The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

To see the gorillas we had to trek for 3.5 hours up the mountain. Rwanda is very beautiful whenever we turned around.

The first section was from the road through farms. To keep the sheep from eating the crops they are muzzled.

This plant is grown to mark borders between fields and keep the animals out of the fields in the first place.

After an hour or so we began trudging through the jungle.

The first bit was alright with the bamboo forest. However with no bamboo shoots this time of year we were going up higher into stinging nettle. Gorillas really like stinging nettle.

It is covered in big spines to inject you.

Unlike the gorillas we do not like the stinging nettles.

It isn’t just the leaves the stems are covered as well.

But this does not stop the gorillas from building nests in it or eating it.

Here we are in a clearing after a couple hours of hiking.

It got quite a bit thicker in most of the jungle.

Eventually we climbed up 700 m vertical bringing us up to 3350 meters.

That gave Matt altitude sickness, but we still had drugs leftover from Peru so that was cleared up after a few minutes.

Then we reached the gorillas in the Pablo group. This group has 33 members, including 4 silverbacks and 13 babies, four of which were too young to have names.It took us 2.5 hours to hike back down.

Silverbacks are the mature males.

They are really big.

They eat a lot.

In the group we visited there were four.

We saw two of them.

You can only visit a family if the silverbacks are around otherwise the other members get agitated.

Also if the silverback come back he could get very aggressive.

I would not want to get entangled with a silverback.

Here’s a picture finally of the previously mentioned “silverback”.

The whole time we were there they ate.

Sometimes they would look over to see what we were up to.

Most of the time they were focused on what they were going to grab next and eat.

Because of the hill and where we could actually stand we ended up pretty close to them.

Kerri was very excited.

And terrified, don’t forget terrified.

As the hour was up and we started to go, so did the silverback. He walked right past all of us in the little clearing. That was the number two,not even the biggest one.

The small gorillas are really cute.

They look a little disproportionate.

And very fuzzy.

They also have funny grins.

Even they don’t mind the stinging nettle and happily eat away.

They focus just as hard on what piece to eat.

It is very tiring to eat all afternoon.

They were interested in what we were up to as well.

They never shared their lunch though.

Some of them just wanted to play instead of eating.

Swinging around on the larger branches.

Or just hanging around.

They were very acrobatic.

It wasn’t all that tasty though.

After one started playing others jumped in.

This one was far more acrobatic.

He did lots of summersaults.

The look after a successful spin.

Then there was a fight over the branch.

Fighting leads to falling.

Which some find hilarious.