Yesterday Mum and I went to visit the mountain gorillas at Parc National des Volcans. Seeing as it was really expensive and you can only spend an hour with the gorillas themselves we wanted to go on a long walk through the bush to find them. There are multiple groups, some are close and some take hours to reach. Clearly we didn't want to pay hundreds of dollars to walk for about ten minutes.

Now, we planned to make sure we got to visit the Susa group which is the group the farthest (ius that a word?) Unfortunately this great plan was thwarted by our driver who (without asking us at all) told the organisers that we wanted the shortest trip possible... so we set out on a half hour bumpy drive to be dropped off for our walk. About ten minutes later we reached the gorillas... thankyou driver!

Now, those of you who have been stung by nettles will undertand the pain I describe, although according to the English people that were in our group you times the normal nettle pain by about ten to understand the stings of these giant beasts. The nettles were HUGE! Luckily I had mums wet weather jacket protecting my arms and hands but my legs got nailed! ooo the pain!

Anyway, getting on to the gorillas. Somehow they were the most terrifying animals ever (one of the videos is when we were looking at the younger gorillas and a huge beastly one came up behind us on the path at which time the guides were pushing us out of the way of the gorilla and right into the nettles....). It was hard to know what was scarier, the big silverback gorilla or the guides making 'gorilla' sounds, kind of like a very powerful clearing of the throat crossed with a vicious growl. The little ones were sooooooooooooooo cute! There was one (a 2 year old) that kept climbing up the trees to the very top, then the tree would break and the little gorilla and tree would crash to the jungle floor.

It was a really amazing experience to be in the presence of such human like animals. Each one is so different, they all have different facial markings and characteristics. They seem to have a pretty cruisy life, slowly moving around eating, more eating and further eating - sounds like a good life to me!