Hair streaming behind me, dust stinging my eyes from oncoming vehicles, I held on to the boda-boda driver’s shoulders, my large backpack precariously balanced on the motorbike’s handlebars. As we negotiated the bumpy dirt road, children ran out waving and shouting from the surrounding villages “Mzungu, mzungu (white person, white person), hullo mzungu.”
The 13km ride from Kisoro to Mgahinga National Park in southern Uganda left my legs wobbly, my heart racing and a multitude of promises to myself to find alternate transport on the return route. In retrospect the bizarre transport seemed in keeping with the eccentricity of Africa where exposing knees is considered more scandalous than exposing breasts, where men hold hands in lingering grasps reminiscent of lovers’ clasps, where to throw away means literally to throw down wherever you are and where grocery shopping is done through train and bus windows.
It had taken me two and a half weeks to travel north from Namibia, through Zambia. The voyage included a journey up Lake Tanganyika to Kigoma in northern Tanzania on the hundred-year-old Liemba ferry, where the cockroaches in the second class cabins warranted a fear factor episode of their own. Not far off in the town of Ujiji Livingstone had met Stanley in their historic well-documented encounter. I thought about Livingstone’s heart buried in Africa while his bearers rushed his heartless body to Bagamoyo and back across the seas to Westminster Abbey. I wondered what he would have thought of the two new ‘C’s’ in Africa. It was no longer Christianity and commerce but Celtel and Coca Cola that had spread through Africa like wildfire.
I was headed to the green throbbing heart of Africa to luxuriate in the green energy of the Ugandan forests. I began in the south where the three dormant volcanoes of Mgahinga National Park border the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and decided to hike up the 3474m Gahinga Mountain. The name ‘gahinga’ and ‘mgahinga’ meaning pile of stones, refer to the piles of volcanic rock that the local people, the Bafumbira, create when clearing their land for cultivation.
Starting off in the crisp morning, walking over fresh buffalo tracks and moist dung, we trudged uphill through regenerative and bamboo forest. While I was panting madly, my nose streaming, sweating profusely and clinging onto my bamboo walking stick, the ranger guide David Rwahamuhanda (meaning ‘born on the way’) and law enforcement ranger Jerom Taremwa, the rear guard with his AK47, hadn’t yet built up a sweat. When we neared the base of the mountain, David turned to me and said “This is where the real climbing begins.” Ruwenzori turacos chrrrrrd and flew across the path, flashing striking deep red wings, and golden monkeys called from the distance. The bamboo forest, providing the delicacy of fresh bamboo shoots favoured by the endangered and critically endangered endemics, the golden monkeys and mountain gorillas, transformed into afromontane forest. While I was wondering why people climbed mountains, thinking that ‘because they are there’ is a totally feeble and deficient answer, the vegetation changed once more, like bright stones swivelled in the mountain gods’ kaleidoscope, and the afro-alpine vegetation of giant lobelias and senecios appeared, with old man’s beard hanging down from the trees. I stumbled up to the top, dreaming of giant turacos arriving to lift me up and carry me away, to see the crater swamp surrounded by alpine vegetation with a mist blowing in on an icy Rwandan wind.
Mgahinga Gorilla National Park, Uganda’s smallest, forms part of the Virunga Conservation Area, together with Rwanda’s Volcano and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga national parks, and consists of the three volcanoes - Mt. Muhavura at 4127m, Mt. Gahinga and Mt. Sabinyo at 3669m. Muhavura, the largest of the three, was active as recently as 150 years ago and is known as ‘the guide’, its glowing summit once visible to travellers for miles around. The volcanoes Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira on the DRC side of the mountain system are still active, erupting every few years. Local lore is rich with stories of the volcanoes and people still journey to the summits of the Ugandan mountains to offer sacrifices to appease the gods, or collect sacred water from the crater lake to ensure a flourishing crop or to treat specific ailments such as heart disease.
The small group of mountain gorillas in Mgahinga regularly cross over into Rwanda or DRC and are part of the last group of approximately 700 mountain gorillas left on the planet. The two forest blocks comprising Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the Virunga Forest provide the last refuge for these large primates that share 99.6% of the same DNA as humans.
In 1902 Captain Robert von Beringe was the first European to identify the mountain gorilla on the Sabinyo volcano in Mgahinga, the mountain gorilla thus classified as Gorilla beringei. The most popular places to view these powerful, gentle animals are Bwindi National Park and Rwanda’s Parc National de Volcans.
Mgahinga Gorilla National Park battles with illegal forest resource use as people enter the park to cut bamboo, firewood or take water; inadequate funding, farmers from the surrounding villages demanding compensation for crop raiding by buffalo and elephant; and livestock grazing on the DRC/Rwanda borders by cattle and goats.
As determined - and monitored - by the Park staff, bamboo can be cut by the local population in designated areas, beehives can be maintained, water drawn and medicinal plants harvested in a sustainable utilisation strategy.
The forests surrounding the Virungas were once joined and provided a natural corridor for the movement of animals. Human encroachment has now isolated each area, leaving the animal species to live and breed in small remote populations.
Descending the mountain, the path took us back down the rustic ladders, over the wet muddy earth, past red and black blackberries hanging alluringly in the trees, through bamboo forest and the smell of buffalo that hung in the air, an invisible curtain of smell.
The grey sky thundered as I had a bucket wash on the slimy wooden floor of a small open-roofed shack and ate a supper of potatoes and beans bubbling menacingly in a tomato gravy. I curled my stiff limbs into my sleeping bag and blew out the kerosene lamp.
Awakening with the birds and first light, the only available transport was once again a boda-boda. With my bag tied to the back this time, the straps dangling dangerously near the tyres, I held on, pushed close against the driver as he took a short cut through villages, dodging cows and goats, and passing the rich loamy soil ploughed into ridges with fresh green leaves that greeted the day. Women walked placidly with hoes over their shoulders, their long wraps catching the early morning sun, glowing orange, blue and pink, as we sped through the Ugandan morning.
