Forty-five minutes with a family of mountain gorillas, close enough to feel how much power was standing a few feet away. The walk to find them runs anywhere from one hour to six, depending on where the troop has moved. Ours ran short, which bought the time at the other end.
That was the morning. The same trip took in the Kigali Genocide Memorial on the way back to the airport – heavy, direct, and very hard to square with the country going past the window on the drive there.
And then Kenya, where a warthog chased my mother to lunch. Still the funniest five minutes of the trip.
We stayed in terracotta cottages below the Virunga volcanoes, where the staff had every guest's name memorised by the second day. On the Mara there was room for the family to spread out after a tighter few days. Game drives turned up elephant, giraffe, and a rhino nobody could identify afterwards. An afternoon in a Masai village closed out the safari.
