4^th October at Virunga Lodge

An early 500 am wake up with spiced coffee and a lovely breakfast before heading off to the Park entrance for our briefing. On the programme for today were Golden Monkeys.

Our guide was Emmy and he told us that it was very likely that we would find the monkeys on the forest floor as they were looking for Bamboo shoots which they love, like the gorillas.

We were a bigger group and we travelled some 20 minutes to a different gate. At the village we met the porters for anyone who needed them. There were also two stretchers there for people who could not walk and needed to be carried. Apparently Frank Gardner may have visited and he was carried in to see them.  Once more we walked through potato fields and fields of pyrethrum and beans. Many women working in the fields, tilling the ground – small little huts along the way where they take refuge when it is raining, it’s the beginning of the rainy season but the rains have been insubstantial of late. They are hoping for more …

We enter the park and the bamboo forest and come across these lovely lively golden monkeys pulling bamboo shoots out of the ground and having fun peeling and eating them. Some are more golden then others, but all have delicate coats with expressive faces. They were not troubled by our presence. We spent a whole hour with them and followed them to various places, watching them jumping from branch to branch or rummaging in the ground to find the bamboo shoots.

We wondered how long the bamboo forests would last, what with the gorillas and the golden monkeys favouring the shoots but we were reassured that they both had other sources of food which they called on at other times of the year.