When the boy gets an idea in his head, there is really no changing his focus.  Therefore, when he learned that the Susa family of gorillas was the farthest away and the biggest, his mind translated that to mean best and no other family would do.  [Ed. note: why come all this way to not make sure you visit with the best gorillas Rwanda has to offer?]  We ignored the warnings of an up to 7 hour hike, the signs from literally everyone we told in Rwanda about this hair brained plan with reactions of shock and concern, and we begged our driver to go early that morning to “fight for this group”… Which is how our lovely driver Theo took it upon himself to call around to Ruhengeri on Sunday and convince the trackers to go out specially and find the Susa family up the volcano.  Yes, even though it is now busy season, no one was trekking Susa that day…or week…or in fact no one was suspected to trek Susa for another month until all 80 gorilla permits were sold out and they needed to fill each group!  This also meant that the unlucky trio from London who just asked for a nice longer hike got grouped in with the two of us and had to endure the pain and suffering that lie ahead…

A quick recap from our round the world adventure in 2015: I don’t like to hike.  I especially don’t like to hike uphill.  And when the Boy ignores A and B, I tend to hit a stopping point and plop down allowing him to go ahead with the guide and see more of the things up, up and away while I wait at a still acceptable altitude and pine for when we are back down with a cold beer.   Recap #2: The Boy convinced me to first do this hiking madness with him years ago by bribing me with cold beers at the bottom.   I believe his track records of actually providing said beer is around 1 in 10…probably less…[Ed. Note: I call it motivation because you never know which hike will end in a beer!]

The problem with that life plan in Rwanda: the hike is 100% uphill and only stops when you find the gorillas, then it’s one hour of visiting and back downhill.  If you plop, you don’t find the gorillas you came so far to visit, plus the trackers with the very large rifle and machete have to stay with the group, so you are basically bait sitting along the trail.  Fine, so I’ll chug along, how hard can it be?  The first 30 minutes makes you think you’ll be fine.   After two 9-hour plane rides in the last 24 hours, it feels nice to move a little and the farmland you are crossing is relatively flat with happy children waving at you along the way. [Ed. note: relatively flat is relative. Compared to the mountain slope, yeah, it was pretty flat. Compared to something flat, it was quite uphill.] If you look up in front of you (instead of down like you’re supposed to because the fields are peppered with large rocks that want to trip you…), you may have given pause to the volcano peak looming surrounded by a thick jungle.   But you don’t, nor did you really think at all about where gorillas like to live and how the current 75 degree temperature might not suit them and the reason there are snow capped mountains in the world is because it is colder as you go up…

Heading into the jungle seemed innocent.  We walked about 50 feet through a bamboo forest which looked eerily similar to our friends’ back yard, so if it can sustain in Atlanta it really can’t be too bad!   Then we rounded a corner and the ground tilted.   This wasn’t a gentle roll of a hill, but rather a near vertical muddy slope we were expected to hoist ourselves up aided only by the bamboo shoots that snap in half at your touch.  I suddenly felt part of an Indiana Jones movie where you needed to solve the booby trap puzzle to encounter the treasure…and Indy was a wimp, I’ve seen all the films, his booby trap lasted 5 minutes tops and it took twice that to get up the first 400 feet…

So as we mentioned, the Boy was in a car accident a month before our trip.   No fault of his own, he was literally stopped at a red light and the large SUV driving 45 mph didn’t stop until his rear end made her Jeep…halfway into the intersection in fact.  The doctors warned us not to go, or at least to amend the activities, but the Boy is stubborn and nothing was standing in his way of the primate snuggles he planned for the past year. Unfortunately, we didn’t account for the hour and a half drive from the gorilla permit place to the start of our hike, so by the time we actually began the ascent up the mountain, all the pain medicine he had preemptively taken had worn off…and every step up jarred one or six of his herniated discs… Thankfully we hired porters so there wasn’t a backpack weighing him down along with this, but we were only half a kilometer up the hill and already had taken 2 breaks.   The long day was just getting longer…[Ed. Note: I am stubborn, and I was told I should look into cancelling the trip by both the Dr. and my PT guy.  It turns out medical professionals might know what they are talking about, because every step hurt – bad.  My legs were happy to move, my back not so much.  But as noted, I was going to find these gorillas.]

Truthfully, I have blanked on a lot of the details of this hike.   It was painful and I didn’t have an injury.   The altitude adjustment was challenging as we live not far above sea level and were climbing a mountain.   Oh, and it was a muddy rain forest jungle so my sure-footed self was missing as usual and I kept falling.   Again, thankfully we hired porters because while they lacked the turban to hoist me up, they did hold my hand for the greater portion of the the hike, both ways.   And for being farming people, his palm was surprisingly soft…

Three horrible uphill hours later, we came into a clearing and found several more trackers waiting for us…we had reached the Susa family!  At this point we dropped our hiking sticks, our porters and packs, and the armed guards, and proceeded towards the 13 members of the troop with only our cameras in hand.  We were lucky to find our gorilla family in a clearing instead of inside the jungle itself as we were able to move around them for photos and have unobstructed views.   [Ed. note: Amazing!]

It honestly wasn’t until a few days later when I was looking over the photos that I appreciated just how massive they were.   Part of this could have been that I had some solo time with a baby and he was around the size of my two year old niece (and probably just as destructive!).  The Boy however had no doubt about the actual size of these Silverbacks.   This family has 3 Silverbacks and we were hanging out with 2 of them: the main one who is 32 years old and #3 who is around 17.  When #3 was behind us, we decided to frame up a selfie, as any good American tourist must, and after we snapped the photo with our backs foolishly towards this giant beast, he was suddenly  on the move…towards us!  There was no time to react, let alone move out of his way, but not to worry, the Silverback solved that issue by shoving the Boy aside to make room! [Ed. note: gorillas are actually stronger than they look, and they look pretty strong.] It wasn’t quite the snuggle that my Boy had dreamed of, but his hip does have a beautiful bruise left behind as a souvenir…