My alarm woke me up at 2am this morning which to my surprise I was absolutely ok with me for once. The driver was supposed to show up at 3:15am but never came so Arthur had to track him down but was unsuccessful in reaching him. So instead he called a taxi. We had to be at the Serena at 3:45 to leave by 4:00 and by 3:50 Shawn and I are running down a dirt road that is the farthest thing from flat you have ever seen, in the dark to find this taxi. We decided it was good training for the Amazing Race though.
We arrived at the Serena at 4:10 just in time to jump in one of the Land Rovers and make the 3 hour drive to the volcanoes. There are no street lights up this mountain so the only light you have is from the cars. With our caravan of five Land Rovers heading up the mountain at 4:30 in the morning, life in Rwanda has already started. There sun has yet to awaken and yet the Rwandans are already headed down the mountain into town to sell their goods. Men, women, and children, some barefoot, some with babies on their backs, and all with loads of potatoes, beans, or other crops on their heads. They walk miles and miles from their remote villages to the city in hopes of selling theirs goods in order to make a few francs for the basic survival. They have no running water or electricity. They do not have the luxuries of a window in their mud huts or doors that separate their bedroom from their kitchen/living room. They do not even have a floor to walk on. They clean themselves with dirty water from streams nearby. Occasionally they will have a well they can pump clean water from. Yet this clean water for the Rwandans would make any westerner extremely sick. The few hundred people that we drove past in the darkness of the early morning have to make this trek back up the mountain to their villages later that evening. With only four hospitals in Rwanda there is a lack of health care and a lack of ambulances. This being said my next sight was heartbreaking. It was four people carrying a sick person on a homemade stretcher. They were not carrying this person down the mountain, but rather up the mountain. Sometimes it can take a person two, three, or even four days to walk to the nearest hospital. Many times there are people that do not have the family members or friends to carry them and they therefore have to walk. Could you imagine being extremely sick and having to walk a day or even four days to see the doctor? Or being a mother walking with your sick child or infant to see the doctor, not being able to heal them of their pain? And yet the push on and do what they have to do because there is no other way. A man in our SUV was telling us that on separate occasions he came across two sick people on the human ambulance, if you will, and made his driver pull over and put the sick people in his van and drove them to the hospital. It is in situations like theses that you see the love between people. Had we not been smashed into our SUV’s like sardines, we too would have taken that person to the doctor.
As we continued our drive the sun finally began to rise. I don’t think I have ever seen the sunrise as beautiful as it was here. It was an incredible sight. The red, orange, yellow, and even purple rays of light dancing across the sky as God awakens his people with a beautiful symphony. You cannot help but praise him at a time like that. To see God’s ultimate imagination and creativity at work is a true blessing. It is in this brief moment that we are connected with God in a way that only you and Him can experience together. It is as though He is showing you a window into His heavenly kingdom and giving you hope and excitement of a world that awaits us when our time here is done.
We finally arrived at the base camp to the volcanoes. We signed our lives away and wrote down our next of kin, and then were broke up into two groups of eight and one group of five. My group of eight was a great group. I had the CEO of Relevant Magazine who is here covering the PEACE Plan, a newly wed couple that is now living in Rwanda for the next year and a half doing God’s work, a woman from Iceland that came here by herself to see the gorillas, and the rest of the group was from Church. We had an orientation with our two guides where they explained that we needed to maintain a safe distance of seven meters from the gorillas and there is no flash photography, food, or drinks allowed near the gorillas. In fact as we got near them we had to leave everything except our cameras to go see them. Once orientation was over we hopped in our Land Rover and drove about forty minutes to the base of the volcano. The reason for the forty minute drive is because on the dirt roads you have to drive slow and what would normally take fifteen minutes on a smooth road takes at least twice that long on these dirt roads. We made it to the base just in time as most of us in the car were starting to experience motion sickness from all the rocking back and forth and bouncing up and down. Once we arrived we were met by a group of porters. They will come with you if you request them and either carry your bag or help you hike through the jungle. We were told that once they had to carry a 300 pound woman to see the gorillas because she was too big to walk, they help an 83 woman get up there, and another time they helped a blind man walk through the jungle to “see” them as well. They handed us walking sticks that were hand made and even had little gorillas carved into the tops, and we started our journey.
It began with a long walk through various potato fields. We were welcomed by excited children running through the crops waving excitedly and using their little English to say “Good Morning” to us. We finally arrived at a wood chopping station, this is where they chop down trees and cut the extremely large and thick wood logs into smaller pieces to sell. It is a very tedious process that is done by placing a large log on top of a wood stand, while one person stands on top of the log sawing through it while another person stands underneath the log and helps pull the saw through. At this station we were met by two soldiers carrying AK47’s. They will be joining us for protection from leopards, elephants, or any other large animal that we may encounter, as well as for poachers. Since the gorillas are extremely endangered and the poachers are very prevalent the soldiers will shoot to kill the poachers on the spot if necessary. Which makes for an exciting day of hiking through the jungle. We started up the volcano and when I say we hiked through the jungle, that is exactly what we did. There was no nicely paved trail or open path that we walked through, no, one of our guides carried a machete and he would chop through the brush when necessary for us to go through. There is also this lovely little demon plant called “Stinging Neddles”, let me just tell you, we got along great! I took the first hit for them team when I backed up into one and the little pricker came straight through my jeans and stabbed me in the back of the leg. It is like a cactus needle, but called a neddle, and it stings like bee. If you have ever been stung before then you understand my pain. It takes about five to ten minutes for the pain to subside and then you only feel it every once and a while. As we trekked, others in the group were hit by the little demon plant as well. I even managed to almost fall face first into one on the way back down after sliding in the mud, but by the grace of God I caught myself and only stuck my hand in it. I wanted to cry. My middle finger got stuck with about six of them and it swelled and had little white bumps all over it. I thought it was an appropriate finger to sting based upon my feelings for this evil little plant.
Thankfully it was not raining on our hike because there was enough mud to begin with and many people in our group were slipping and falling down left and right. It was so beautiful and tranquil in the jungle. The trees are incredible. They are the kind of trees that you will only find in Africa. As we trek along I am once again reminded of God’s astonishing handiwork. The view of the town below is one that you usually only see from an airplane. As seeing as how we hiked to an elevation of over 9,000 feet we were almost to cruising altitude.
We finally caught up to the trekkers, the guys that search the jungle before the groups go up in an effort to find the gorillas location, and then they radio the guides their location. Once there we were instructed to leave everything but our cameras, money, passports, and any other article of value behind. We walked to a clearing and there they were! Our family consisted of Charles the silverback, his three wives, and his four children. Apparently Charles skipped over the part where God said man should only have one wife, but none the less he feels he has something to prove to the other gorillas in the region. Charles was lounging in the sun while two of the babies chased each other around in circles and then started wrestling with each other. One of the babies was with its mama just hanging out in the brush and the other baby, affectionately named “Nakebazo” , which means “No Problem” in Kinyarwanda, was climbing in a little tree. Our guide said we were lucky because not only was the whole family together, but they were in an open space where we could see them and they were actually interacting with each other. They were extraordinary! Every once awhile they would stand up and bang on their chest and make gorilla noises and the guides would make this gorilla noise to them telling them that we are friends. They would run around and stop and almost pose for us. One of the babies even decided to sit and pick his teeth for us. We were so close to them. Seeing a gorilla in the wild as opposed to the zoo behind a glass wall is so different. They just seem so friendly you just want to lay down with them and cuddle them. After about thirty minutes or so they decided to leave and search for more food. So we followed them up the mountain a little more and watched them play and eat. When one of the mothers started leaving a baby jumped on her back and they took off together. We even walked past a baby who was separated from the group and it was sitting there crying for its mother. It was so sweet. We were only allowed to spend an hour with them and then we had to leave, so I took over 200 pictures of them and we started back down the volcano. The really cool thing about being on a volcano is that you can see the top of it from where we were. Although it is a dormant volcano I was still willing to hike three more hours up to the top of it to see it.
The hike down, although faster as it only took about a hour, was just as slippery if even more since we were descending a steep mountain. Even more people we slipping and falling, I have to admit I was excited about the fact that I was the only person not to fall, until Shawn reminded me that pride comes before the fall and then I slipped. I tried to not to completely hit the ground so I popped right back up but it was still funny. It was the second slip that I was almost taken out by the demon plant and then I made sure not to slip again.
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