Just imagine it’s a cold winter’s night and you decide to head down to AAMI stadium to watch Port Power take on another lowly side (presumably because you got free tickets). As the match kicks off there’s a lot of empty seats in the ground, in fact you’ve never seen so few people at an AFL game. When they announce the crowd number it comes in at a paltry 14,000.
Now imagine that after the game finishes pretty much everyone goes straight home. 95% of this already small crowd has made their way back to their cars and there’s just you and the remaining 5% scattered around the oval, unable to move after the game.
Now imagine that at that very moment there’s a nuclear holocaust and for whatever reason the entire human race is destroyed – apart from that people remaining in the ground (I don’t know why, maybe there was a lot of asbestos in the stadium that somehow protected the fans?).
700 people left on the entire planet.
It’s hard to imagine a species which numbers only 700 but this is exactly the case with the critically endangered Mountain Gorillas, and we were fortunate enough to see a family of about 15 of them, or 2% of the their global population. They are only found in a tiny corner of the planet, in a mountain range which borders Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and if you want to see them you need to organise a permit in advance and go with a guided group. We initially tried to see them in Rwanda but permits were impossible to come by (we’d left our run a bit late) so we ended up heading to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (most awesome forest name ever?) in Uganda to begin our search.
The thing with tracking Mountain Gorillas is that you never know how long you’ll be walking for, I spoke to people who found them 15 minutes after setting out, I also spoke to a 60 year old Australian man who hiked for 12 hours and 20km on his quest so it really is luck of the draw. Fortunately luck was on our side and after about 2.5 hours of searching we found what we were looking for – it was the perfect amount of anticipation and made us feel like we’d earned it, but it wasn’t ridiculous (although we did have a girl break down in tears in our group after about 2 hours, the terrain was impossibly steep and slippery and she felt she couldn’t go on. Obviously she did and it was all worth it).
Once the gorillas are located you have to leave your bags and everything behind and are permitted just one camera and nothing more. (For the photo nerds I took my 5D2 and 70-200 which was perfect). You get one hour with the animals, not more and not less and as expected the time absolutely flew. For basically the entire hour the gorillas were eating and in fairly dense surrounds so it was difficult to get good full body photos. They were never in the open. There was a super cute baby who did some climbing for us, and we could see everything really well, but photographically there were too many branches in the way of most photos for them to work well. Having said that there were some nice natural frames to work with so you have to take the good with the bad. My biggest disappointment was that we didn’t get to see (or hear) any chest thumping like in this video but I’ll get over it.
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| Some cute local kids. |
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| We had 2 security guards escort us, one at the front, one at the back. We were told it was to protect us from any rogue Silverbacks (they would fire into the air) but I’m pretty sure it’s because we were only a few km from the Congo border and they were protecting us from kidnapping. |
It was a truly amazing exerience getting so close to these massve relatives of ours (they share 98% of our DNA). At one stage a large male walked so close I couldn’t focus my camera, my first instinct was to run as fast as I could but I soon regained composure and returned to being cool like the Fonz.
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