(Sorry for the absentia of the bloggorhea yesterday. Waited for 45 minutes for the Blogger page to download in a Rwandan caf?, and got nowhere.)
By Sunday I was done with my Tribune article (score.), and had a day to kill. So I decide to drop $250 to go see the Rwandan gorillas. Had to drive up to the northwest corner of the country, right by the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Me and my 2WD-taxi driver set out from the capital of Kigali at 4 AM. The first two hours of driving is just winding around around Rwanda's enormous hills. No lights of civilization anywhere, except for truck headlights on other hills. We pass a continuous string of people walking on the roadside with bundles on their heads in the darkness.
The 2WD taxi takes a beating in the last half hour of rocky road, but we get to the camp at 6:30: second ones there. But it eventually (an hour and a half later) becomes apparent that we have come to the wrong camp. The group I paid $250 to be part of has already started hiking up the mountain, from a location a number of miles away. How I could have known this I don't know. I'm talking to my Francophone taxi driver with a French-English dictionary, and he's talking to the locals in Kinyarwandan: I'm just happy we got somewhere official.
So me and this Italian girl who also came to the wrong site climb into a truck with a guide and two anti-poaching soldiers with AKs and we all head back down the rocky road to try and catch up with our group.
After an hour and a half, we pull over in what looks to be the middle of Hobbitton. Squat little houses among enomous hills, upon which the locals have planted sorghum or tea on every square inch, now matter how steep the hill gets. Only a few spots of sheer vertical rock are uncultivated.
But we start marching on the first leg: the spooky forest, which is full of spooky trees: tall and spindly, and close enough together that the block out all the sun. So there's just diffuse, evenly reflected gray light everywhere, and lots of mist.
This would be the point where I'd post a picture of the alleged spookiness, but I don't get a chance to take one, because the march is relentless. "We need to keep a good pace if we are going to catch the other group," says our guide. But he confuses "good" with "Bataan-like." We broke twice, for a total of about 120 seconds, in and hour and half of stomping uphill, grabbing bamboo to pull ourselves forward.
Second leg of the march is all Dagobah. We walk fully bent over, ducking under vines and branches and bamboo, for long minutes at a time. Freaking hell on the back.
Third leg: Crouching Tiger What The Frap Am I Doing. We emerge from one of our little Yoda tunnels into the sun. The ground dips sharply below us, but there is a sort of bridge forward made of trampled branches. Can't see any ground beneath them, but the guide goes bouncing down the shaft of one branch, and ends up on firm ground about twenty feet away. So we follow him: trying to get across the canopy by stepping on the thickest branches or, when no thick ones are available, by stepping on a few smaller branches that crisscross and thus might theoretically support out weight.
Now, I don't think we are eighty feet in the air or anything, but the most important fact at the time is that I have no idea how high we are. I know that when one leg slips and falls through the canopy of branches, it sinks in two feet or so, and only stops when it lands on some other branches. We alternate between this and Dagobah for about half and hour: hunched over walking through a tunnel of vines and bamboo, and then balancing our way across a canopy of flattened branches.
And then the blog got too long, and I had to declare that the gorilla story would be To Be Concluded tomorrow. Sorry. Sun going down here.
