Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Long weekend: Kigali and Virunga National Park

First two quick movie recommendations to learn more about recent history in Rwanda 
and the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)

For Rwanda: Shake Hands with the Devil (2004 or 2007)
Trailer (2007):




For DRC, specifically the park we were in: Virunga (2014) 
(stream on Netflix)  Trailer:




First some scenes from the road



Loads of loads to push!

Such bright colors everywhere!


Curious peeker!

Simple wooden "bikes" very common for ferrying loads



Kids come out to see the cars go by!

A patchwork quilt of farming!

And the mountains of the Virunga park


Some rain clouds, but a lot of that is gasses from the lava inside!

We went with some park rangers to meet up with the gorillas living wild inside the park, protected by rangers / guards. There's only ~700 of these left, and the Virunga Movie is a riveting, modern true story about these creatures. Highly recommended.




Unbelievable strength of ripping and chewing! That's a solid cylinder of biomass, thicker than a coke can.


Serious! So beautiful and curious to stare into each others' eyes!


Play-fighting with each other


Gorilla bodies everywhere!


Cute little ones!


A silverback! Look how large his head & shoulders are compared with the young ones!




Contemplating... something?





Hiking and adventure buddy!



At the rim of the volcano after the big hike up!


Not bad for a photo taken without a tripod!

Lava.


Boom! Crash! So loud and active!


Check out the floating dark masses in the bottom left!





Hard to beat when it comes to adventure and beauty!


Quite steep coming down! I held this as level as I could with a water bottle as reference!


Hiking down the lava - sometimes solid like this, other times loose lava scree!

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