[Author Note: OK, this series is going to be four parts, not the originally-promised three. Suck it up.]
In the morning, we left the lodge for Virunga National Park’s northern reaches. Our
destination was the Bukima campsite at the foot of the mountains the endangered
mountain gorillas made home. By the light of day, we were permitted to ride the
rear of the giant armored truck.
If you’ve
ever wondered what it’s like to be a celebrity, I recommend being white and
riding through remote Congolese villages. People dropped everything. At first,
we passed the simple, single-story lodges that housed the park rangers and
their families. Rangers were paid $170 dollars a month, some six times the
average wage in this part of the world, so these people were well-fed and
relatively content. They were happy to see us (All told, Susan and I were
injecting more than $3,000 into the local economy, including a whopping $400
each for a single hour with the gorillas). As we passed out of the ranger’s
camp, we were increasingly surrounded by villagers who relied on subsistence
farming. Their jobs were apparently to alternate between whacking the soil with
sticks and – judging from the incredible number of children we saw = breeding
wildly. The adults mostly eyed us sullenly, rich foreigners passing by. The
children, on the other hand, were wildly happy to see us. There is a move in
the Congo that every child over the age of four seems to have mastered: It’s a
vigorous Miss-America style wave, followed by a smooth upturn of the palm so
that the waving hand is now outstretched and demanding of a handout.
It was both
pathetic and moving to see so much begging. These people had NOTHING. Every few
minutes Susan and I would come up with some stupid revelation about life here. “None
of these people have ever seen the ‘Tourette’s Guy’ videos or watched a porno
film,” I would say. “See that guy over there wearing the Subway T-shirt?” Susan
asked. “Think he’s ever been to a Subway?”
This last
point was kind of interesting: Apparently, 90+% of the world’s donated clothing
winds up here. No one apparently cares (or – sadly but more accurately – can
read) what’s on their shirt. Here is a small sampling of the stuff we saw
people wearing during our visit:
(1) FUBU
(2) A pink Chicago Bulls Jersey (on a
dude)
(3) I “Heart” NY
(4) Towson High Girl’s Fast-Pich
Softball
(5) Eminem: Rule-Breaker (with embossed
pic of rapper)
(6) Chanel sweater (on a dude)
(7) Boy Scout Shirt (Rank: Wieblo,
multiple merit badges)
(8) Minnesota Department of Health
(9) Detroit Free Press
(10)
Several championship shirts from teams that did not win. I believe these were
the shirts that the winners wear immediately after, for example, the Super
Bowl. Obviously they print these for both teams, so the loser’s shirts have to
go somewhere.
Honorable
non-shirt mention: Santa hat, worn non-ironically.
Approximately
one hour into our journey, Susan started a riot. Ironically, it was triggered
by charity; As an antidote to the anticipated begging we would face in Africa, Susan
and I had brought several dozen packs of Pop Rocks (that fizzy, carbonated hard
candy crystals) to give to children. We figured the look on kid’s faces who had
probably never had candy before would be pretty much priceless. Oh, and we’d
given them out as tips to our drivers – good as money ‘round these parts. While
we hadn’t had much opportunity to mingle with the locals, that suddenly changed
when our vehicle broke down in the middle of one of the villages. Susan and I
clambered out of the back of the truck. While I helped the driver work on the
engine (my strategy was to pop the hood and look for a big on-off switch set to
‘off.’), Susan strolled down the road to meet some of the local kids. “Noah,”
she called back, “can I give them some candy?”
“Sure,” I
replied, thinking nothing of it. Susan fished several packs of Pop Rocks from
my pack and handed them to a couple of the kids. The kids looked confused.
“Bonbon,” Susan said, using the French word for candy. She mimed tearing open
one of the packs and pouring it into her mouth. The kids got it. So did every
villager with a clear line of sight.
You know
how little kids are when someone brings in candy? They don’t quite have the
maturity to wait their turn to get a piece, and it kind of turns into a
free-for-all scrum. Yeah, that’s what was going down here, only with hundreds
of full-grown adults. People who viewed us as giant walking ATMs saw one of us
malfunctioning and spewing out free shit. The rush was on.
I turned to
find Susan in the middle of a rock-star-sized crowd. Probing hands stripped her
of all candy in mere seconds. Our driver grabbed his machine gun (bad sign) and
rushed back into the crowd, yelling in Swahili and waving the gun around. The
sight of an angry armed man wielding a machine gun was, apparently, only a mild
deterrent to the crowd, but it was enough to back them off a bit. “Let’s roll,
babe,” I said, grabbing Susan by the wrist and ushering her back to the truck.
A few angry complaints in Swahili followed us, as did several children who
trailed our progress for some distance with surprising ease. Kenyans and
Ethiopians make wonderful distance runners. I wondered if sufficiently
greedy/hungry Congolese could be similarly trained to run at high speeds behind
a truck (possibly with me dangling a sandwich on a fishing pole).
Before I
could fully explore this churlish fantasy, we arrived at our second campsite.
We stowed our bags and were told we would be heading out straight away to track
the closest family of gorillas. In the main (and only permanent) building of
the camp, we were paired with another pair of armed rangers and a couple of
affable Dutchmen (Sub-Saharan Africa is popular with the Dutch; in three weeks
we met over a dozen Netherlanders and exactly zero Americans.) and set on our
way. We crossed over a mile of ragged fields and entered the jungle.
We climbed
up the steep slopes on a path that had been carved through the dense woods
using nothing but brute force and copious application of machete. The forest
path narrowed, then narrowed further as we branched from the main artery onto
smaller and smaller tributaries that snaked through the jungle. The bush was
incredibly thick. Technically, we were in Virunga National Park, but this tract
of forest was contiguous with the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Struggling
through another snarl of saplings, I thought that name was far more appropriate
for what this was – a suffocating crush of vegetation. The rangers moved
through the jungle effortlessly, barely disturbing a branch as they eased
through the underbrush. The white people thrashed behind them, struggling to
keep up.
After
several hours, I was tired and disoriented. Behind me, Susan was wheezing a bit
in the thin air. Here, in the deepest reaches of the jungle, our group would likely
die if our guides melted into the forest. Finally, some twenty minutes after abandoning
even the faintest trace of trail, we halted. I was about to ask why we stopped,
when I heard a rustle in the trees above us. Maybe twenty feet away, a giant
fucking gorilla was casually chomping the leaves of the tree. I poked Susan to
draw her attention to the animal we had come so far to lay eyes upon.
Susan was
cranky and tired from climbing. “What?” she asked, following my gaze up. “Oh,”
she breathed.
“If this
was Donkey Kong, you’d be dead by now,” I murmured.
This is
supposed to be a funny story, so I won’t dwell on it, but seeing a wild animal
in its environment is incredible, a thousand times more real than seeing
something in a zoo.
Miscellaneous
observations:
(1) We had to wear surgical masks. Even
12,000 miles from work, Susan and I can’t seem to get away from surgical masks.
(2) Gorillas are gassy bastards. The
group of seven averaged three flatulations per minute (source: best guess).
(3) Members of this group were
acclimated to very limited numbers of human visitors. The adult animals didn’t
pay us much attention, but we were investigated by a teenager. When he got
within six or seven feet of Susan, one of our guides tossed a stick to startle
him and move him back. Before grudgingly retreating, the curious gorilla gave
our guide the most wonderfully offended look for disrupting the interaction. So
did Susan, for that matter.
(4) There may only be a few hundred
gorillas left at the time of this writing, but they’re trying to come back. The
group of seven we spotted included three large males, two females, a teenager
and – best of all – a tiny little baby that was never far from its mother’s
arms.
(5) Doing a quick headcount, it was
clear there were more boys than girls in the group. Even though gorillas are polygynous,
we figured there was at least one very pissed off male gorilla in the group.
After about 50 minutes, we found him when Susan caught (and filmed) a male
gorilla pulling his own ripcord during a bit of self-lovemaking. Video:
When we
arrived back from our trek, we found the campsite populated by an Asian camera
crew that was visiting the region to film a documentary for Korean TV. Their
leader, a tiny bearded man in a cowboy hat, introduced himself as (and I
quote): “the Korean Bear Grylls.”
“I am the
American Lee Myung-bak,” I replied, which got a good laugh from the group [Lee
is South Korea’s president. Protip: People from other countries LOVE it when
you can name the president/PM of their country].
The Koreans
and our Dutch companions quickly departed, leaving Susan and I alone in the
camp, save for a few guards and staff members. “You must be hungry,” said the
camp’s chef. I will make you dinner. Thirty minutes,” he promised.
Thirty minutes. Three hours later, the food
arrived. “Sorry,” said the cook, as he delivered our food, “time is different
in Congo.”
No shit. On the plus side, neither Susan or
I had ever eaten at a restaurant where the slaughtered the chicken you were
going to eat before your very eyes.
As was the
case the previous evening, Susan and I were exhausted from the day’s events. We
went to sleep, bathed in the light of the volcano we would be climbing the following
morning.
Next Time:
A vastly underprepared Noah and Susan spend the night on the rim of an active
volcano. Also: Noah wears underwear as a hat.
No comments:
Post a Comment