Gorillas In The Mist (Saturday, May 16th)

I’ve never seen that movie, but today we saw live gorillas in the mist!
Kelsey and I woke up at 2am because it was raining so hard outside. I thought our little hotel was going to fall over. It didn’t but the roof did leak a little. We actually woke up at 5:15am. I was nervous all morning because today is the day we were going to go gorilla trekking. It was still rather dark out when we left the hotel. After checking in and meeting with our guides, we were off on the most bumping road I’ve ever been on. I got a video of it! There are 8 families of gorillas. Seven of us and one lady from Ireland, who had an awesome accent, were in a group. We had two guides, Oliver and Hop, one man with a machete who cut down the jungle that was in our way, and we had 4 army men to protect us if anything went wrong. We never saw the army men because they blended in the bushes so well and they surveyed the area around us to keep us safe. We walked about 20 minutes (10 was straight up hill) before we got into the actual park. I’m glad we had walking sticks! We got to the stone wall that we had to crawl over, and our guide went over some more basic details we needed to know. There are men who stay with the family of gorillas to protect them from poachers. Our guides were in contact with them to know where to go. We were told that trekking could take anywhere from 30minutes to 7 hours to even find the gorillas! Our guide was scaring us because he wouldn’t tell us how long. He said if we asked he would tell us 24hours! When we were suppose to be close to the family, the men who protected the gorillas would take our bags. About ten minutes had pasted and we met the men who took our bags. We were confused because we thought we had hours ahead of us. The guide tried to trick us by saying we still had another 2-4 hours left. After 30 seconds of walking we heard the guides start grunting to communicate with the gorillas!!!! We all got really excited because we were there so quick! The first one we saw was the big silverback (male leader of the group). Our family had the biggest silverback in the mountains! He weighed close to 500lbs, our guide said he looked like a hill. The family was in a very jungly part and we couldn’t really see that well. We were with them about 10mins and then we couldn’t see them. The guides led us to another stone wall to climb over, and this led to a large clearing outside the park. The whole family was in the clearing! We had a clear view of everyone. It was so awesome to be with them for an hour. I took around 150 pictures….I’ll have to delete some  After an hour, it was time to leave. Since we were in a clearing we just walked along the edge of a field for about 10mins and we were back to our truck! The whole thing took under 2 hours. I wish we could have hiked a little bit more to get there. I wanted to go for another hour because it was so pretty, and when are you in a jungle like that? Oh well, at least it was 7 hours!
The afternoon was a lot of waiting for the other group to finish! Close to 5 hours after we were done hiking, we were on the road to a town I don’t know the name of. We are staying in a hotel called paradise, and it is! Kelsey and I have a little cabin right next to the lake. It is so pretty here!!! We were sitting around a campfire and we had singers and traditional dancers come out of no where and start dancing for us. It was so cool! That experience made us feel like we were actually in Africa. I ordered the only thing I thought was “safe” off the menu (scrambled eggs) and we had dinner. I’m really missing my Mom’s cooking! Things are good here, but at the different restaurants you never really know what you are getting. Elizabeth ordered fish, and she got a whole fish with bones and all on her plate! Interesting….. Tonight we are resting and in the morning we get to sleep in so I am really excited!
Still have no voice, but I feel okay. The girls that I’m always with have learned to translate for me.  I try to speak what I want to ask, order, or whatever to them and then they relay the message.