Before we left Kigali, Jamie and I spied a large, bright green snake slithering about just beneath a highway overpass while walking to the market. On the way back we found the snake dead and learned that it was a Green Mamba, with a bite that is poisonous enough to kill several adults. It felt like a uniquely African urban hazard.
We rode from Kigali, crossed Rwanda’s border with Uganda, and continued to the town of Kabale, located near the shore of Lake Bunyoni. Our mission here was to inquire about the mountain gorilla tracking excursions into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest located just to the north of Kabale. We learned that within a week the official start of the rainy season would be upon us and the tracking permits would be half price, so we had some time to hang around in this dusty little town. All it takes is a few days in a place like this and we know our way around town, we have our favorite restaurant, regular grocery shop, and morning bakery. The workers at the guest house quickly become our new friends. In fact, given the incredibly friendly people here, Uganda could certainly rival Malawi for the title of the ‘warm heart of Africa’. People are happy to see foreigners visiting and we’re greeted with smiles from strangers around every turn.
Our favorite $2.50 local fare buffet was located directly across from the power-ballad mini market. Perhaps simply because the owner had a massive set of speakers at his disposal and access to electricity 5 hours a day, he provided a daily soundtrack for the block with hits from Celine Dion, Phil Collins, and Journey. We had a few emotive lunchtime lip-synching sessions. As we’ve come to expect in Africa, there was a dance party happening somewhere in town that didn’t stop until dawn.
Though it was now raining every day, we still managed to get out to Lake Bunyoni for a few days of camping while we waited for our gorilla tracking permit date to arrive. We took one of the dugout canoes to paddle to an island in the middle of the lake, which ended up being more difficult that I first imagined. The problem was keeping the canoe going in a straight line. If we drifted even slightly to one direction we would soon find ourselves spinning a full 360 degrees around, doing what the locals called the ‘Mzungu corkscrew’ (Mzungu being the Swahili word for white folk). The local guys seemed to have no trouble keeping a constant heading and usually laughed at us spinning around in circles.
I too laughed eventually, but in the moment I was anything but amused at my wonky paddling struggles. We made our way out to an island in the middle of the lake, had lunch and took a swim.
Lake Bunyoni traces such a craggy shoreline and the roads are so poor that canoes are the preferred mode of transport for people, goods, and even delivering the local kids to and from school.
After a week in Kabale and Lake Bunyoni, we finally rode off into the mountains ready to spy some gorillas. We rode to regular calls of ‘Mzungu!’ from local village kids along the way, and sometimes the air of wide-eyed wonder in the way that they said it had us laughing. All the way up the twisting mountain roads towering hillslopes were covered with cultivated fields from top to bottom.
Imagine the effort to walk to and from your field carrying tools or a harvested load of veggies if it happened to be at the top or bottom of these hills from your village. People are working hard for the food that they grow here.
Our campsite in the mountains was little more than a clearing in the jungle pressed right up against the wall of dense vegetation that was teeming with life. A dizzying diversity of birds, snakes, lizards, insects, and of course gorillas and chimpanzees all inhabited this forest. At night the jungle produced a symphonic wall of sound that lulled us to sleep in our tent. It felt like an auditory analog to the impenetrable barrier of vegetation that formed the forest margin, reminding us that beyond that threshold, humans are merely visitors.
To us foreigners it’s an exotic and wild place, but the villagers here live their whole lives right up against it. Their fields and huts run right up to the jungle and we were told that they’ve even had the gorillas wander right down into our camp.
We got up early the next morning to meet our guide who provided us a bit of gorilla etiquette training. He said not to look the gorillas directly in the eyes, and if they become aggressive to make gorilla noises and pretend to be eating leaves. If one of them begins to charge us, we should slowly back away, but definitely do not run. Easy for the guy with the gun to say. Sounds reasonable, 700 pound gorilla closing fast, just stay cool, continue grunting ‘ooo…ooo….ooo’ and munching my palm leaf.
Newly armed with expert knowledge on staying friendly with our fellow primates, we began the walk into the jungle. The trail quickly turned to an extremely steep, muddy slope with barely a passage through the vegetation. Our way seemed to be more a gorilla trail than a human trail. Trackers had set out ahead of us early in the morning to help us find a specific family of gorillas called the Nshongi Group. The trackers began at the place that the gorillas slept the night before (since they move sleeping locations every night) and tracked them to their morning hangout location. Up we climbed, stumbling over roots and slipping backward in the mud, with our guide’s machete slashing left and right every few steps to clear the way ahead. After an hour and a half of climbing, we met up with the trackers on a hilltop clearing where they told us that they had found the gorillas just behind the next rise. We dropped our packs and walking sticks at the clearing and crept slowly towards the group.
Our first view was of the silverback male about 50 meters away, and deep in a stand of vegetation pulling leaves from a low branch of a nearby tree. He paid us no mind as we circled around to get closer, but without even a look in our direction he moved off from us. We crept along again circling wide again to his new spot, and again he lumbered off slowly, giving us only a view of his formidable looking backside.
We persisted in our slow motion pursuit of the brooding silverback towards a clearing in the vegetation and he finally let us draw a bit nearer. As we did, we turned around to find two females and a youngster coming upon us from the rear. On sighting us, they showed no alarm and calmly diverted their path around us continuing towards the male. As the female walked slowly in the vicinity of the male, he reached out a thickly muscled arm and pulled her around the front of him. As it happened, the gorillas were in the mood for love. While the gorilla morning delight proceeded before us, we realized that they were probably even less bothered about our presence than we’d thought.
Their coupling was brief and when they finished we moved a bit closer and finally came face to face with the silverback male. He moved slowly and he always seemed to have a pensive air about him. It was his eyes. They seemed a mixture of peace, thoughtfulness, and mild puzzlement. Like an old man about a craft he knows well and at the same time lost in wistful thoughts of younger days.
His two year-old was a different story altogether. He bounded about the clearing with hardly a moment’s stillness, jumping to grab a low branch and swinging and twisting wildly. He charged at us, with as much fearsomeness as he could muster, quickly thumping his little chest with his hands in mid-run. It would have seemed much more fearsome it he hadn’t stumbled over a root and fallen onto his face during the chest thumping. He didn’t see us as any kind of threat and he wanted to play. Our guide had to shoo him away with a branch so as not to have us make physical contact with the little fella.
In total, we spent an hour with the furry primates that passed by in a flash. I spent most of the time squatting in the bushes about 6 meters from the silverback staring in wonder at this enormous, powerful creature that had such an air of peace about him. This was all Jamie’s idea and looking over to see the excited smile on her face as she peered through the foliage felt just grand. In the afternoon we descended back to our camp, slipping down slick spots on the muddy trail to land on our backsides and describing this or that moment of the encounter.
Only about 880 of these mountain gorillas remain in the world, all of which live in the rainforests of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo. Parks like Bwindi, which was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1994, are the only way their habitat has been preserved and are essential to the continued survival of the mountain gorillas. Some 30 gorilla groups roam Bwindi Forest, 10 of which have been habituated to humans by the rangers and trackers. This process of habituation takes 2 years and results in the gorillas viewing humans as a neutral species that mean them no harm.
Constrained by the rains, we took two days in transit from our mountain camp to Kampala. The day we left, a long menacing black cloud loomed in front of us by 10:30 AM and within 15 minutes it descended on us with fury. We only had a few minutes to seek out some shelter and found a wooden shack at the perfect time to weather the worst of it.
Despite the storm, it only took the local village kids a few minutes to find the Mzungus huddled in the shack. After some wary staring from the opposite side of the road with Jamie smiling back, they decided on bartering as the mode of interaction. The first brave soul ran halfway across the street and threw two potatoes in the grass in front of us. The next one came all the way over to us and handed two more to us. In exchange we produced a few coins, which turned on the potato tap. We ran out of coins we gave up a carton of milk, a bracelet, and a pen. Somehow the message that we don’t want any more potatoes didn’t seem to be coming across.
By the time we were out of things to give and the kids finally gave up, we had a stupid amount of potatoes to carry away.
As we dropped altitude, Dyna Rae ran a bit smoother and the rainstorms didn’t last quite as long. The only important reason we had for coming into Kampala was to visit the Sudan embassy and try once again to procure a visa. After a couple hours wait, still all geared up, we were allowed to meet with the very friendly ambassador who gave us the same story we’d received in Nairobi: visa approval for US citizens must come from Khartoum, which could take a month. Since we’d already been denied a visa in Nairobi per this process, we decided it best to move on and wait until Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where this ambassador said we should be able to obtain a transit visa. Strike two. We get one more swing at this in Addis before we’ll need to get creative.
Approaching the seething capital of Kampala turned out to be another mad riding affair. Big surprise, I know. I should really be used to it by now, but I still get pissed when getting run off the road by an oncoming truck. This happens at least 30 times in a day in Uganda. Just three days before our arrival in Kampala, we got some very sad news about an Australian couple on a BMW1200 GS that had a crash along the same route we were riding. Like Jamie and I, Dean and Tanya were in their 30’s, and had tossed in their jobs to travel the world two-up on a bike. A four-wheel drive truck overtaking another vehicle ran into them head-on, killing them both. They had big dreams and plans to tour the world on their bike. Their website is titled “One Life is all You Get” and a quote above one of their photos reads:
“The most dangerous risk of all: the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later,’’
It’s difficult to reconcile people’s general warmth and regard for one another here with the madness found on out on the road. No true adventure comes with a guarantee of safety, but we like to think that we’ve got our eyes wide open to the risks. We kept calm and carried on.
We stayed on the outskirts of Kampala for a couple nights before fled the chaotic city eastward to the banks of the Nile. We stayed at a camp just where the mighty River drains from Lake Victoria.
We hired some paddleboards from the camp and began our explorations upriver. The current wasn’t swift, but it was some effort to resist it washing us downriver.
We explored little islands in the middle of the river and I found a rope swing for an aerial assault on the Nile. In my underwear.
The next morning we loaded up after a rain shower to ride eastward back to Nairobi. We’ve been riding for a month now circling Lake Victoria, visiting three new countries and crossing the equator twice. It’s been an action packed few weeks and we’re now headed back to the city that’s become more familiar to us than anywhere else on the road. We plan to regroup in Nairobi and do some bike maintenance before beginning the long journey into north Africa, keeping our eyes wide open.
