I know many of you know this story, but for those that dont. The first image of 5 of us at the foot of the Varungas Volcano is a classic photo of me with James Tarbuck jnr. (son of famous English personality Jimmy Tarbuck...he is basically like Burt Newton in Australia) and Fred ( who lost it his mental state during this journey). In this image we were in Zaire (now DR Congo), The Volcanos in the background is where we have travelled from. It was a classic adventure, with the Rwandan genocide starting and the border had been closed between Zaire, Rwanda & Uganda for 3 months. This is the exact three border zone where Uganda, Zaire and Rwanda borders meet. We entered Zaire from Uganda on foot. No border crossing was permitted, all borders were closed due to war outbreak, so we bribed these guards to let us into Zaire to go up a see the Mountain gorillas as we had travelled so far we were not turning back regardless of a war, we wanted to see the gorillas before they were likely to become extinct. At the time it was concievable that these may have become the final images of the species. We each had 1 bottle of beer and enough food for 3 days of trekking. We left most of our pack gear back in Uganda to travel light. Jamess passport was held as guarantee of our return at the border with Uganda and Zaire..so he didnt even have a visa or passport there, it was crazy, we passed through areas of continuous machine gun and mortar explosions during the day. But it was the challenge to get there. This photo was taken after we made back from the mountains and saw the gorillas so we drank the bottle of beer each, but we still had a 1.5 day trek to get out of the danger zone. No other tourists were there,,,,for obvious reasons. The day after we basically made it back on foot into Uganda 20,000 refugees flooded through escaping the Hooto-Tootsie Rwanda Genocide thing that is now in history as one of the worst genocides of our time. The war in Rwanda had started 3 years before media sources ever reported it, I know because I experienced it first hand at least I heard all the sounds of warfare. It actually started in June 1991 and this image was taken in Sept. 1991. Media sources only started reporting a war starting in 1993/4 onwards which is complete rubbish We trekked up that mountain in the background in complete darkness of night led by 12 year old local boys. no torches, no Moon just clouds and completely dark. Try following jet black kids through forests in complete darkness. Its extremely difficult let alone a warzone. It was just the craziest experience ever and then awesome unknown was when we reached a clearing just below the cloud line we saw a red glow that we assumed was bush or forest fires , but then as the forest cleared we could see it was another nearby volcano erupting. No images of that though as I just couldnt risk opening my camera bag in the darkness and wet/rain if I dropped anything out of it I couldnt find it. No torch light so we did not give ourselves away and needed to save the only batteries in the penlights. Back then there were only 250 Mountain gorillas left on Earth. Now there about 850 so numbers have recovered, but still extremely endangered and still in a constant war zone regardless of what the media reports.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:39:57 +0000