Gorillas not to be missed

Our big distant cousins are worth the effort of a visit, says Jody Kurash, of AP, from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

Something is cracking, crunching and rustling its way through the jungle.

The noise is loud. It sounds closer.

Our guide, Olivier Mutuyimama, pauses, extends his arm and holds us back.

My tired legs thank him. I was happy for a moment to catch my breath.

After almost two hours of arduous trekking up steep inclines over rocks and brush, ducking through dense patches of tropical forest, pulling my boots out of pits of mud coupled with snaking vines that wrapped around my ankles, we were at long last near the mountain gorillas in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park.

Now we could finally hear them.

Our group of five tourists had trekked through the same park in the Virunga Mountains where American zoologist Dian Fossey studied the apes.

Some 700 mountain gorillas remain in the world, according to the Rwanda Tourism Board's website.

About half live in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and the other half live in family groups in the Virunga Mountains on the border of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That's where we were, with a guide, two armed soldiers and two trackers.

Our group hushed at Mutuyimama's command.

The smell of wet jungle foliage filled the humid air.

As I trained my weary eyes at the thick vegetation before me, I slowly focused on the dark figure behind it.

Although difficult to make out at first, due to its vast size, I suddenly realised that a 180kg gorilla was lurking in front of me.

I gazed at the giant less than 2m away.

Mutuyimama nudged our group slowly backwards to give the ape, a male silverback, room to enjoy his daily bamboo snack.

The cracking of the branches reverberated again.

The park allows visitors to approach as close as 8m to the gorillas, a distance the guides enforce to avoid exposing the apes to human germs.

As we inched back, the huge primate continued munching away, paying no attention to the human intruders around him.

As we stood in awe, we heard more noises off to our right.

We tiptoed slowly around a tree and spotted two females on a hillside.

Their thick pitch-black fur contrasted sharply with the lush bright greenery of the forest.

We moved silently around the back of the silverback's resting spot, and discovered two more females playing with two infants.

Mutuyimama motioned us to back up.

But one of the mothers spotted us, grabbed her infant and swept past us, so close I felt vines rustle against my leg.

The babies galloped over to the resting silverback.

They tried to rouse him as they tumbled over his large frame, like the Dr Seuss classic, Hop on Pop.

He continued his nap, motioning away the children like a dad swatting his kids in the back seat of the family car.

But slowly he began to wind down.

During our march up the mountain through stands of bamboo forest, the guide explained to us that the gorillas find the bamboo plants intoxicating.

Soon, the huge primate lay down for an afternoon nap, his massive body sprawled out across a bed of leaves.

Mutuyimama told us that the gorilla family we were visiting, nicknamed the Hirawa (local slang word for lucky), consisted of nine members.

Mutuyimama made gorilla grunting noises to draw them closer.

We managed to spot seven, including the two babies, before we had to leave.

Visitors spend one hour with the gorillas, but by the time we started back, it felt like much more time than that had passed.

The gorillas appeared so human as they went about their daily lives, feeding, playing, resting, and raising their young, that I left the park with the magical feeling I had come face to face with a very distant relative.