Jungle Graveyard

I didn’t quite expect that my first ever anthropo-archeological experience would take place in a gorilla graveyard, at an altitude of 3,000 m, in the most incredible, eerie forest on the face of the earth.

We started up at 7 a.m. on Monday morning, with a team of specialists from George Washington University. Leaving their PhDs aside, we can also call them “the bone people”. They’ve been here for several weeks, and they have dug up several gorilla skeletons, in order to study their disease history and stuff. This Monday was going to be very special, though: for the first time we would take the gorilla remains out from the original cemetery, where Dian Fossey is also buried. On top of that, this grave (belonging to one of the legendary silverbacks in Rwanda) had been desecrated in March, so the surprise element was eating at us all. Would we find something/anything?

Once the cars dropped us off at the edge of the park, after a terribly bumpy ride, we hired six porters from the village for our heavy equipment (now that I also have a big telescopic lens for my camera, I also need someone to carry my stuff up. Honestly, every hundred grams less makes a difference when you hike like this). Of course these guys ran us up the mountain like crazy, so my idea of being fit took a hard blow, when I was left breathless (of course, I keep saying to myself that the horrible pneumonia I had last fall still has something to do with the fact that I get tired unusually fast, and I never seem to get enough air in my lungs).

After a couple of quick breaks, we entered the park and then this movie-set Hagenia forest. Simply breathtaking (on the positive note, this time). After about an hour, we reached the old camp site, which Dian Fossey set up and ran, and which was completely looted and then destroyed during the 90s. Luckily this is still the dry season, so the paths were decent, although the soil does get swampy here and there. I was sweating like crazy and freezing at the same time, so I didn’t quite know how to negotiate between my fleece, pullover and rain jacket, other than on-and-off several times.

A short walk later, and here we were at the gorilla graveyard. Dian started it when she buried Digit, her favorite silverback, killed by poachers in 1978. She was later buried here herself. Since then, the place has become a true pilgrimage site (an expensive one too, at about $75/person).

The American scientists were quick to set-up and explain to everyone that since the grave had been desecrated, this was going to be an unusually delicate operation. Basically, two women would scrape the entire surface just with trowels, while all the men would either sit around and watch, or sift the stuff dug up. Considering that this was a massive pit and the pace very slow, we were all bracing for a very long day (well, couple of days).

Trying to warm up in the freezing temperatures, everyone was guessing away the reasons for which the locals would have dug up the gorilla skeleton. Someone offered that it was surely to sell it to a collector, while someone else believed it was for a much more pragmatic reason: the villagers will have wanted the blanket in which the silverback had been carried, and which they assumed would have been buried in the pit as well.

The operation did indeed, take a veeery long time. All the while I fussed around, took lovely pictures of everyone and everything, and at the same time cursed the fact that no one else around seemed able to take a decent picture of myself (for the millionth time, HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO POINT AND SHOOT, on a really fast, accurate camera?!?!?!) But leaving my photographic frustration and the freezing cold aside, I did enjoy the day to the most. It was then and there, in that magical forest, that I knew I had made the right decision for Africa. My life-long dream to be in such a fabulous place had indeed become TRUE.

On a more mundane level, it is definitely noteworthy that my lunch consisted of a slice of by-then almost frozen pizza (this is certainly one of the most unusual places where anyone will have ever had pizza…) Although dehydrated, I almost didn’t have any water up there, since that bottle was colder than the vodka bottle I usually keep in the freezer.

Notwithstanding all this, the two American women were quite amazing, digging upside down for hours. First a tooth, then a pile of hair, and finally, on the second day, the real body started appearing. Turns out the looters had only snatched the head, so everything else was pretty much in order. We now have the skeleton remains in the garage, in my backyard, so the story certainly goes on, in quite an intimate way…