I have arrived safe and sound in Rwanda to begin my primate trek through Rwanda and Uganda, the first  stop is at Volcanoes National Park, which is where Dian Fossey studied her families of gorillas.

I’m still trying to process the day, I cannot describe what it was like to see these majestic animals in the wild. The population of mountain gorillas is growing, but there are still less than 900 of them on earth. Today we saw 11 of them.

The internet speed isn’t the greatest, so I picked four quick photos to post.

A bit of a background on how this all works.

You need a permit to enter the park for gorilla trekking, the permit costs $750 USD per person for 1 hour of access to the gorillas. The money goes to the conservation efforts for the gorillas as well as economic development for the nearby villages where all of the guides, porters and rangers live. There is 24 hour protection for the animals to protect them from poachers, who still attempt to kill gorillas for the body part black market.

You meet up with your guide and you’re  assigned one of the families in the park. They are located all over the mountains, and some are easier to get to than others. Our trip today was very easy trekking, it only took about 20 minutes to get to our family called Hirwa. There are 10 families in total in the park, and it has grown 2 families over the last couple of years.

We had the pleasure of spending about 30 minutes with the above Silverback male, he weighs in at about 220kg and eats 15% of his body weight every single day.

This guy actually gave me a bump as he walked by me going to his next meal spot, getting touched by a male gorillas on the first day was pretty surreal.

The family groups are very tight knit and there were lots of young gorillas of various ages being taken care of.

 

The environment for photography is quite challenging, as the light is low and there is a lot of vegetation around, but you figure it out if you’re willing to get dirty.

 

We’ll be visiting the gorillas two more times, before we head off to Uganda to see the chimpanzees.

This was an amazing day.

I hope I can better put into words what I’ve experienced in Rwanda in the coming days, I just have a permanent grin on my face today and it’s hard to get it out.