Capturing the Moment

  How do I describe the magical feeling you get when spending time with a family of mountain gorillas. It is a bit unnerving how human-like their facial expressions and actions are. They let us get, and stay very close, seemingly undeterred at the daily one hour visit from a small group of humans. The trekking groups are limited to six paying tourist, a guide, and a small entourage of porters. A group of armed trackers spend longer with the gorilla family, tracking their movements through the day and noting their nightly nesting places...making them much easier to find the next morning. The experience is pure magic. Knowing that we are the only tourist they will see all day makes the experience, and the cost of a permit, even more special.  Looking back at Mount Sabyinyo, where we trekked to find the gorillas   The gorillas living in the Virunga mountains were not even known to the international scientific community until 1902. Since then the gorillas have seen their habitat shrink due

   I have just wrapped up a big fly and drive safari around Kenya with a Rwandan gorillas adventure at the end. This was two and a half years in the making, as the covid pandemic postponed the original 2020 summer date. There was a time when it looked like even 2021 summer might be touch-and-go, but everyone stuck in there, jumped through a bunch of hoops, and made it happen. And in doing so, got the trip of their lives.     We spent eleven nights in Kenya, visiting five different parks. Then we spent three nights in Rwanda, but I'll touch on that more in the next post. Our experience in Kenya ranged from having our own private driver and safari landcruiser, nicknamed the 'Blue Rhino', to taking small bush planes into unpaved airstrips. We stayed in luxury tents, had coffee delivered to our rooms, shared a pool with warthogs, saw amazing stars and nocturnal animals on a night safari, fed giraffes, crossed the equator....twice, saw snow on Mt Kilimanjaro, watched countless s