The following blog was written by volunteer Julie Lovegrove who recently joined The Great Gorilla Project:
I recently spent two weeks in Uganda where I was involved in a volunteering project that included a couple of gorilla treks and a chimpanzee trek.
Our first task was to plant some trees with the Mgahinga Community Development Organisation. This organisation aims to help the local community to have better lives, and volunteers spend time teaching school children or helping with small building, agricultural, or reforestation projects. They can sit on the ground for hours with their legs stretched out and not leaning back against anything.
Seeing gorillas in the wild has been on my wish list for a while, and last month I ticked it off. This trek was in Mgahinga National Park and I was quite prepared to possibly trek for up to 6 hours to find them. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case and we only had to walk to where they were for under 2 hours.
There is only one habituated gorilla family in the park (habituated means used to humans) and it’s a family of 9. There are only 8 permits a day issued for a gorilla trek here and for a maximum of one hour to be spent with them. Face masks must be worn to protect them from human diseases and I came away with many images and the memory of one of them walking so close to me that it brushed my leg as I was standing there. Here are some of my favourite photos:
Whilst volunteering in Uganda, we also visited a pygmy tribe to learn about their history and way of life. I initially wondered how they felt about privileged white people descending on them, but the volunteer organisation makes a much needed monetary donation to them which they spend on things such as food, building materials, teacher's salaries, etc. I would have felt uncomfortable just going to impose our presence on them otherwise.
The pygmies are one of the oldest surviving indigenous tribes in Africa and were the first humans to live in the forest areas that are now Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Batwa were originally hunter-gatherers and the forests were their main source of food, shelter, and income. Sadly in the early 1990s, the Batwa were evicted from their ancestral lands to create national parks to protect biodiversity and promote mostly gorilla tourism. They were displaced without adequate compensation or resettlement and today many live in poverty and marginalisation.
One of our activities was a trek to observe chimpanzees in the wild. They travel far and fast but we were promised a 99% chance of seeing them. Needless to say, on our 2 hour walk we didn’t. I recorded our walk and was amused to see that we’d walked a 5k route that looked a bit like Africa with an extra stuck on the top!
Later that afternoon we heard that the chimpanzees had been spotted very close to the ranger station where we had started and ended our walk, so it was arranged that we could go back early the next morning before leaving the area.
The rangers went out early to track them, and sure enough after only 15 minutes, we found them high up in a fig tree. When I write ‘high up’, they were really high up, and our necks were nearly breaking looking at them! It was great to see them though and the young one below was amusing itself playing with a stick. He (or she) looks like a child pretending to shoot somebody! I was grateful for the long zoom lens on my camera but they were really difficult to photograph as they were often hidden in the leaves and constantly on the move.
For our second gorilla trek, we left our accommodation early in the morning and we had an amazing view of the mist in the valley as we climbed the mountain towards Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
There’s a reason Bwindi Impenetrable Forest has its name, and trekking there was extremely physically hard. The terrain meant that we were following in single file behind a ranger who was hacking his way through the foliage. Some very steep ups and downs, with some big steps needed, and also balancing on a log to cross a river! It was shallow, but fairly fast running with a section covered in giant ants that we had to hurry over (not so easy on a wet and slippery log!).
I wondered how we would ever manage to see the gorillas through the greenery, but when we found them the rangers were really good at hacking down the leaves near to us so that we could have a better view.
This little baby was practicing beating his chest which was very amusing to watch.
Climbing up a tree gave us a good clear sighting.
It was definitely worth the effort, and I can now tick ‘gorillas in the wild’ off my list. It was a great trip and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone considering combining a gorilla trek with some volunteering!
If Julie's experience at The Great Gorilla Project has inspired you, reach out to us today to learn more about this incredible project.
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