The First Five Minutes With a Gorilla

You will have imagined this. Everyone does. Somewhere in the months between booking and going, you will have pictured yourself in the forest with a Gorilla, and the picture will be wrong, because the thing nobody manages to convey is how fast it happens and how little of it you control.

Here is what the first five minutes are actually like.

Minute one

 The guide stops. He has been moving ahead of you for two hours, cutting through vegetation with a panga, and now he simply stops and lifts one hand, and everyone behind him stops too.

You hear it before you see anything. A low rumble, somewhere ahead in the green, so deep it seems to come through the ground rather than the air. It is a contentment noise, a gorilla telling its family that everything is fine, and it is the first indication that the animals you have spent a year thinking about are twelve metres away and have been aware of you for some time.

Your heart does something complicated. Two hours of climbing have left you hot and out of breath, and now you are trying to be silent while your pulse is audible in your own ears.

Minute two

The guide moves a branch aside and there is a gap in the wall of vegetation, and through the gap is a silverback.

The size is the first thing. Photographs cannot do this, because photographs have no scale, and nothing in your ordinary life has prepared you for a primate the weight of two men sitting on the ground eight metres away. His shoulders are absurd. His hands, resting on his knees, are recognisably hands.

He looks at you. Not the group, you, briefly and without much interest, and then he goes back to pulling stems apart with his teeth. That glance takes perhaps a second and a half. People spend years describing it.

 Minute three

You realise you are not frightened.

This surprises almost everyone. You expected adrenaline and got something quieter and stranger instead, closer to the feeling of being allowed somewhere you should not be. The silverback is not tolerating you so much as ignoring you, and the difference matters, because ignoring you means he has assessed the situation and found nothing in it worth his attention.

Around him the family begins to resolve out of the green. A female with an infant on her back. A juvenile hanging from a branch by one arm, watching you with rather more curiosity than his father showed. Another somewhere behind, invisible, moving.

 Minute four

 The camera comes up, because it always does, and then something happens that catches people off guard.

You take four photographs, badly, of a dark animal in dark vegetation in bad light. And then you stop, and lower the camera, and you simply watch, because some part of you has worked out that you are inside a moment you will not be able to reconstruct from images and had better attend to properly.

This is usually the point at which people cry, or notice that they might. Not from sadness. From something more like recognition. The juvenile scratches his head with a hand exactly like yours. The mother adjusts the infant with a gesture you have seen a hundred women make on buses.

Minute five

The infant tumbles off a stem, rights itself, and looks around to see whether anyone noticed.

And you understand, in a way you did not before, that the word family is not a metaphor here. You are watching a small society with a politics and a history, in which everyone knows their position and their relationships, going about an ordinary Tuesday. The silverback shifts his weight and three of them adjust without appearing to look at him.

You have fifty-five minutes left. It will feel like ten.

Afterwards

The walk out is very quiet. Groups that talked their way up the mountain come down without saying much, and the guides, who have seen this several hundred times, know not to fill the silence.

What people say later, when they can say anything, is some version of the same sentence. They did not expect to feel recognised. They came to see an animal and came away from something closer to a meeting, and the difference between those two things is the reason a gorilla permit costs what it costs and the reason nobody who has done it describes the money as a problem afterwards.

The mountain gorilla is one of the only wild ape populations on earth whose numbers are rising, protected by rangers and veterinarians and a funding model that depends substantially on the permits visitors buy. The IUCN upgraded the species from critically endangered to endangered in 2018. Your hour is not separate from that. It is the mechanism.

The part that is up to you

Nobody can guarantee you a good encounter. The family may be feeding in thick vegetation. The rain may come. The trek may take five hours instead of two.

But a good deal of what makes this land properly is decided long before you fly. It is whether you have the right permits for the right forest, in a season that suits your fitness. It is a lodge close enough to the park that a four-thirty start is manageable rather than brutal. It is a guide who has done this for fifteen years and reads the forest rather than following it. It is having enough days that a hard trek does not wreck the rest of your trip. Our gorilla trekking journeys are built around exactly those variables, in both Uganda and Rwanda, because they are the ones that decide whether your five minutes are the ones described above.

Sixty minutes, once

 Here is the thing about that hour that people do not consider until afterwards. It is not repeatable. You cannot go back tomorrow. Permits are issued for a single hour with a single family on a single day, and when the ranger says time, you leave, and that is the entirety of your experience with wild mountain gorillas unless you buy another permit on another trip in another year.

Most people get one hour of this in their lifetime.

That is not a reason to hurry into booking. It is a reason not to arrange it carelessly, or cheaply, or in a rush at the end of a trip when you are already tired. One hour, once, deserves the version of the trip that gives it the best possible chance. Whenever you are ready to arrange yours properly, we would be glad to build it.