Reflections on Rwanda

 Thursday, August 29

Today is a long travel day, a good time to reflect on other aspects of our time in Rwanda.

Rwanda is, based on the past 5 days, a wonderful country. It is currently the end of the dry season, and the red clay hillsides are awaiting the rains for the next season of crops. While that means that the skies are hazy with dust, you’d never know it from looking at the roadsides or the areas in front of people’s houses. Not only is there no litter or trash, the roads and curbs are swept clean of fallen leaves, even in Kigali. 

While the genocide in Rwanda was 30 years ago, it figured frequently in the conversation with our driver/guide. He was very proud of what his country has become, that everyone is just Rwandan. 

The President is clearly focused on increasing that sense of community. The government philosophy is “worship as you like, love whom you like, play as you like, just don’t disturb your neighbors”. For example, nightclubs must have soundproofing to protect the adjacent properties. The government also has established a national monthly mandatory day of service.  Initially this day was spent collecting plastic bags; since they have been outlawed (an important thing for tourists to know!), other activities can be chosen at a local level. Examples are building a house for a poor family, or helping to repair a road, or planting in the new park areas. 

The ecotourism system around the national parks has become almost only a source of revenue and income for the local communities, but has engendered a real appreciation of conservation as a path to the future. In addition to fees from visitors, ecotourism has led to the creation of hundreds of jobs, and the improvement in local infrastructure. 

Once a year there is a formal ceremony to name (by proxy) every baby gorilla known to have been born in the preceding 12 months. Celebrities from around the world are invited to attend and to sponsor the naming of a particular baby gorilla. The event draws attendees from across Rwanda and beyond and is televised as a major event. 

Our driver/guide, in his time in the operations office of the Volcanoes park, initiated the practice of hiring former poachers to be trackers for the tourist treks. These were men hunting for bush meat to feed their families. They would hunt bushbuck antelope or buffalo, not gorillas or monkeys as there is a taboo against eating primates. They knew the forest better than anyone else. The income as trackers enables them to feed their families legally and to provide a higher standard of living. 

The farm fields around the Volcanoes Park  contain not only potatoes, but large meadows of white daisies— Pyrethrum— the oil of which is made into insecticide, pharmaceuticals and hand sanitizer. Each flower is hand-picked, dried in the sun, and then sold on for processing. The dried flowers are worth about $1 per pound. Formerly they were exported for processing, but are now processed in country. The products have become the #3 cash crop in the country after coffee and tea.  

There are also large groves of eucalyptus, which grows rapidly and is the most common wood for furniture and house building. We watched a team of men with enormous handsaws cutting planks from fallen trees. Many rural houses have vertical beams of eucalyptus, cross beams of bamboo, and mud filling. Others are built from local brick. 

Pictured: pyrethrum fields, sawmill, naming ceremony park

Final walk in Rwanda

 Wednesday August 28

We awoke to pouring rain today.  After breakfast we set out on a nature and birding walk near where we went gorilla trekking on Sunday. It was very misty, creating challenges for the photographer. The weather cleared later in the morning, and by 11:00 we could see some blue sky.  

The first part of the walk was through a section of former farmland that was brought back into the park 7 years ago. While grass and shrubs have recovered, the introduced clumps of bamboo have not thrived— because the project that planted them used lowland hybrid bamboo rather than the mountain strain that gorillas love to eat. It was sad to see such a large effort yield such poor results. We crossed into existing potato fields, and then back into the “old” part of the park. We were reminded of how hard the people work here; raising potatoes is hard work to being with, but these farmers have to have someone guarding the fields 24 hours a day to protect from daytime raids by golden monkeys and nighttime raids by buffalo and elephants.  Somehow these large animals get past the 4-foot high stone wall delineate park boundary. 

We basically followed wherever we heard bird calls, which took us past the same location where we first saw the gorillas on Sunday. They weren’t there today, but on our way back down we did see a golden monkey in the bamboo forest. We also saw a number of now familiar species, and a few new ones. 

Pictured: African Green Pigeon, looking across the new part of the park towards the potato fields, Rwenzori Batis, Albertine Boubou, Streaky Seedeater 

Gorillas 2– many pictures!

 Tuesday August 27

Today was our second gorilla trek. It was quite different from the first but equally as rewarding. We visited the Sigasira family. This family has 12 members. The silverback is one of two sons of Titus, a silverback made famous by Dian Fossey. 

The starting point for the trek was farther from the park office than our other trips. Then we walked up steep inclines through farm fields for about 45 minutes, stopping to catch our breath. It is amazing that farmers work these fields every day, including lugging 200+ pound bags of potatoes down from the fields, and then carrying the seed potatoes back up.  Once we entered the actual park, we hiked for another hour on narrow jungle paths to reach the family. We estimate that the start of the trek was about 7500 feet elevation, and that from the start to the gorillas was an elevation change of about 1400 feet. 

The gorillas were resting, eating and playing (depending on whether they were adults or infants) in an open glen with heavy underbrush. We could see 11 of the 12 family members: the silverback, three females with babies (ages 3 months, 8 months and 12 months), and 4 other juveniles. The group split up a bit in search of food and we followed where we could.  Our first attempt to follow them was stymied by the silverback, who decided to sit down right in the path we needed to take. Much bushwhacking ensued.

Our guide today (Epa) had previously been a tracker, and we learned a great deal about the interactions in gorilla families. He also taught us about the tracker’s duties. Trackers stay near “their” gorilla family for three months, watching them until they settle for the night and then finding them again next morning, regardless of whether that family is due for a tourist visit. They file reports every day about the health and wellbeing of the family members. During Covid, when tourism shut down, the trackers were still out there monitoring and protecting the gorillas (and quarantined from other people). Throughout the pandemic, no gorilla caught Covid.  The rule is still to mask near the gorillas and the monkeys, and the researchers have noticed a marked reduction in respiratory infections (a major cause of death in young gorillas). 

Epa also taught us the “happy sound” to reassure the silverback and the protective mothers that we were friendly. 

The hour passed all too quickly, and then it was time to clamber back down. There is a plan to convert the farmland through which we walked back into park habitat. On our way back to our lodge we drove through one of the “model villages” where farmers are being resettled with free housing and enough compensation to allow them to buy new farmland. In many cases the new housing and its running water and nearby modern school is a great improvement from their current homes, but of course leaving the land is hard. 

Pictured: silverback, mother with 8 month old feeding, 3 month old acting up, two views of babies riding on mom through the underbrush 

Golden Monkeys

Monday, August 26th

This morning we trekked for Golden Monkeys, an endemic species of which 2000 remain across Rwanda, Uganda and Congo. Golden Monkeys prefer a bamboo forest habitat. That is where we found them  after about an hour’s walk, half in farm fields and half in forest. As with gorillas, you are split into groups and each group is assigned a family. You can stay with the monkeys for an hour after you first encounter them.

Yesterday several groups found their monkeys in the harvested potato fields near the park boundary. The farmers leave some potatoes behind after the harvest, so that the monkeys have another source of food and do not bother the fields that have yet to be harvested. We were thankful that our assigned family was up in the forest, which seemed a more appropriate setting for them.

Our family, Abaqua (“feed us”) is one of the largest. During the twice yearly mating seasons the family may include 200 monkeys. The rest of the year, the adult males go to other areas and the females and young retain the home territory. We saw about 40 monkeys today. They were all around us, and were very serious about eating continually. Some were above our heads in the bamboo, others were on the ground carefully folding nettle leaves so they could eat them without being stung by the nettles.  Some of our colleagues were less lucky with the nettles! 

This afternoon we did some birding around the lodge, then travelled to a pair of lakes near the Ugandan border. There we walked along the shoreline looking for birds. While we didn’t see any new species at the lakes, it was a lovely way to spend the afternoon and early evening. Driving back after dark was a real adventure, as there are pedestrians everywhere and not a lot of light. 

Pictured: Golden monkeys, Stuhlmann’s Sunbird 

Gorillas!

 Sunday, August 25

We left the lodge at 6:40 this morning and went to the park headquarters. There we were assigned to groups of eight people each, and received a briefing  about the system of gorilla trekking in the park. Our group was led by Fidele, the same ranger who had taken us to Buhanga yesterday.

We learned that there are now over 1100 mountain gorillas across the Virunga Mountains in Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. In the Volcanoes Park there are estimated to be about 600, up from 200 in 1978. Ecotourism has been vital to the preservation of the landscape, the wildlife, and the local communities. There are 22 families in Volcanoes that have been habituated to human interaction, some for research and the others for tourism. Each tourism family is only visited for an hour at a time, twice in a week. 

Our designated family today (Sabyinyo) is one of the largest with 17 members including 2 silverbacks. It was also one of the first families to be habituated.  We started on the trail by about 8:15 but the trackers had set out about three hours earlier. At the time we started walking, the trackers had not yet located the family. We were extremely lucky that our family was only an hour’s hike away— some families go much higher up the mountain in search of water-containing plants as the dry season progresses.

We saw about 14 of the family members, including a mother with a tiny baby and two pairs of mating adults. The soundtrack to the latter activity was pretty amazing. The family seemed unconcerned by our presence, walking around us and in one case “through” our observation line.  We had to lean back and hold our breath to get out of their way.  Two gorillas brushed against Katharine’s pants leg and gently shoved the next person over a bit to get through. The one exception was the baby’s mother, who kept her treasure hidden behind or beneath her much of the time.  At various points in our hour with them, the gorillas meandered to new locations, and we followed, ducking through bamboo tunnels and clambering over vines and other underbrush. While humans are told to stay 5 meters away from the gorillas, most of our visit was from a distance of about 1.5 meters, by the gorillas’ choice. 

Arriving in Rwanda

 Thursday August 22

We got off to a roaring start, sitting on the tarmac for two hours and then being told the flight was cancelled.  But they served us lunch before we disembarked— and had to watch the safety video before they could feed us. It was certainly odd to eat a meal on an airplane sitting on the tarmac in the repair part of the airport. The airline rebooked us on the next flight out, and NatHab arranged a later flight from Nairobi to Kigali…. But then, after 4 hours on the tarmac, the problem was solved and we took off 5 hours late but in time to make our original flight to Kigali! We were somewhat ironically grateful for our original 6.5 hour layover in Kigali, but a little concerned to be told that we didn’t have to change planes because they had found “an acceptable alternative to the broken satellite system”. 

Then the flight to Kigali was delayed by late arriving aircraft, and then that aircraft developed air conditioning problems (Kevin suggested we just open a window while we flew), so in the end we arrived in Kigali 90 minutes late having eaten far too few meals in the 30 hours we’d been traveling. 

Saturday August 24

This morning we drove from Kigali to Kinigi, the location of the park office for Volcanoes National Park and of our lodge for the next four nights.  We knew that the northern province of Rwanda was mountainous but we had not expected how very hilly and steep much of the central province is as well. The drive from Kigali was on beautifully kept roads, but with a single lane each way and many switchbacks, the rate of progress depended a lot on how many trucks were in front of us.  There are many scooters and bicycles, including as taxis (if the back rack of a bicycle has a cushion on it, it’s a taxi). 

Amokoro Songa Lodge is beautiful with extensive grounds and gardens. We spent the early afternoon birding around the lodge where all the flowering plants were an attraction. Later in the afternoon we went for a walk in a local park, ostensibly for birding but also just to explore an interesting location.  Buhanga Eco Park is based on land used for coronation ceremonies for the kings of Rwanda, dating back perhaps to the 11th century. In the early 2000s, a local business man bought the land and started installing stone walkways, platforms and even creating the location for the swimming pool of his planned hotel. The government decided that the location had too much significance, paid him off and added the park to the Volcanoes portfolio. It was surely interesting to walk on paved (volcanic cobblestone) walkways in what was otherwise jungle. 

Pictured: bronze sunbird, a bicycle taxi, a statue welcoming us to the northern province.