We had one more day in Kigali exploring the different areas of town and visiting a natural history museum which is housed in Richard Kant's house, before heading to the Volcanoes National Park. One thing that was very striking is how clean Rwanda is. The other pleasant surprise is that the police do not carry around guns (of any size) compared with the machine guns seen in many other countries we've been to. We spent three days at the Volcanoes National Park with treks planned each day, so we expected to get very tired.
The first day was a trek to see the Golden Monkeys, supposed to be quite an easy walk. After our guide (Patience) informed us that the monkeys had moved and it would be a four hour hike there, we reached the monkeys before even entering the park proper observing them from the fields just outside. (Supposedly Patience was testing us to mae sure we really wanted to go). The monkeys were quite entertaining to watch jumping around in the bamboo... and at one point jumping on each other (although the female didn't seem to notice as she just kept eating before, during and after).
Day two was the much anticipated gorilla trek for Jason and I. There are only 750 mountain gorillas left in the world and we were very excited to have the opportunity of seeing them in the wild. In the morning of the trek you are assigned to groups based upon the difficulty of the trek the guides think you can manage. Jason and I were assigned to one of the intermediate groups (Umubano) that is supposed to be about a 1 and a half to 2 hour hike in the park. After walking through the fields towards the boundary of the park for about 20 minutes we met the trackers for the group. All the rain had encouraged the group down the mountain meaning we had a 10 minute hike through the forest before being able to spend 1 hour with the gorillas. Before you go you are informed that you should stay at least 7m from the gorillas at all times (although the gorillas are not aware of this rule)... in reality it was nearly impossible to get that far away from the gorillas. Generally we were about 2-3m away and at times closer. One of the babies seemed to think making the tourists move was great fun. The 8 of us were all standing in a group when the baby starting walking directly towards us, so the guides quickly moved us out of the way... and the baby changed direction heading towards the group, we moved, he followed. He didn't seem to want to touch us, just make us scramble out of the way. Once he tired of this game he started climbing on a tree, hanging upside down and fighting with his brother. We were also able to get incredibly close to the silverback. He hadn't moved from his nest that he slept in and went back to sleep whilst we were there after greeting the guides with some grunts. It was an incredible experience and we could happily have spent many more hours with the family getting to know them, but alas that's not allowed and so we headed back down the mountain.
On day three we were excited to finally get into the park!! We were pretty sure that Dian Fossey's grave would not have moved down the mountain. Initially we expected a 15minute walk to the park, then 2 hours in the park to the grave... however, because it had rained so much the guide decided to take us a different route walking for nearly an hour before making it to the park. We then scrambled over the wall and started up the volcano. Luckily for us it was only the three of us in the group, so we could go at our own pace without upsetting anyone. There was another group heading to the crater lakes, but 3 of those turned back before making it to the park and another 2 turned back shortly after overtaking us. There is really only one work to adequately describe this hike - mudddy!!! The 2 hour hike took us about 4 hours as even on flat sections we were incredibly slow trying to avoid sinking into the mud - we failed. By the end we were all caked in mud up to our knees and the inside of our shoes had filled with it. The walk was great fun and the gorilla graveyard although sad was interesting to see. By the end though we were all tired and hungry (having forgotten to take any snacks with us) and were looking forward to a few days of r and r on Lake Kivu.
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