Nyungwe Forest

Before coming to Rwanda, I was debating whether or not to do any tourist things. My primary objective was to come with a pilgrim’s and missionary’s spirit. When I think about the fact that this is likely my last trip here, I have started to soften a little on the anti-tourism stance. Today is the first example.

Nyungwe National Forest, one of four national parks in Rwanda, is roughly three hours from Kibeho. It is home to 13 species of primates (though not the most famous, the silverback gorilla featured in “Gorillas in the Mist”), 300 species of birds, over 1,000 plant species, and I am pretty sure the guide said 26 species of venomous snakes (grateful to not have seen any of those today!).

At dinner last week I mentioned to the three priests who live at the Cana Center that I wanted to go. All three are native Rwandans, but two of them had never been to the forest. Fr. Jean Pierre, the local superior, grew up about an hour beyond the forest and has been through the forest countless times. They suggested we take the trip together. This morning we had Mass at 6:30, ate a quick breakfast and hit the road.

Because Fr. Jean Pierre has been many times, only the other two hiked with me. Pictured above from right to left is Fr. Celestin, Fr. Alexandre, and yours truly. We had a guide lead our hike…he took this picture in front of the “Canopy Walk.”

I have no idea who that guy is on the canopy walk, but this gives a sense of what we went across today. The canopy walk is a single-file, roughly two football field-long suspension bridge that is 70m above the ground at it’s highest point. It is called a canopy walk because it allows the hiker to see high up in the canopy of the trees, where the best monkey viewing is (though we saw more on the ground today than in the trees).

I am most of the way across the canopy walk in this shot. That is Fr. Alexandre with his back to me, beyond him is Fr. Celestin, and it is tough to make out but they are both looking back at the guide, who brought up the rear.

This is one of the maybe dozen golden monkeys we saw on the canopy walk. It is actually tough to get a good shot at these buggers, as they moved around quite a bit. I actually took more video than pictures, but I can’t share the videos on this blog. This picture was taken with a 20-30x zoom on my phone from a swinging bridge, so it isn’t as sharp as I would like.

I am pretty sure this is a L’Hoest monkey, named after some dude. I hate to admit that this was shot next to a road. There were a whole bunch of these monkeys walking along the road, so I hopped out to get this picture. There was a cute baby monkey that got very close to me, but I wasn’t sure how much it could be trusted, so I stomped my foot and it scampered away. I wish I had my camera ready, cuz that would have been a pretty cool pic. Still, I like that this guy looked over just as I took the picture. Otherwise it would have been profile, and that’s no fun.

This picture was taken from the car. These are three of the 20 or so olive baboons that were parading along the road as we drove by. There was a sort of driveway that went off to the left and for some reason the line of baboons were headed that way.

Not pictured, but we saw several antelope and a pair of Great Blue Turacos (big bluish-gray birds that landed on a branch right above us, but the lighting was so poor that you would have seen just a couple of blobs on a branch).

We stopped for coffee on the way home, and I told Fr. Jean Pierre I needed a picture of him since I only had pictures of the other two. He was our official tour guide and driver for the trip.

Final story that I think is interesting. I asked the guide what Nyungwe means. He told the story that when a European explorer came to the forest, he hired some locals to serve as his guide. There were of course no trails, so the guides were swinging machetes to clear a path. Suddenly they turned to run and started shouting “ingwe, ingwe.” I will save you the Google search–it means “leopard, leopard.” The European explorer decided to name the forest after it, but he didn’t know how it was spelled. To this day, the forest has kept the name of a misspelled word for leopard!

Thankful tonight for a great day with three priests, for safe travels, and for God’s beautiful creations. God bless us all.