To see the gorillas we had to trek for 3.5 hours up the mountain. Rwanda is very beautiful whenever we turned around.
The first section was from the road through farms. To keep the sheep from eating the crops they are muzzled.
This plant is grown to mark borders between fields and keep the animals out of the fields in the first place.
After an hour or so we began trudging through the jungle.
The first bit was alright with the bamboo forest. However with no bamboo shoots this time of year we were going up higher into stinging nettle. Gorillas really like stinging nettle.
It is covered in big spines to inject you.
Unlike the gorillas we do not like the stinging nettles.
It isn’t just the leaves the stems are covered as well.
But this does not stop the gorillas from building nests in it or eating it.
Here we are in a clearing after a couple hours of hiking.
It got quite a bit thicker in most of the jungle.
Eventually we climbed up 700 m vertical bringing us up to 3350 meters.
That gave Matt altitude sickness, but we still had drugs leftover from Peru so that was cleared up after a few minutes.
Then we reached the gorillas in the Pablo group. This group has 33 members, including 4 silverbacks and 13 babies, four of which were too young to have names.
It took us 2.5 hours to hike back down.
