Gorilla Trekking in Volcanoes National Park

My gorilla trek in Rwanda was going to be my second gorilla trek, and I truly could not begin to imagine how it could ever live up to the first. Shockingly, it managed to be even better!

I should have known it would be an incredible day when we met our trekking group at the Volcanoes National Park headquarters. In our group was an older Japanese woman and man. It turns out that the woman has been the official Volcanoes National Park photographer and videographer for the past 10 years, and she was super excited because the family we would visit (the Hirwa family - whose name means “lucky one” in English!) just took on a new wife the day prior and she was coming to photograph and film the family interactions. The older gentleman turned out to be a professor on mountain gorillas who worked with Dian Fossey and helped habituate the Rwandan gorilla families! He was coming back to visit them again!
As if that all wasn’t reason enough to be excited, our guide was Emmanuel Harerimana. He is the guide who is featured in National Geographic productions about the gorillas, and was also the guide who led Barack Obama and was featured in “Our Great National Parks”.  He has spent his entire life living near and with the gorillas and is able to understand their language and respond!

The trek ended up being completely different from the first - rather than a steep hike straight up a dense jungle-covered mountain, we had a leisurely stroll along rolling farms to the edge of the forest.

Once in the forest, we were mostly on easy trails through the bamboo.

We arrived to the spot where the gorillas had been when we started our walk, but they had decided to move by the time we got there. So, we were on the move to head to their new location. For this part of the journey, the rangers were doing quite a bit of bushwacking with their machetes, carving a path through the forest for us, but it still was not a strenuous pace.

When we made it to the gorilla family, they were not tucked in the jungle as they were in Bwindi, rather, they were lazily spread out, relaxing in a large, grassy clearing.

This meant we were able to capture clearer photos of the gorillas, especially when they decided to come up nice and close to us!

For the hour we were there, the babies played with us

and the teens ate and relaxed

and checked us out more closely (this one grabbed my hand, trying to take my camera!).

Meanwhile, the adults were busy acting out a soap opera! New wife was sitting by the silverback, eating the family’s food, and old wife was having none of it! She kept yelling at the new wife, trying to get her to back away from her man. (Thankfully, Emmanuel had taught us some of their language as we were hiking, so we were able to really understand how the gorillas were feeling about each other - it was amazing!)

Eventually, after several attempts by old wife to chase off new wife, the silverback got up and punched old wife in the face to make her stop harassing new wife. Old wife was furious and stormed off into a different clearing - which required her walking right through our group. In her tantrum, she grabbed members of our group who were in her path and shoved them out of the way (everyone was fine)!

The photographer said that in her 10 years of filming mountain gorillas, she has never watched jealousy unfold as a new wife joined a family! It was an incredible thing to witness!

We continued enjoying our time with these magical creatures until our hour was up and we were forced to part ways. The walk back to our vehicles was easy and slow paced and still only took about an hour and a half, making the overall experience about a total of 4.5 incredible (sweat-free) hours.