The Big Magilah: Part II (8/6)

As James Brown’s “I Feel Good” startlingly awoke us from our slumber at 6am, we began to doubt the wisdom of a second day of gorilla tracking. After all, how could we possibly top our 65 minutes with the Hirwa. Then, when we heard that our family, the Kwitonda, were but a 20 minute hike from the starting point, and met our fellow groupies, including an overly loquacious and inquisitive Lebanese development consultant and an elderly woman of unknown origin who warned that she didn’t think she could handle the hike and forgot her asthma medicine, we were convinced that we should have spent the day with the Golden Monkeys.

Boy, were we wrong. After a long and bumpy Land Cruiser ride and a short, easy hike through a not-so-thick forest, we encountered the first of the 21 gorillas, calmly munching on a vine in the shade. Within seconds, the alpha male and oldest of four Silverbacks, Kwitonda (meaning Humble), ambled nearby to greet us. For the next hour, we wandered among the 35-year-old Kwitonda’s flock (apparently the other Silverbacks and most of the females were his offspring). They led us through the forest, over a stone fence, to an open wooded area, where they climbed and gnawed on trees and groomed each other. The babies nursed or clung to their moms, a Silverback did a Dick Cheney imitation, juveniles wrestled and rolled, and Anne captured Kwitonda chasing one aggressive, Jewish amateur photographer.

Unlike the previous day, where the trekking was tedious and the viewings quick as D-Rose and obstructed like the cheap seats at Wrigley, the Kwitonda group smiled, nurtured, climbed, prayed, prowled, growled, groomed, and grunted almost on cue. Photographing and filming them was as easy and visually pleasing as a Victoria’s Secret shoot. Kwitonda, in particular, seemed quite at ease with the camera, as he lay on his stomach, his grand head perched on his elbow, and calmly observed the gaggle of homo sapiens casting about. If yesterday’s 65 minutes felt like 20, today’s 63 passed like nanoseconds. We just couldn’t get enough of our ancestors, and hope to be invited back to a family reunion some day.

We lunched in Musanze on our way back to Kigali, stopping along the way for a few photo ops (at a pygmy village, a 7^th Day Adventist gathering, and a Primus-signed bar), and haggling over a couple of scarves at a small arts and crafts market. As we drove along the Musanze-to-Kigale “highway,” we were struck by the amount of pedestrian traffic. A quick census indicated that we passed 40 humans for every car—a cornucopia of humanity, from children rushing the road to wave and say “Good Afternoon” to 6 year-olds carrying two big water jugs up the hill, to women with all matter of objects on their heads to men just hanging out.

We said goodbye to Alex at the Chez Lando hotel overlooking the city, a great location, but a real dump of a lodging, where we hoped to catch 4 hours of sleep before heading to our 3am flight to Nairobi. The lack of A/C and presence of mosquito netting in the room were not encouraging, nor conducive to slumber. More disturbingly, there was enough mold in the bathroom to supply a wheel of Limburger and a quart of penicillin, and the darkness of the outdoor dining area was a welcome blessing, assuming the food looked no better than it tasted.