Kigali - Dressed from head to toe in camouflage, with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, the young soldier cuts an imposing figure as he emerges from the jungle. Two of his comrades follow him, offering reassuring smiles.
Like wellies and waterproofs, you really do need armed guards if you’re planning on trekking in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. It might look harmless enough, but this vertiginous jungle is a place with nettles sharp enough to sting elephants, bogs that can suck in a grown man’s legs and, most dangerously of all, highly aggressive buffalo, which can greet unwelcome visitors with a customary head-butt.
It’s also home to man’s closest living relative, the mountain gorilla, a critically endangered primate that shares 98 percent of its DNA with us. The park is the jewel in Rwanda’s crown precisely because of these creatures, whose portraits adorn the country’s bank notes, festoon its airport lounges, and appear on packets of tea and coffee, the principal exports.
Tracking gorillas is an experience that tops bucket lists, but before I snap up one of the 80 permits allocated daily to see the primates, I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the woman who helped save them from extinction.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Dian Fossey, a US zoologist who came here to study gorillas in the 1960s, and ended up staying until her murder almost two decades later.
“This is a pilgrimage,” explains my guide, Francois Bigirimana. “People walk this trail because they want to pay tribute to Fossey’s work and feel like they are part of it.”
A trained occupational therapist from San Francisco, Fossey left the US in 1963 to travel around East Africa. She blew her life savings in the process, but had found her calling. In 1966, she moved to the Congo to study the gorillas. But political unrest pushed her across the border into Rwanda in 1967, where she built a house and a ramshackle research centre. Everyone thought she was, well, a little crazy. “Local people called her Nyiramacibiri (woman who lives alone on the mountain),” says Bigirimana.
The route we’re following today is the one Fossey took twice a month to fetch supplies from Kinigi, the nearest village. It’s an arduous stomp and, as we climb the verdant foothills of Mount Karisimbi, the air becomes thinner and the mud thicker. Huge raindrops start falling from heavy clouds. I keep my head down, counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.
By the time we reach a clearing the storm has fizzled out. “The question is,” Bigirimana says, “who killed Fossey and why?”
It’s a poignant question given we’re standing on the spot where she was murdered on Boxing Day in 1985.
Back then, this mossy ground was occupied by her house (which, weirdly, she christened The Mausoleum), but all that remains are crumbling foundations and unsolved mysteries; still, nobody has been charged with her murder.
Bigirimana leads me through the undergrowth to her grave. “She wanted to be buried next to her favourite gorilla, Digit.”
Fossey’s campaign against poaching and other gorilla-endangering activities, such as forest clearing, earned her enemies. “Some people think she was killed by poachers,” he says. “But by the time she was murdered, poaching wasn’t really a problem.”
Other suspects range from gorilla-snatching zookeepers to fellow researchers jealous of her success.
One thing we do know is Fossey’s legacy lives on. The 18 years she spent studying gorillas inspired the government and locals to get behind conservation.
“At first, people didn’t like her – they thought she was denying them their rights to hunt and graze cattle in the forest,” says Bigirimana. “But over time she started employing people – porters, trackers, researchers – and they could see her methodology and started to like her.”
Rather than stymying her conservation work, Fossey’s murder marked a new era for gorilla protection. The small charity she set up to tackle poaching, the Digit Fund, blossomed into the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. Today it employs 120 people in nearby Musanze and has widened its conservation remit to include other species.
Hollywood played its part too, with the 1988 blockbuster, Gorillas in The Mist. “At the beginning there was just one voice,” says Bigirimana. “Then there were many.”
After the hike, my legs are jelly, but the next morning I’m back in the forest with Bigirimana, who worked as a porter for Fossey in the 1970s. He was with her when he saw his first gorilla and the experience inspired him to become a guide. What was she like, I ask him? “I think she liked gorillas more than humans,” he says. “But now the gorillas are increasing. Why? Because of Fossey.”
Bigirimana is taking me to see a gorilla family called Hirwa, who are grazing on bamboo shoots nearby. “When they eat 20 bamboo shoots it’s like one beer,” he laughs. “When they eat 100, it’s like whisky.”
Bigirimana is a showman, a sort of Rwandan Ace Ventura. During the trek he impersonates gorillas, grazes on various plants, and talks endlessly about the sexual habits of the primates. “Sometimes they have two or three wives for jiggy jiggy at a time,” he says.
There’s also a serious side to him. He talks passionately about the Rwandan government’s revenue-sharing scheme, which distributes 5 percent of the income raised through national parks to communities living near them.
“In other countries tourists pay and the money goes into (the government’s) pockets, but here it goes to the community.”
Eventually, we locate the gorillas, some of which are indeed the worse for wear from bamboo. We crouch quietly in the bushes and observe them grooming each other, play-fighting and snoozing. There are 19, including one giant silverback, who looks like he’s passed out, and two adorable twins, who crawl around chewing everything they see. The juveniles strut around, beating their chests.
I feel privileged to witness the tenderness shown by a mother to her baby and laugh out loud when an inebriated blackback tumbles out of a tree. “He’s so drunk,” Bigirimana sniggers.
I could watch them all day, but my hour, the fastest I have lived, is soon up. Bigirimana signals for us to leave and I walk away reluctantly, gazing over my shoulder until they are gorillas in the mist.
Gavin Haines, The Independent on Sunday
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE: Gavin Haines travelled with Tribes Travel (www.tribes.co.uk), which can arrange bespoke trips to Rwanda and Uganda. Tribes offers an eight-day Rwandan tour for £3 990 (R78 000), taking in Kigali, Lake Kivu, the Nyungwe Forest, and the Volcanoes National Park gorillas.
STAYING THERE: Mountain Gorilla View Lodge (www.3bhotels.com). Doubles from £167 (R3 331), half board.
MORE INFORMATION: www. rwandatourism.com