Luckily I also I had my trusty gorilla stick – carved by Innocent himself – to steady my tired body as we squelched along the rain-soaked track. I occasionally wiped out Innocent, my smiling porter who did his best to steady me while carrying my 10kg of heavy camera gear on his back. And then it was all over and we were back, slipping and sliding through the deep mud for the long trek back to the base of the mountains. We had only an hour to stare at the gorillas who seemed completely oblivious to our presence and even turned their backs on us at once stage. ![]() I was in awe and even more so when Vuba bent over a whole lot of branches and made a comfy seat for himself. It felt like we’d just stumbled across a band of furry aliens. All I could do was stare at the gorilla family in the mist, including a tiny curious baby who kept waddling towards us and a morose wet female who stared in misery, and quietly swear under my breath – ‘holy shit, holy shit, holy shit’. Vuba’s name means fast and although our guides repeatedly made small gorilla sounds ‘ah hmmm’ to reassure him, my heart was pounding a hundred miles an hour. We climbed through knee-deep mud in the wind, hail and freezing rain, though dense jungles dripping in vines, past bushes of fierce stinging nettle and under intensely bright hypericum bushes buzzing with African bees to meet a small furry family of gorillas, led by the silverback Vuba, a 21 year old male who beat his chest almost on cue as soon as we arrived. This was an assignment that I will never forget. ![]() The whole event, to commemorate the Dian Fossey Fund’s anniversary, was so surreal that I still can’t believe it happened. Little did I know that forty something years later, in March this year in fact, I would be fortunate enough to find myself climbing those very same high altitude mountains to photograph the mountain gorillas who live there and were part of Dian’s study group. The Virungas, as seen from Kinigi, rise in the distance ![]() I guess you could say it was my first introduction to wildlife conservation and the people who dedicated and risked their lives to protect wild animals. I must have been only a toddler when I first saw the magazine but there was something about this adventurous brave lady dressed in denim, living in the mountains of deepest darkest Africa with a gorilla hanging from her shoulders that struck a chord with me even then.įrom then on I was hooked on Dian Fossey and inhaled every book and article I could find about her and her gorillas. I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Dian Fossey and still remember the first ever Nat Geo cover of her with a gorilla. There she lived for 17 years deep in the jungle studying and monitoring the behaviour and movements of gorillas until her brutal unsolved murder in September 1985. It’s been fifty years since Dian Fossey began her ground-breaking work to study and protect gorillas in Rwanda high up in the misty Virunga mountains. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
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