Home again Home again . . .

On Saturday we made the 2 hour drive through the hills of Rawanda from Ruhnegeri to the capital city of Rawanda. We left our stuff in a friend’s hotel room and then set out to explore the city on foot. After getting lost on our way to the craft market, we aborted that mission and proceeded onto the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The center is the grave site of more than 300,000 Rwandans who were brutally murdered during the 1994 genocide. The memorial also serves as an educational center with several exhibits that were very moving. Katie bumped into a friend from Bates doing research at the memorial. You can find Batesies everywhere!

After arguing with some taxi drives about fare prices in my broken French (French is the national language in Rwanda), we elected to walk back to the hotel. Unfortunately it was ~10kms away so we quickly had to re-evaluate our options. We found some motor bike taxis and climbed on. We roared through the city streets at 60km/hr clutching our drivers trying not to fall off and eventually arrived back at the hotel.



We said goodbye to our dear friends whom we had been traveling with for 2 months as we made our way to the airport. We thought our adventures were over but they had just begun.

Our plane left Kigali ~3 hours late and we had a short layover in Entebbe at 2am local time. After a long 8 hour trip north, we arrived in Brussels with less than 30 minutes to make our connection. We sprinted through the airport, back through security, had the beverages we purchased at Duty free confiscated and arrived at our gate 10 minutes late but luckily this plane was delayed too. We wiped the sweat from our brows in the restroom, and boarded the plane for another 8+ hr trip over the Atlantic. We arrived in Newark after 20+ hours of traveling only to find that one of our bags didn’t make the connection in Brussels. C’est la vie.

I was super excited to see my parents who had surprised me by driving down from Boston to meet us at the airport along with Katie’s parents. We climbed into the car for our trip back to Gladstone sleep deprived and euphoric as the magnitude of our 2 month adventure in Africa started to settle in.

Day 56 – GORILLAS!!!!

After breakfast on Friday, we climbed into our Land Cruisers for a short drive up to the visitor’s center at the Parc National des Volcans. The park is home to the world’s largest number of endangered mountain gorillas. As the name implies, the park encompasses 5 massive volcanoes (Karisimbi, Bisoke, Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabyinyo) and is covered in dense rainforest. We met our two Gorilla Guides (a coveted job for Rwandans) and got a briefing about our trek for the day. We would be headed out to find the Umubano family of gorillas which was lead by a mighty Silverback named Charles.



A separate team of gorilla trackers had been on the volcano since sunrise trying to locate our family of gorillas so they could radio us the GPS coordinates for our hike up. After bumping along a road which resembled a rocky dry river bed, we arrived at the base of our volcano. We were a little surprised to see two men in uniform sporting very large automatic weapons. Our guide informed us that the Rwandan Army had stationed these two armed guards here for our protection from animals and from “bad people” who might wander over from the Congo.



After a short hike through the dense forest (our guides used machetes to clear the way), we met up with our trackers at an altitude of ~7900 feet. We sat and watched the gorillas snack on branches, climb trees, beat their chests and wrestle with each other. Our time with them was capped at 1 hour by park regulations to make sure we don’t disrupt their daily routines too much. Standing so close to a 200 kg blackback gorilla (a younger version of a silverback) was quite exhilarating and a little scary. Gorillas are said to be 5 times stronger than humans and a friend from another group confirmed this (A gorilla slapped him in the leg because he was standing in the trail that the gorilla wanted to walk down.)



We returned to camp just after lunch and spent the afternoon organizing our gear and repacking in preparation for our long trip back to the good ol’ USA.

7,700 Pictures and Counting . . .

We awoke a little bit sad on Thursday realizing we have just three days left in our African adventure. Our trip has been fantastic and we’ll miss Africa a lot.

We broke camp before the sun crept over the horizon and drove south towards Rwanda. The mountains got taller and more lush as we careened along a red dirt road through a misty cloud forest past herds of goats and long horned cows.



In the afternoon, we snaked up and down some extremely narrow mountain passes that reminded Katie of Ecuador. Just outside Kisoro, we passed a refugee camp occupied by people who had fled the Congo. Our guide reminded us that we were only ~15kms from the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and that there was still significant fighting in the country despite recent reductions in violence.

We arrived in Rungheri in the late afternoon and set up our tent for the last time. Everyone headed to bed early that night to prepare for our next day's activity...gorilla trekking!