Kinigi

Up at 5am this morning and greeted soon afterwards by a stunning sunrise as only the Virungas can offer. I drove up to Kinigi with one of the tour group's leaders to tell ORTPN that this group may be a little late. This road has unfortunately become notorious for being in very bad shape so at times we were doing about 5km/h max with the 4x4. Good news is that the upgrading is due to start soon. Anyway, a 12km journey that takes about 40min to complete but hugely scenic and ending at the ORTPN office with fantastic views of the volcanoes.

Having delivered the message, we waited and had some coffee hoping that our estimate of the group arriving 15min late is not an under-estimate. In the meanwhile, I managed to get some video footage of the ORTPN office there and some pics of the volcanoes. I also overheard someone say that the altitude at which the ORTPN office is, is about the altitude at which the gorilla sightings take place at Bwindi in Uganda - I can't vouch for this but its an interesting observation.

The group's arrival made us sigh a massive sigh of relief - they arrived exactly 15min late. So everyone got sorted into the various groups going to the different gorilla families. Susa family was quite low so only a 45min trek was anticipated - this is a family which can on occassion go quite high up on Karisimbi and offer the visitor some challenging trekking and tracking.

The afternoon the group offered me dinner with them at the Hotel Muhabura as a little token of thanks for the help the morning. We had a really good time and obviously a lot of the discussions was on the days' gorilla tracking.