could “talk” to the young gorillas in their language and sometimes they’d respond.

As our time limit of one hour with the gorillas was winding down, we had the pleasure of seeing a mother carrying a recently born offspring, she ended up carrying the baby through the group of us, she was probably about 6 inches from me as she passed by.

It was another amazing day in the mountain forest, and we have one more trek to the gorillas to look forward to tomorrow. On Thursday, we head to Uganda and get ready for our chimpanzee treks, which are apparently very different from these ones, as chimps are pretty much insane.

Until tomorrow…..