Anna in Africa: My 4th of July

Thursday, July 26, 2012

My 4th of July

Every year I can remember, I've done the traditional 4th of July celebration with fireworks, parades, and hotdogs or hamburgers.

This year I trekked Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda.

I went up Sabyinyo Mountain and trekked Mountain Gorillas. We left at 6:15 in the morning. We tracked the Hirwa group. Hiking up the mountain was tough at times- we had to go a little more than half way up before we found them- and it was sometimes slippery, muddy, and steep. At one point I was edging my way along the foliage on the cliff face and if I had took one step forward, I would have fallen straight down, it was that steep! (Sabyinyo is 3634 meters tall).

We started by walking through some local people's farm paths because our car broke down because of the bad state of the roads. The women and children greeted us from their fields and doorsteps and the men herding the goats and cows waved from a distance. The official language is French here but since not everyone goes to school and learns French, when locals speak their language, the only word (besides hello and thank you) I can pick out is Mzungu, which means white person/traveler/foreigner.

The farming fields ended with a stone fence, the border to the national park the mountains are in. We climbed over that and started up hill. We went through bamboo forests and our guide hacked his way through the vegetation with his machete. There were prickly bits and stinging nettles but nothing got me too much.

When we got close tot the gorillas, we had to leave our hiking sticks and bags behind and only take our cameras. We had one hour and first we watched a mom and an 4 month old baby. Then we saw the rest of the group (18 of them in all) and they were breath taking. There were one set of baby twins, boys, who were cheeky and rambunctious. One of them stood up and did the cutesy little chest pound- and then promptly fell backwards into mum. This one time, Beth and I were standing off to the side with the gorillas in front and then from behind one comes bounding down the slope straight towards us. He wasn't coming to attack us or anything, just running down the hill, but man was I scared! We watched them interact, eat bamboo and bananas, play, grunt, climb...