You haven’t truly experienced the African jungles if you haven’t gotten stung and pricked by random jungle plants, latched on by and bitten by evil ants (more than once), had an appearance of a machete, a buffalo soldier in your group carrying a gun to protect you all while finding gorillas. ALLL of these things happened to me today. 

My morning started off at 4am. My tour driver picked me up at that time to drive me to Kinigi in the northwest of Rwanda. It hosts the Volcano National Park. I went gorilla trekking!! What an interesting adventure. First of all at the briefing they group you based on your fitness level and age. You’re assigned a park ranger and porters with your group who will take you to your starting point of the family of gorillas you’ve been assigned to go see. Then you start your hike into the jungle to find the gorillas. The ranger is in contact with an actual human gorilla tracker who already started their morning tracking the family for you to hike too. Gorillas move their nest everyday so they are never in the same spot. A “buffalo soldier” is what they call them, followed us with a gun just incase we encounter any buffalo or elephants as they are not friendly here. They do not shoot at the animals, they use the gun to just scare them away if we encountered them.  When we entered the jungle we were warned about prickly plants and biting ants. All of which were very hard to avoid… I had an ant latch onto me under my gaiter. I thought it was a thorn stuck in my ankle. As i lifted it up there was an ant latch onto my skin continuously biting me!! As we trekked, we were told the gorillas moved away from our planned path and so we had to divert and create a whole new path in the jungle, travel across a ravine to go find this specific gorilla family. We climbed over and under trees and trekked through lots of vegetation. Our ranger and porters straight up pulled out machetes and started chopping down vegetation for a new path for us to follow…. Don’t see that everyday… after about 2 hours of trekking we found our family of gorillas!! They don’t look real. They look fake when you first encounter one. The ranger and tracker made gorilla noises to let the gorillas know we are friendly. The gorillas made the friendly sound back welcoming us into their environment! We got to sit with the gorillas for an hour. We can’t touch them but they can come near us. We met the King of the family, a silver back, a mom and a baby! They got so close to us and moved around us. They were gentle giants. Through out this adventure today, I got pricked by random jungle plants, bitten by ants, trekked through the unknown jungle, while rangers and porters handled machetes and another had a gun to protect us while trying to find gorillas. Truly another type of experience with my time here in East Africa.