Every account of gorilla trekking talks about the walk. Almost none of them prepare you for what happens when the walking stops.
The walk in
You leave the briefing at eight with a group of eight strangers, two rangers and a guide who has done this several thousand times. For the first hour it is simply a hard hill walk in a wet forest. Nettles. Mud. Somebody falls over. Somebody else asks how much further and gets the only honest answer, which is that nobody knows.
Then the guide's radio crackles and everything changes register. The trackers have them. From here you leave the path, and a ranger starts cutting.
Contact
You leave your bag with the porters. This is the moment it becomes real, because you are told to, and because it means you are close.
The first thing you see is almost never the whole animal. It is black in green — a shoulder, or a back, thirty degrees off from where you were looking. Then the shape resolves and a silverback is lying on his side eight metres away with his chin on his forearm, entirely aware of you and entirely unbothered.
The first ten minutes
Here is the part nobody mentions: most people do not take a single photograph for the first ten minutes. Cameras stay at chest height, switched on, forgotten. It takes that long to stop processing and start watching.
What you are watching is not dramatic. A female strips bark with the concentration of someone doing a crossword. A four-year-old falls out of the same sapling three times, because it keeps trying. Two juveniles wrestle until one of them overdoes it and gets a look from the silverback that ends the matter without a sound.
The hour
It goes in about fifteen minutes of subjective time. Somewhere in the middle the group moves and you move with it, sideways through vegetation, ducking under the ranger's arm. A blackback walks past the line close enough that you can hear him breathing, and the rule about seven metres becomes a rule about what you do, not what he does.
At fifty minutes the guide says ten more. At fifty-nine, everyone lies about needing longer.
Afterwards
The walk out is loud with talking for ten minutes and then very quiet for an hour. At the trailhead you get a certificate with your name handwritten on it, which is absurd and which you will keep.
Almost everyone says the same thing that evening, in slightly different words: that it did not feel like watching an animal. Read our complete trekking guide for the practical version of all this.
Next
Keep planning
- Gorilla trekking guide — the practical version
- How hard is the trek? — before you book
- 3-day Bwindi safari — where this trek was
- Photographing gorillas — settings that actually work