We went to see the Mountain Gorillas! This was our big splurge for this trip. To do the gorilla trek you have to get a permit. They limit the trekking to 80 people per day and no more than 8 people in a group. Luckily for us Roadtrip Uganda purchased the permits for us for our trek. The cost of the permit was $550.00 for each of us plus Roadtrip charged a service fee of $25.00 for each permit.
To get to the gorillas we left Queen Elizabeth National Park in the morning. We took a wrong turn in a small town. We ended up going on a longer back road. Some of these towns do not have very good signs. But we made it to where we needed to go. This is what many of the small towns look like in Uganda.
To get to where we needed to go we had to drive up into the mountains.
We saw lots of clear cutting and it was all being done by hand.
Looking at the boards on the truck you can see they are not uniform they are all different.
It was quite the drive on the winding dirt roads to get to our lodge. We stayed at the Gorilla Valley Lodge.
It sits on top on a mountain and has a fantastic view of the area. The food was very good there too!
The next morning we woke up had breakfast and were off to our briefing for the gorilla trek.
There were lots of men standing around hoping that they would be hired as a porter for the trek. We had already decided that we would hire 2 men. Being a porter is how a lot of these men provide for their families. The trek to find the gorillas was very difficult for us. We were at high altitude. There was not a path or trail. We were trekking on very deep and slippery vegetation and it was hot! We were not in the best of shape, so it made it even more difficult for us. We trekked about 2 hours before we found the gorillas. Even with the help from our porters once we did find the gorillas Drew had to lay down for about 20 minutes. He felt terrible! We were only allowed to stay 1 hour to observe the gorillas. It was very difficult to get photographs of the gorillas, because there was lots of vegetation around them, it was dark under the canopy, and the large silverbacks were not moving much, they were mostly napping.
These are our Angels, I mean our porters. They helped us so much on the trek! We bought 2 box lunches from our lodge for the trek. The lunches were really big. We didn’t feel like eating anything, so we gave the lunches to our porters. They were very appreciative! When the trek was over we gave our porters double the normal tip, because we would not have made it without them.
When we were finished we both received a beautiful certificate!
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