Mountain gorilla moments last a lifetime
Famous gorilla passing away brings back memories of being among the gentle giants in Uganda's impenetrable forest.
The passing of any mountain gorilla is sad.
The experience of being in mountain gorilla habitat will stick with you for life. I remember it as one of the hardest days of my life.
Passing through five airports to get to Nairobi, Kenya, left me with a horrible chest infection. This was a year before Covid, so it wasn’t that.
Circled on our Oasis Overland of U.K. trip’s calendar two weeks out was our day to see gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest Reserve. The $700 had been paid in advance and there were no refunds.
If the gorilla outing had gone one day earlier, I would have canceled. But I felt up to it when the day came.
We split into small groups, drove two hours and met our armed guards. They were in contact with gorilla trackers by cell phones down in the impenetrable forest, which had better cell signals than many a western American city.
They told us to hurry down a thousand feet. But when we got there the gorillas had moved on. I barely had enough strength to get back up to the Touotas.
We drove to another spot and the trackers told us to hurry down again. After two hours of thrashing through the jungle I became worried I’d never make it out. Just as I was about to ask to retreat, we were among the gorillas.
We stayed on hour, the allotted time. The baby of the bunch brushed past my pantleg as the silverback stared at me. No problem, because I was too scared to do a thing.
We watched the gorillas go about gorilla business, taking as many photos as we wanted. I had hired a porter to carry my pack and camera.
Fortunately, it was another guy who slipped off a wet log and immersed in a cool pool of water, not me. His photos may have survived, but his $5,000 camera didn’t.
My porter held my hand and pulled me back toward the road, a half hour behind the rest of the group. I needed the next three days to recover from the best wildlife experience of my life.