Gorilla Trekking in Bwindi

The morning starts cool and damp. You’ll be at the trailhead by eight, listening to a UWA ranger run through the rules of the next few hours: keep your voices low, keep seven metres between yourself and the gorillas, no flash, no eating in their sight. Then you walk into the forest, and the rules start to feel less like rules and more like a kind of respect.

Bwindi is older than almost any forest in Africa. The trees close above you within minutes. The trail isn’t really a trail — it’s a corridor that trackers have cleared with machetes that morning, following a family the rangers have been with since dawn. You’ll climb. You’ll slip. You’ll hold onto vines that turn out to be the wrong kind of vine. A porter (hire one — it supports a former poacher’s family and saves your knees) carries your bag and steadies you on the descents.

Then, often without warning, the radio comes alive and the lead ranger raises his hand. You leave your daypack at his feet and step forward quietly, and there they are. A silverback the size of a small car, eating wild celery with the absent-minded focus of someone making breakfast. A mother nursing. A juvenile turning somersaults in the leaves. You have exactly one hour. It goes quickly.

What to bring: long sleeves, long trousers, sturdy waterproof boots, gardening gloves for the stinging nettles, gaiters if you have them, a rain shell, and three litres of water. Bring more memory than you think you need on your camera, but spend at least ten minutes of the hour with the camera down.

Mountain gorillas were on the brink of extinction within living memory. They are not anymore — and the reason is gorilla tourism. Your permit pays the rangers, the trackers, the porters, and the communities around the park. It is one of the only places on earth where putting people in front of a wild animal has, demonstrably, saved that animal.