"When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future." ~Dian Fossey

Musanze - what a beautiful escape from the harshness and clouded Kigali! We took Friday off from work to begin a three-day adventure to the north, in search of relaxation, solitude, some village scenes and gorillas! You have no idea how happy I was from the early morning hours when the breakfast table was set with the delicious fruit salad which I have been blessed to have only three times so far! What a welcomed change from the daily bread - the bread varieties always remind me of Bubba in Forrest Gump and all his shrimp varieties! LOL I mean how many ways can you have bread served before it sadly becomes a bit dull....the little joys we find here in fruit, flat land and hot water ;-)

Charlotte and I arrived in Musanze in the early afternoon and knew immediately how lovely this town already was. As a base community from which many people begin their gorilla treks, they are seemingly used to tourists around, so the infamous "muzungu" wasn't shouted at us nearly as often. After meeting with the tour company through which we were planning a community visit, we decided the walk would be best for Saturday. So for the afternoon we planned a short excursion on our own to Mukamiira - a less-frequented village 30 minutes away in which a small but tranquil lake would be our destination for some reading and journaling. But first, LUNCH! I must say it is so great to travel with someone who enjoys eating the local food as much as I do! We found the Green Garden buffet just off the main road and had such peace enjoying our lunch in their small garden area behind the building. From here, taking in the scenes around us, we spotted an oddly shaped figure in the hills off in the distance. As we starred at it, we soon realized it was a person...but this man towered over the few buildings surrounding him. Thus, we aptly named him, the Musanze Giant :-) Our story of this man involves some injustice he faced due to his towering figure and thus he was ostracized to this mountain to overlook the community for eternity....and somehow, the moral of the story will involve the community embracing him when he saves the town from a landslide, likely to be caused by some earthquake...So that is about as creative as we could get.... :-) But I am telling you, this "giant" continued to interest me and if I had had the time, I surely would have tried to find a path up this hill to speak to him myself!

After lunch we checked into this lovely guesthouse where a woman has opened the front part of her property as a guesthouse and rents out the rooms separately. It boasted a peaceful porch from which we could view the "Musanze giant" and take in the serenity of this town. After settling in, we caught our afternoon bus to Mukamiira. The bus ride was really so beautiful The mountains from the Volcano Park were so prominent all around the town. The clouds softly hiding the peaks allowed for breathtaking views. It was a bit hazy in the distance, but I was unsure if it was due to pollution or the natural clouds for this time of year. At any rate, as we stepped off the bus we soon realized that the town certainly is not as accustomed to tourists as the "muzungu" shouting and the following soon began. We thoroughly enjoyed the walk as we watched the locals at a couple different watering stations and could see more closely the plots of land being cultivated with cassava, maize and bananas, to name a few. It was so picturesque as a handful of children followed behind, laughing and smiling while a man biked by packing a load of bananas and woman passed balancing insanely heavy bags of what I could only guess were potatoes of sorts on her head. We reached the turn off to head towards the lake and it was soon apparent that we were now the the main attraction. As we made our way down the narrow dirt trail, we were leading a train of one older woman and three girls which soon became quite a group of people. The views of this small lake in the late afternoon sun were really calming, but the masses of people following us was a bit unnerving. We decided to stop and sit on a small grass hill near the shore of the lake and watched a teenage boy put out a fishing net along the shore, carefully untangling and dropping it just-right along the bank. But around us, teenage boys were everywhere! At one point, I counted 21 people who were watching us. And it wasn't as though they were watching from a distance - no, there were many sitting all around, with four right in front of us, laying on the ground with the chins propped on their hands, starring at us as though we were an exhibit in the zoo.....it was really quite annoying. I put on my bug repellent and one boy tried to lean over and smell me while another I found leaning over my shoulder as I tried to write in my journal. Trying not to be rude, I asked the crowd to back away and they did, but the lake soon lost its appeal since we could not be left alone, so we headed back to the path and on to Musanze. Even with the disturbance, overall we had a really nice time just being out and about, taking in the fresh air all around us. Back in Musanze we hit up the outdoor market to buy our fruit for dinner - pineapple, bananas, avocado, maracuja, and passion fruit.

Saturday we woke around 6:30 for another peaceful morning sitting on the front porch, drinking some Rwanda black tea, listening to man singing off in the distance, the birds whistling their tunes and soon watching a new rain cloud move through. The rain started just as we were enjoying our breakfast of banana, maracuja and bread with butter & peanut butter and banana and peanut butter, which I must say have made me a bit nostalgic. With the rain falling, the temperature quickly dropped as it seems to do here, fluctuating 10 degrees or more between every time a short rain comes through and the sun chooses to shine.

We met our guide, John, and he led us through the streets to these roads heading down to a village at the base of these mountains. To walk down, past women and children living in their real homes, going about daily life was a fresh pace for both of us. It seems getting out of the main roads allows my soul to connect with something almost bigger than myself. We were told how they will be already making the trek to town at 5am with baskets full of things to sell, so those walking back that we saw, with empty baskets, were complete with round one. Many times we were joined by trails of children again - always walking on your heels making navigating down a narrow rocky dirt path a bit challenging for my clumsy self. They really are okay in spurts, but I find the constant following and touching a bit much at times. We find ourselves constantly balancing personal space with natural curiosity - something I doubt I will master before I leave here....I really do wonder if there will be a time where "muzungu" is no longer hollered and the children may not follow strangers to the edges of their villages...so we walked through so many banana fields and made it to the base of the hills where women were cultivating the land. There was his hazy fog just gently embracing the hills around us. And every so often clouds of smoke rising from the hills were they were burning fields or grasses. The silence and calm was so welcoming...we saw along the way evidence of the stages of banana beer making. The sorghum soaking in canvas bags in the river to turn them dark, the heaps of banana leaves under which the banana were fermenting, and the drying of the sorghum before they add it to the fermenting bananas. We also were able to see how they made containers woven out of banana leaves and cow dung to place in the trees for bees to capture their honey. The final destination was a basket weaving co-op. They were not really weaving that day but they did come to show us how they do it, wrapping one kind of grass around stands of another thinner type of grass. After the hour and a half walk there and the 30 minutes in the hot sun, we back up a main road - up, up, up back to Musanze. Another trip to the fruit market and lunch before we caught another bus up to Kinigi- our base before the gorilla trek on Sunday!

As we got off the bus in Kinigi, I was overwhelmed with the beauty all around. The mountains were sooo close, even with their distance. I felt so much excitement being there! We had to walk up a long hill, just about 1k, but it was up and up and for me, it was amazing. The mountains really surrounding us and the late afternoon sun behind the clouds was so beautiful. I snapped a couple photos of the sun hiding behind the clouds as the mountains prepared to welcome the setting sun. We walked with more children following behind us and Charlotte discovered the simply asking them to stop and go home actually works! We simply must remember this for next time! :-)

Once we finally found the guesthouse, relief set in so we could finally stop working so hard! The people working there seemed very sweet but the rooms were not as nice as we expected - I get the sense that most places can get by up there with the minimum since the gorillas are such a popular destination - they will get business anyway. As we were settling in, I heard very loud thunder all around, rolling through the mountains and the sky began to flash with lightning. The storm as it moved in was gorgeous - just as the sun was setting, there was nearly a straight line in the clouds separating the clear blue from the dark grey. The rain was falling so hard for most of the evening that the ceiling in our bathroom was actually leaking through the night. Back in our room, we used my swiss army knife to cut up our pineapple, which I must admit I did a fab job at, leaving only the base and the center core still standing :-) We shared a nice salad and some African Tea (like Chai tea) back in the restaurant, sitting around a hot fire, listening to the rain, and chatting with an interesting family from New Zealand. They had seen the gorillas that morning, so just listening to them talk about the experience really put me in the mood for the next day!

Sunday morning was a sign of great things to come when the rain was holding off but the skies were just overcast enough to keep the air nice and cool. After a quick early breakfast, we met our hired driver who took us to the ORTPN office to meet the guides and to be assigned to a group. It was crazy to see how many people were all around; some of whom had done treks in the past, others just as excited to have their first experience like me. My excitement was accompanies with some nerves, curious to which group I would be assigned and what family of gorillas we would be tracking. They say some came be found in as little as 20 minutes while others can take two hours or so. If you know me at all, I am sure you can guess I was really looking forward to one of the longer hikes - to really be able to experience the forest in which these amazing animals live! Well, I had 5 Australians in my group and two from Texas. We were going to be tracking the Hirwa family with 12 members, the youngest a baby of only six months! The silverback made his way to this family from two other mountains, surviving as he battled for space in two other groups before he found this one. Their names means Good Luck.....

Since Charlotte was hiking the Dian Fossey tomb trail, she used our driver and I joined a couple in my group and their driver to get to the trail head. The 30 minute drive took us to the base of the mountain where our guide explained all the rules about the hike and passed our our walking sticks. We began making our way through very large bamboo forests with a tracker in front using his machete to cut through the thick bamboo for us to squeeze through. We saw fresh antelope and buffalo prints in addition to elephant dung and prints - I still cannot believe an elephant fit through this dense area of the forest! I soon began to see how helpful the walking sticks really were as we worked our way up very steep mountain sides. I kept envisioning what it would be like when we see them - sitting amongst trees while we would kneel behind surrounding trees and watch them from a comfortable and clear distance - it was nothing of the sorts! We went up and up and up, for about 90 minutes until the trackers told our guide we would find them down the side of this mountain and across the valley below. So our ascent quickly turned to an extreme descent! We were standing at what seemed to be a cliff, but our head tracker began using his machete and cutting branches of trees on the side of the mountain on which we were challenged to find some decent footing, all the while slipping on the wet stalks and trying to hang on to the branches and roots above us. You shouldn't be surprised to know I did slip and fall a couple of times....but the fall was so weird because you're walking almost straight down, as if you were going down a ladder, do "falling" was more like me losing my footing, laughing so much as I held on to a branch above my head as my feet worked to find something to rest upon. We were all slipping around everywhere but the porters were so great at helping us all in our moments where balance left us. Not only was knowing that we would soon be near the gorillas keeping all of our spirits up, but the views were spectacular! It was something I had never seen before in my life! We really felt as though we were in the tops of the trees, looking out at the small hills of the countryside sprawling to one side, with the tall Volcano mountains to the other side, the tops of which were still covered in a soothing and calming grey mist...

About 45 minutes of this, we reached a clearing in the valley where we met up with the rest of the trackers and could see the silverback off in the distance, just resting and eating some grasses. After a short hike up the other hill, suddenly they were just right there in front of us! It was an awesome feeling to be near such impressive creatures and my nose tingled as my eyes watered. We saw the silverback resting mostly, but grooming another. The baby and another younger gorilla were gently playing with each other. Another female was off eating alone, with her body showing signs of being quite pregnant. There are 12 in the family, but I do not know that we even saw all of them. They moved around quite a lot and we had to keep walking at times to follow them to their new resting place. The total experience was one hour but it was well worth it! The one I was closest to just sat in front of me, maybe three yards away, just eating - but I was so thankful she was looking my direction so I could examine the roughness of her nose and the brown on her eyes and the wrinkles in her fingers. She was beautiful! The trackers kept making some noises to try and get the silverback to turn our way, but I don't think he was interested in our presence much at all :-) He kept to himself mostly. In fact, at one point, the mother of the young baby came out of the bushes somewhere and made some noises after which the baby got on her back and she led the way off to a new destination. Even though the majority of the time we were with them their backs were to us or they were slightly hidden behind other grasses, I was still able to capture a handful of videos and over 100 pictures - just snapping away to capture any moment possible :-)

As we began our walk back, the gorillas were moving in the same path we wanted to take, so there were a couple of times we had to wait for them to decide to get a move on before we could keep walking ourselves. During the entire journey back up the mountain, through my slipping and falling backwards, I was in my own world, just hanging on to the memories of the experience. I cannot believe I was actually able to do this one thing that I never really thought would be possible....it was such a surreal experience, but one I will be forever thankful to have had.