In February of 2008 Hjalli and I travelled with Afríka - Ævintýraferðir (an Icelandic travel agent) to Uganda and Rwanda with the main focus of visiting mountain gorillas in the Virunga volcanos that straddle the border between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The journey started out in Entebbe Uganda where we visited an animal sanctuary which cares for wild animals that have been injured or cannot in other ways fend for themselves and rehabilitates them. Whenever possible they are introduced back to the wild.

This is a shoebill, voted the #1 ugliest creature on Earth by the Animal Planet's Beastly Countdown.  Even if you may have a pet ugliest creature, we can all agree that it isn't pretty.  It's a also huge, on average around 1.2 meters high with wingspan around 2.3 meters.

In Queen Elisabeth Park there is a magical place called Mweya Lodge. Depicted above are my two favorite spots: The dining room and the swimming pool.  These pictures are for all of you who thought travelling to Africa was about lowering your standards. And for us to remember because we're going back. Only the lure of gorillas managed to get MD out of the pool.

We took two morning safaris from Mweya. The sunrise is stunning in East Africa.

This is whole area is very volcanically active, hot springs, craters. Feels like home.  Here on the left there is a soda lake which the locals are harvesting for salt.  February is dry season in Uganda and so the water level is very low.

Kyambura Gorge (right) hosts a number of primates. We dove in to see if the chimpanzees were in. Unfortunately they weren't. But we met  a few of our more distant cousins, baboons and colobus monkeys.

Note also the forrest in the gorge (by the river) that disappears at the brim.

At the end of the dry season is seems to be customary to burn away the dead grass to help the new vegetation grow when the rain comes. This is even done inside the national parks. As this is done regularly the fire seems to be easily controllable and we drove through the area.

They are reconstructing (with help from outside) their infrastructure and while we were there two important people pledged to help build the economy: George Bush and Tony Blair.

But we were there for the gorillas. As we read on a road sign: Given peace, the gorillas will give us money.

The gorillas are a major part of Rwandan tourism.  56 tourists line up each day to visit 7 gorilla families, each tourist paying $500 for the privilege. That makes up for 20.000 tourists a year, out of a total of about 40.000 tourists that visit Rwanda per year (2007 numbers).

We set out on a visit to a family of 17 gorillas, the Amahoro group. We were in luck because they had moved right to the edge of the forest and we caught our first glimpse from the potato fields.

This group has 2 silverbacks, 4 females, a few juveniles and some kids, the youngest 1 month old.

This is the groups main silverback, Ubumwe. A silverback can reach 1.8 meter, standing tall.  They are around 125 kg and need to eat around 25 kg of vegetation per day.

The gorillas are, despite of bad PR, peaceful creatures and we were often within a few meters from them as they moved about their habitat.

Mountain gorillas are critically endangered. There are only about 700 left. Around 400 of them live in the Virungas (where we visited them) and an additional 300 live in Bwindi national park in Uganda.

They're number has been increasing during the last three decades when they reached a number as low as 500. This is a success story of ingenious conservation that not only helps the gorillas but also creates revenue for the surrounding inhabitants.  Around 10% of the proceedings made by the gorilla tourism goes into the communities surrounding the park. On top of that the park provides work and additional revenue through hotels, restaurants etc.

The gorillas are vegetarians. Their food consists of bamboo, wild celery, roots and leaves. They get all their water needs directly from the plants. This is however, a very low calorie diet. Which means they spend much of their day eating and don't waste energy on being agressive.

The only time there is turbulence in a gorilla group is if there is a shift in power and a new silverback takes over. 

In the event of a power shift the new silverback kills the youngest cubs to assert his dominance; only the main silverback is allowed to copulate with the females.

The Mountain Gorilla's Nest Lodge not only offered good facilities but also a golf course with rented kit. Since we were lucky and didn't have to trek for hours looking for our gorilla family we found ourselves with an afternoon off. What better than to share a little private moment on the golf course?

The golf course has 9 holes, but only one flag. Thus a member of the staff ran with the flag between holes as we moved along.  Also, another member of the staff (who also, fortunately, knew a little bit about golf (much more than us)) insisted on accompanying us as a caddy.  Last but not least an entourage of about 10 villagers went along for the ride, enjoying my golfing style. So much for a private moment.

On hole 3 we ran into the local football team, rehearsing on the golf course.  We didn't have the heart to ask them to leave (also, this would have meant a considerably larger audience of my golf style) so we moved along directly to hole 4.

The golf course is 'work in progress' but we had fun, the entourage had fund and the view (especially from hole 2) can't be beat.

From Rwanda we went to Bushara Island on Lake Bunyoni where we spent the night. The lake is very deep, estimated up to 900 m deep.  The lake is almost 2000 meters above sea level and the very grown hills you see around it reach up to almost 2500 m.

The hotel we stayed at also runs the rafting company. A part of their proceedings goes into a project to build up the society around their establishments.  See SoftPower.