Results tagged “Gorillas” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Friend of Intelligent Travel, Molly Feltner, shares this story of sitting face-to-face with a silverback in Congo as one of the first tourists to visit Virunga National Park since tourism reopened in May.

For the first time in nearly two years--following the massacre of seven endangered mountain gorillas and months of occupation by rebel forces--Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is welcoming back tourists for gorilla trekking.

Up until a few months ago, Virunga National Park sat in the eye of a perfect storm of man-made calamities. Rebel fighting, refugee crises, unchecked poaching, and a forest-killing charcoal trade all took their toll and prevented visitors, and even park rangers, from seeing Virunga's most treasured assets: about 200 of world's last remaining 700 mountain gorillas. This past January, however, the main rebel leader was captured and his forces demobilized, allowing rangers to regain control of the area where the gorillas live and take the steps necessary to bring security and tourism back.

Maybe I'm brave or perhaps a fool, but I made up my mind months ago to be one of the very first tourists to go gorilla trekking in Congo once tourism opened. On three previous visits, I'd come to love this hauntingly beautiful but desperate country and wanted a good excuse to go back. So when Emmanuel de Merode, the Chief Warden of Virunga National Park, declared gorilla tourism open on May 7, I called my Congolese guide friend Kennedy Nari to make it happen. I'd seen gorillas before in Rwanda, but trekking in Congo felt like uncharted territory. After a 4:30 am wakeup call in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, my guide and I faced a 20-mile drive on a bone-rattling road that disintegrated from potholed tarmac to a freshly dug mud track where tree stumps and boulders had yet to be removed. We got stuck three times and at one point nearly caused a mini avalanche when we were forced to drive up a steep slope of broken lava rocks.

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and got the chance to experience a model sustainable hotel in Rwanda.

In my travels to various destinations in the developing world, I've often been disappointed by how some upscale resorts and hotels go out of their way to separate their businesses and guests from the local population. So I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, located in a farming community right outside Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.

Set on the slopes of the volcano Sabyinyo, this luxury lodge caters to well-heeled tourists coming to track the park's mountain gorillas and it supports some of the neediest members of the surrounding community. It's managed by Governors' Camp, which operates several high-end lodges and safari camps in East Africa, but is owned by SACOLA, an association of about 18,000 local Rwandans that is sponsored by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, African Wildlife Foundation, and USAID.

When guests stay at the lodge, $50 per person per night goes to SACOLA. Since the lodge opened in 2007, SACOLA has earned enough to build more than 1,200 houses for survivors of the Rwandan genocide and other needy families, and fund sustainable agriculture projects as well. Sabyinyo also employs locals--90 percent of the staff members are Rwandan--and most of the food and all of the flowers used on the property are grown by community members.

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and shares how one group found a sustainable solution to help the impoverished residents who live alongside Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park.

In Rwanda, conservationists have discovered that you can't protect species like mountain gorillas without also looking after the people who live around their habitat. And in the area around the gorillas' home, Volcanoes National Park, where there are nearly 600 people per square kilometer, the potential for human-wildlife conflict is particularly great. I learned about challenges and some of the possible solutions from former Volcanoes National Park Tourism Warden, Edwin Sabuhoro, whom I met while traveling in Rwanda. As it turns out, cultural tourism is a big part of the answer.

In 2004, Sabuhoro rescued a baby mountain gorilla from poachers who had killed several adult gorillas and where attempting to sell the baby on the black market. The baby survived but the two young poachers received life sentences in prison for their crime. After their conviction, Sabuhoro visited with the poachers' parents to find out why they did it. One of the boy's father said "If you were starving and couldn't feed your family, wouldn't you do something desperate to survive?"

Sabuhoro did further investigation into the lives of the nearly 500,000 poverty-stricken people who live around the park and found that the residents suffered as a result of their proximity to it--animals like Cape buffalo and elephants ate their crops and trampled their dwellings, and access to fresh water, firewood, and other resources was limited because it was illegal to harvest them from the park. The locals resented the park, and saw little reason to conserve it, so wildlife poaching and illegal harvesting of trees and other plants was rife.

Friend of IT Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and just came face-to-face with mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

I've witnessed cheetahs hunting gazelle in the Serengeti, spent hours watching monkeys play in the Amazon, and swam with wild dolphins off the coast of Brazil, but no wildlife experience I've had can compare to coming face-to-face with a 500-pound silverback mountain gorilla, an animal that shares about 98% of my DNA. I met Kurira, the leader of Susa group, a 38-member gorilla family, while trekking in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and found him to be a rather hospitable fellow. He didn't mind me or the seven other members of my gorilla trekking party wandering among his charges--he's been visited every day by tourists for years. After giving my group a good look over from a sunny patch of vegetation about 20 feet away, he stretched out on his back, arms folded behind his head, and let a baby crawl up on his big belly. The two played together for nearly 20 minutes.

Other gorillas gathered around us as we stood still. A big black-back male made a nest of leaves and settled in for a nap to my right. On my left a mother plucked and peeled wild celery, her twins playing nearby. After an hour, our guide signaled it was time to go--tourists only get one hour with the gorillas to limit the apes' exposure to human germs. It was a short time but the chance to see such rare creatures (there are only about 700 in the world) in so intimate a setting was well worth the $500 price tag and the effort of trekking up the volcano to find them.