Taking a $15,000 Private Gorilla Trek in Rwanda – Worth It?

This week, I’m back in Rwanda and have dropped by for my fifth and sixth gorilla treks.  In the interests of journalistic curiosity — and poor financial decision-making — I decided to try both the trekking options that the Rwanda Development Board offers: private and shared.  One day, I paid $15,000 for a private trek, and the next, I did the standard $1,500 shared trek, just to see whether the private experience was worth it.  Humanity, you’re welcome.

Here’s their sales pitch to part you from an extra $13,500.

• Optional conservation talk at the lodge the evening before, typically with the park warden (I didn’t do this, so won’t comment on it)
• Private pre-trek briefing at your lodge rather than joining the standard park briefing
• Ability to choose your gorilla family the day before the trek
• Option to request a specific park guide
• Flexible trek start time, usually between 08:00 and 10:00 (with 11:00 as the latest possible start)
• Any other special requests to create special/memorable trekking experiences for groups trekking multiple times.  (Absolutely no idea what this means and what they’re prepared to do.  Dress you up as a gorilla for some erotic encounter?)

The deets

Regardless of how you do it, gorilla trekking is capped at eight people per gorilla family.  If you happen to be travelling as a group of eight, the park won’t split you up.  At that point you’re effectively already private, and the additional $3,000 is really paying for the ability to choose your gorilla family, request your preferred guide, and avoid the morning gathering at Kinigi Park Headquarters in Volcanoes National Park.

If you’re a couple, a family — or a complete loner/loser like me — then the private permit simply means no one else joins your trek.  Private group is, well, private.  It was just me, a guide, a tracker team who locate the gorillas ahead of time, and a porter if you want one (optional, but recommended, and he stayed behind once we located the gorillas).  No other guests.  You can, of course, bring friends if you have them.  I’m told these “friends” things are great.

Convenience

Normally, gorilla trekking requires means being ready to leave the lodge around 6:30 am.  If you’re a loser.  If you book a private trek, you can roll out of bed at 7:59 am, then make your way to the lobby to meet your guide.  Well, actually, you can go as late as 11 am if you’re a complete animal, but the gorillas sleep an awful lot and I wanted to maximise the experience.

If you’re doing the standard shared trek, you drive to Kinigi Park Headquarters for the 7 am briefing, stand around for a while whilst half the place tries to sell you something, get assigned into a group of strangers, and then listen to the same briefing I’ve already heard multiple times.  Only after that does everyone pile into vehicles and drive out to the starting point, usually arriving around 8 am.

The trek itself always begins the same way.  You drive to a starting point near the park boundary — usually agricultural land — walk through the fields into the forest, and then work your way towards wherever the trackers have located the gorilla family that morning.

The worst part of the shared experience, for me anyway, is the moment where you’re waiting to see who you’ve been paired with.  You’re quietly praying the ranger looks down at the sheet and says your name… and then nothing else.  It’s like waiting for an upgrade you were absolutely certain you were going to get.  Or your wife coming back from the pregnancy scan and saying, “It’s twins!”

Guide

With the private trek you can request a specific guide.  There’s one particular guide who has built a bit of a reputation for supposedly being able to “communicate” with gorillas.  I don’t really buy into that sort of thing, so I left it to chance.

I ended up with the best gorilla guide I’ve ever had.  At one point, she said, “This gorilla wants to mate”.  About thirty seconds later, the gorilla did exactly that.

So maybe some of them can chat gorilla.  My bad.  I might owe that man an apology.

Gorilla family

With the private trek you can choose exactly what kind of gorilla group you want to visit.  If I wanted the easiest trek that day (one trek I only had to walk 15 minutes to find the gorillas; another time 3.5 hours) that’s what I was getting.  I opted for the group that was most sociable, regardless of how far the hike was.  They delivered on that.  It was the best gorilla group and overall experience I’ve had.  One baby gorilla, I’m fairly certain, is still thinking about me, wondering of the life we could have had together.  He spent a good twenty minutes completely fixated on me.  I didn’t think I wanted a third child, but….

Overall experience

I love photography, so having the space to do whatever I wanted made a massive difference.  When it’s just you, there’s no one hovering awkwardly beside you waiting for their turn, and no guide trying to maintain fairness like he’s refereeing life itself.  If I want to lie on the ground for ten minutes staring at a gorilla, pretending to be artistic rather than slightly overwhelmed by the fact there’s a 200kg primate three metres away looking at me like he’s about to wander over and ask what exactly my problem is, I can.

The bigger point is that most people only ever do this once, maybe twice, so everyone is understandably very excited.  When there are seven other people with you, everyone is trying to get as close as possible and have their moment.

No one is rude.  No one is shoving.  No one is behaving like a complete douchebag.  But it inevitably becomes this polite little dance where everyone is trying to be considerate.  Move here.  Step aside.  Let someone else get the photo.  Rotate positions.  Repeat.  It’s like going to a dance.  And I can’t dance.  Nor share, apparently.  Being civilised is such a chore.

When it was just me, the guide’s entire job was simply making sure my experience was the best it could be.

It also meant the guide was noticeably more relaxed about how close the gorillas came.  I get it, eight people are much harder to control and statistically far more likely to do something stupid.  Let a gorilla get close to one person, and suddenly, everyone wants that exact photo.  Before you know it, we’re all sitting there wondering how we ended up as some silverback’s bitch for the rest of our lives.

The gorillas themselves are incredibly curious about us, especially the younger ones.  In a group, curiosity gets spread around.  When it’s just you, you get all the attention.  Basically, I’m so needy I now require validation from apes.

Worth it?

Probably not if you only have $15,001 in your bank account.  But for me, it was.

Yes, you could end up with the same gorilla family on a shared trek, and you might even have similar interactions.  But from what I’m told, it’s now extremely unlikely you’ll be in a small group.  On my shared trek, they only had 24 permits issued that day (the park can issue up to 112), yet instead of spreading people across more guides, they used it as an opportunity to give some gorilla families a rest.  So I still had seven other strangers in my group.  And that was during off-peak season.  If you’re visiting between June and October, the odds of a small group are basically zero.

So whether the private trek is worth it really comes down to how much you value it being just you and whoever you’ve chosen to bring along — friends, family, or random hitchhikers you picked up on the way to the park and plan to murder afterwards.

Or how much you enjoy a lie-in.

Conclusion

Having the entire hour with the gorillas — just me, no pressure, no one else hovering behind me — was epic.  Gorilla trekking is epic.  Them ebe the facts.  But why not make it even more epic?

I’ve done enough treks to know that a lot of it comes down to luck.  Sometimes the gorillas are moving, sometimes they’re sleeping, sometimes you get magical interactions and sometimes you spend the hour watching a silverback chew leaves like a very large, hairy cow.  But being on my own was unquestionably a better experience.  The simple absence of seven strangers breathing heavily behind me made a noticeable difference.

It would be wonderful if they introduced some kind of off-peak private trek pricing, but alas.  It would also be wonderful if the gorillas picked up my phone, cuddled up next to me and took a selfie.  Sadly, both seem about equally likely.