Now the Virunga National Park is a tourist destination and visits to the gorillas must be booked months in advance. Visitors are strictly regulated. Eight in a group, and one hour with one of the eight habituated group of gorillas after a walk that varies from half an hour to three or more. Visitors are sorted into groups depending on their energy and fitness levels. Our group is assigned a guide and at the trailhead a ranger with a gun joins us. The purpose of the gun, we are told, is to frighten away wild buffalo and, more unlikely, any elephants that we might encounter. The guide says, ‘elephants are not guaranteed.’
The weapon would frighten poachers too, and armed park staff, in addition to tracking gorillas for the visiting groups, spend long days guarding them from poachers. At night, that same army that once froze in the cold mountain nights patrols the perimeter of the park. The combination of physical protection and the protection that comes from tourist awareness and dollars is working: the population has increased 25% in recent years.
The park is safe for people, but yesterday I read that three park rangers were killed on the Congo side, along with five soldiers. A FDLR militia (remnants of Rwandan Hutu genocidaires who fled to Congo in 1994) ambushed a military patrol in the park. Since 1996, 130 Congolese rangers have been killed in various conflicts. At one point, some gorillas were relocated for their own safety to the Rwandan side.
But when our day to visit finally arrives, I’m not thinking of any of that; I'm not thinking of the complicated discussions about whether it is better for us to visit or to stay home. I just anticipating meeting my cousins and hoping it doesn’t rain like it did the evening before, hard and endless, because then the gorillas will hunker down out of the rain and out of sight.
Our walk turns out to be a full two hours. We follow footpaths through fields of daisy like flowers that carpet the landscape with a fluid soft whiteness as a breeze blows through the plots. These flowers are pyrethrum, destined for the pesticide market, and a memory comes to me of reading that pyrethrum flowers are both attractive and toxic to bees twists the beauty of the landscape. Tarps of drying flowers outside small homes are quickly gathered up when rain threatens.
The fields border the high mountains and when we reach the edge of the forest we climb and slide on a muddy path past groves of ferns and bamboo groves and giant vicious stinging nettles and plants that I can’t name, through matted grasses where buffalo have slept, and then up and then down into an open area that stretches to DRC. It is here that we meet the trackers, two more men with guns, and then find our gorillas.
There are big silverbacks, younger blackbacks, a baby of several months and family members of all ages in between. A young one wrestles with the baby and all that can be seen are little feet sticking out this way and that. These cousins seem so familiar, the softness of the bottoms of their feet, the way they pick their noses, scratch their chin, peel the wild celery stalks with skilled fingers, fold up sticky green plants into a good sized package to thrust into their mouths, lean against the trunks of small trees. I am sure that one is posing for the clicking cameras, arm spread nonchalantly over the bushes, face half turned towards us as if showing his good side.
They tolerate us, ignore us actually. No, they just appear to ignore us; they are fully aware of our presence, where we are, and they know the guides who make harrumphing noises to communicate with them. As long as the guides are there they are relaxed, but when the rangers’ uniforms were changed, the gorillas were edgy and nervous. We are told to stay close together at all times and not to speak above a whisper. I know that we have been taken closer than the rules but they don’t seem afraid and I’m selfishly grateful that we are close because they are not easily visible in the meadow.
The hour flashes by and we leave reluctantly when our hour is up, retreating to a clearing where we share our lunch with the two trackers who will stay nearby the gorillas all day, guarding them.
I am awed, humbled, impressed by these quiet beings in their mountain home. Images of them come to me at strange times, vivid memories that I cherish, that bring me home to our evolutionary history, to the phenomenal majesty of life on earth, and to the knowledge that their future, their survival, depends on us.
pyrethrum fields and volcano
a long and slippery walk
and then....
muddy, stunned, happy
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