TRACKING GORILLAS

The suggestion caught me off guard.

“Fly 10,000 miles to Central Africa to do what ?” I queried.

“Track mountain gorillas in the rain forests,” my wife Anastasia said. “That has to be fascinating.”

Anastasia is nothing if not persuasive. Not for us, this time, would there be lazy hours on some deserted beach or candlelit dinners in a romantic European hotel. This time it would be Africa and the endangered gorillas of Rwanda and Zaire.

And so some weeks later, weighed down with a load of safari equipment, inoculated against cholera and yellow fever, malaria medication taken and visas obtained, we were on our way--via London and Nairobi--to the heart of Africa. A journey of 9,920 miles.

Clearly, from what we had read, this was no venture for the faint-hearted.

“The program should not be attempted by those who are not in excellent physical condition” read the warning. “Only those who are 100% fit and used to walking long distances at high altitudes should attempt it.”

Even Ernest Hemingway, an old hand in Kenya and Tanzania (then called Tanganyika), did not venture up into the rain forests in search of the great apes. And yet it was hard to imagine anyone reading Dian Fossey’s “Gorillas in the Mist,” an account of her 13-year study of the creatures, and not being intrigued.

“I shall never forget my first encounter with gorillas,” she wrote. “The thin mountain air was shattered by a high-pitched series of deafening screams. Nothing can possibly prepare one for such a terrifying avalanche of sound. We all froze.”

How would it be for us, I wondered, as our plane cruised high over Egypt and the Sudan and we tried, intermittently, to sleep.

I reread the notes.

Our group would be limited to six people. We could stay with the gorillas for just one hour. And the going would be very, very arduous.

“Gorilla tracking is not for those with a casual interest in wildlife,” I read. “Tracking involves scrambling through dense undergrowth in rain forests. It may be necessary to climb to more than 9,000 feet. We cannot overemphasize how strenuous this can be. . . .”

Perhaps Hemingway had been smart, I thought. He went most places in a truck. What was I letting myself in for?

As it turned out, one of the greatest adventures of my life.

We stayed one night in Nairobi in a hotel filled with similarly garbed travelers about to set off on their game safaris. Next day we flew west across Lake Victoria to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and were briefed further about the venture.

We would be leaving at 6 a.m. the next day for the Parc National des Volcans, where we would find the mountain gorillas.

There was one key rule to remember: If the male gorilla charged us, it was vital that we did not run. If we did, the ape would attack us. “Remain exactly where you are and adopt a submissive pose by sitting down and looking down,” the guide said. “If a male gorilla stares at you, look away. Otherwise it will be taken as a challenge.”

Fossey herself wrote that when first charged by a gorilla, “the only way I could prevent myself from running was to hang onto a tree for dear life.”

People have been attacked. Alan Root, the experienced Kenya wildlife photographer who was working on the movie version of Fossey’s “Gorillas in the Mist,” was charged and badly bitten in Zaire. The warning, clearly, had to be taken very seriously.

Dawn saw us ready to set out on a 2 1/2-hour journey through some of the most spectacular scenery in all Africa, steep terraced valleys and sub-alpine mountains. It soon became clear why Rwanda, the most densely populated country on the continent, is sometimes called the “Switzerland of Africa.”

Sometimes, we had been warned, you saw no gorillas. Travelers had been known to struggle through dripping, moss-laden forests for hours without catching up with the great primates.

Would we be lucky? Shortly after we entered the Parc National des Volcans we encountered Craig Sholley, an American working with the Mountain Gorilla Project (and a former colleague of Dian Fossey’s) who said the seven words we had come so far to hear: “You will all see gorillas this morning.”

Guided by Sholley and Mark Condiotti, who have spent 10 years letting the gorillas get used to them, our small group set out from the base camp at Kinigi, all of us wearing sturdy boots, thick gloves and carrying water bottles along with our cameras.

One of the trackers carried a rifle, not to protect ourselves against the gorillas but as a precaution in case we ran across buffalo.

Soon we were deep inside the forest, climbing up through dense undergrowth, wading through mountain streams, stumbling over rotting tree trunks. There was mud everywhere. Most of us slipped and slithered on the way up but, undeterred, we struggled on, nobody speaking, halting only when Sholley or Condiotti paused to listen.

A Heart-Stopper

About 10,000 feet up, one of the porters hissed, “Ngagi (gorilla).” It was a heart-stopping moment. Just to our right, about 10 feet away, a 430-pound silverback gorilla lay sunning himself in a glade.

“He’s sunbathing ,” someone whispered incredulously. And he was.

At a sign from Sholley we all collapsed on the jungle floor, sweating, caked with mud, and exhausted.

But there he was. Our first mountain gorilla. And what a sight.

A moment later he climbed to his feet and began beating his jet-black chest, the sound echoing through the still forest. A sign of excitement or alarm, this sometimes meant trouble. None of us moved.

Then he looked straight at me with those knowing brown eyes. And I remembered what naturalist David Attenborough had said: “There is more meaning and understanding exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. . . .”

Look away, they had instructed us.

But I had not flown 10,000 miles in search of this extraordinary creature to look away. So I stared right back and hoped he would not charge.

He didn’t. And eventually, bored with me, he loped off and we could clearly see the silver hair on his back (it develops with maturity).

Sholley motioned us to follow and a moment later we saw the family--a female (about half the size of the silverback) and four infants. Immediately the children began playing, jumping about and scampering up trees, making little growl-like noises.

Avoid Direct Contact

As we silently watched them, one of the young gorillas approached cautiously. Sholley beat the ground with a stick, warning it away. Direct contact between humans and gorillas is avoided as much for their protection as ours. There is a real danger of passing on our germs to them. Mountain gorillas, driven ever farther up the mountain by the encroachment of farming at the base, suffer from colds and pneumonia.

We stayed a full hour on the floor of the jungle, the only sounds being the buzz of insects, the cries of birds and the throaty growl of the gorillas.

It is hard to describe the emotions generated by the presence of these great creatures. You are not seeing them in the confines of a zoo. You are on the ground, seeing them right where they live.

Finally, with our formerly spotless safari suits mud-caked and crumpled, we began the long climb down the mountain.

But the adventure was not over yet. The next day we drove across the border into Zaire for an overnight stop in Bukavu before setting off for Kahuzi Biega Park where the Eastern Lowland gorillas live.

We had been told that this would be less exciting than the Rwanda experience. In many ways it was even more exhilarating.

In Kahuzi the road leads right up to the edge of the rain forest, which had not been the case in Rwanda. But the climb in the forest, up almost vertical slopes, sometimes crawling through mud on our hands and knees and hanging onto vines for support, was immensely taxing.

A Massive Ape

We finally stumbled into a glade and tracker John Kahekwa pointed up at a big tree. We stood quite still. A moment later, with much grunting and breaking of branches, a massive 500-pound ape climbed down and glowered suspiciously at us as we cowered on the jungle floor. Here, truly, was King Kong.

Kahekwa, who tracks the gorillas every day, called him by name, Maheshe, and with a sweep of his arm indicated that we were friends, that there was no cause for alarm. Maheshe, the head of one of the three Lowland Gorilla families, looked at each of us and lumbered off.

Maheshe sat right down on the track up which we had climbed and stayed there, pondering our presence.

Soon up came his family--a female about half his size and five children, scampering up and down the trees, jumping from branch to branch. One of them had only one arm. Caught in a trap by poachers who sell the paws for ashtrays, he had torn himself free. Even so, he seemed to climb as well as the others. Not for one moment did Maheshe take his eyes off of us.

We stayed with this group for almost two hours, an unusual privilege, and then with porters hacking out a new path for us with their sharp pangas , we stumbled and clawed our way back out of the forest.

“You were very lucky,” Kahekwa said. “Maheshe is a great gorilla. They are not all his size.”

No Equal Experience

So ended our encounter with these extraordinary primates. Later we were to fly to Kilimanjaro Airport for a game safari in Tanzania. We camped in the Ngorongoro Crater, traversed the great Serengeti Plain and saw thousands of animals.

But nothing could equal the emotional thrill of seeing the gorillas of Rwanda and Zaire.

Abercrombie & Kent, who worked out our safari, had been right to warn us of the difficulties. It is not a venture to be undertaken casually. But the experience of seeing these endangered creatures (reportedly there are just 300 left in Rwanda) was worth the effort.

The gorilla-watching excursion makes a fascinating side trip to any game safari in Kenya and Tanzania. And there are other rewards. Rwanda is a beautiful country, an ornithologist’s delight with 520 species of birds in Akagera Park.

Rwanda has several good hotels. The Umubano Meridien, where we spent the first night, is modern and efficient, with a swimming pool and tennis court on its spacious grounds.

And the Izuba Meridien, where we stayed after our first encounter with the gorillas, is an ideal vacation site. Right on the shore of Lake Kivu, amid white sandy beaches and palm trees, it’s a gem.

Only in Bukavu, Zaire, were the accommodations substandard. The Residence Hotel, once a fine colonial hotel in the old days of the Belgian Congo, has fallen upon hard times, although it was clean and the food was palatable.

At our farewell dinner at Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel, that old hangout of Hemingway and Robert Ruark, the talk turned to the upcoming movie, “Gorillas in the Mist.” Directed by Michael Apted and starring Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey, it is scheduled for release Sept. 30.

Apted had the difficult task of getting his cameras up 10,000 feet into the rain forests with a 40-strong unit. But he succeeded in getting the footage he was after and was even allowed to photograph the rarely seen gorillas at Fossey’s old research center in Karisoke. Sigourney Weaver was apparently so taken with the apes that when the shooting of the movie finished, she returned again to Rwanda to see them.

The movie undoubtedly will generate additional interest in the gorillas. But it will never be easy to see them. Permits are restricted and excursions are heavily booked. Groups are limited to six people. And however fit you think you are, the trip will exhaust you.

Four-day gorilla tracking excursions are offered to both Rwanda and Zaire. Prices include all hotels, meals and transfers. Air fare is extra.

The cost of the Zaire trip is $1,354 per person, double occupancy (single supplement when two or more are traveling is $90). Upcoming trips, arriving and departing from Kigali, Rwanda, are Sept. 20-23 and Dec. 13-16.

The Rwanda trip costs $1,739 per person, double occupancy (single supplement when two or more are traveling is $105; the per-person price drops for groups of four or six). Tours leave from Kigali every Tuesday throughout the year, on request.

For more information, contact the U.S. offices of Abercrombie & Kent at 1420 Kensington Road, Oak Brook, Ill. 60521-2106; (312) 954-2944.