Humble IN THE JUNGLE

As prices rise elsewhere, affordable trips to see the DR Congo’s eastern lowland gorillas offer a lifeline to the region’s forgotten communities…

We’re close,” whispered John, my guide. We were surrounded by vegetation so thick that it was barely penetrable. It was only thanks to the expert machete-wielding skills of the men leading us unerringly through the tangle of vines, shrubs and low hanging branches that we’d made it this far.

“How do you know we’re close?” I whispered back, curious to know. I didn’t doubt John for a moment, but he had worked in this forest his entire adult life and I was intrigued that he had picked up on something that I had completely missed.

“There was fresh dung on the track and I heard chest beating,” he explained. “And if we push through here...” He parted a curtain of leaves and I gasped. My hands flew up to my face in disbelief and tears of delight sprung from my eyes. “There they are,” said John, who took my hand and led me to meet a family of eastern lowland gorillas.

Monkey business

A day earlier, I’d begun my journey to the forests of Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This is the only country in the world where this subspecies – the largest in the gorilla family – is found. But the DRC still has something of a reputation, and travellers aren’t common in its parks these days.

My first obstacle was getting there. Luckily, Kahuzi Biega NP lies only a couple of hours’ drive from the border with Rwanda, near the southern tip of Lake Kivu. New direct flights from London to Rwanda capital Kigali put me just five hours’ drive from the border. It also gave me the chance to compare two countries on very different paths.

Rwanda’s history is as chequered as its neighbour’s, but since the dark days of the early 1990s it has undergone an astonishing change, with tourism now one of its biggest and most vital sources of income. You can see gorillas there, too. Rwanda is home to the mountain gorilla, made famous by Dian Fossey, and its forests now rival Uganda as a favourite destination among travellers to see these remarkable primates. There is a good reason for that. It has built up a reputation for offering visitors great wildlife viewing, with

excellent guides, comfortable lodges and good infrastructure. But it all comes at a steep cost. Prices for visiting the gorillas have recently been put up to US$1,500 (£1,128) per person per day.

Park fees in the DRC’S Kahuzi Biega NP are significantly less – US$400 (£300) per person per day – making it a cheaper alternative. But I still had to get there, and as someone who has travelled widely throughout Africa, I was expecting the border crossing to be a long, frustrating experience. My fears proved to be unfounded, though. I joined an orderly queue on the Rwandan side, and within 20 minutes my passport was stamped and I was free to go and meet my tracker.

A forgotten world

John Kahekwa was born in Miti, a village on the outskirts of Kahuzi Biega. Following family tradition, he became a gorilla tracker after he left school, and since then he has seen great changes. The park was given protected status in the early 1970s and was a popular tourist site until war broke out across the region in the ’90s. But it was his work with tourists that enabled John to set up the Pole Pole Foundation, an NGO run by locals and set up to better the lives of communities living on the park’s boundaries through tourism.

Despite the DRC being enormously rich in resources the rest of the world wants – your mobile phone likely contains at least one element mined here – little, if any, of the wealth that generates filters down to its population. Most of the people living in John’s village are desperately poor and, for them, the park was somewhere to cut down trees to build their houses, use for firewood or turn into charcoal to sell. Animals such as antelope and bush pig would be hunted for food using snares. Sadly, the indiscriminate nature of these rudimentary but deadly traps meant that any animal – including gorillas – was at risk. If caught, the villagers would be fined, but few had the money to pay the penalty and no choice but to risk prosecution again and again to be able to feed themselves and their families.

John used the money he had earned from taking tourists to see the gorillas to set up his foundation, benefitting both the people of the area and its wildlife. He started a tree planting project that provided fast-growing saplings like eucalyptus for the villagers to plant and harvest. The foundation built schools and paid for people to get training in skills that would provide them with the means of making a living. Today, 25 years on, the Pole Pole Foundation is still going but the tourism that was both a direct and indirect help to the community has all but dried up, and life for the people of this region is hard.

“We feel forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, which is happy to exploit us but not support us,” John explained. So he has made it his life’s mission to remind the world that Kahuzi Biega National Park is still here, as well as being home to one of our planet’s most charismatic and fascinating creatures.

‘John used the money he had earned from taking tourists to see the gorillas to set up his foundation, benefitting both the people of the area and its wildlife’