Folks, I wasn't expecting to tear up when I met the gorillas, but I did, and I've spent a couple of long drives trying to figure out why.
At least some of it is down to the way it's set up. You wake up very early, drive to the site, go through the introductions and the briefings. Permits and passports are checked. There's a literal song and dance.
At least some of this, in hindsight, was stalling for time, because locating the gorillas is very old school. There's no GPS tags, no drones - they just send some dudes out into the jungle to look for poop and listen for calls, and phone it in when they find something. You start walking with no idea of where you're going, how long you'll be out there, or even if you'll see anything at all. So on top of the anticipation, there's a layer of uncertainty as well.
Then you hike. Through an actual, honest-to-god rainforest. The air is thick in your lungs, and there are six bird calls and a dozen kinds of insect noises in your ears at all times. A guy with a machete slashes through the greenery in front of you, and a guy with a machine gun ("in case of rampaging elephants") brings up the rear, and you're holding a big stick and trying not to let the strange plants touch you and it feels like an old-fashioned* adventure story.
This whole time, the guide is drip feeding you intel. We've found the trail. The trackers have heard some calls. We know where they're headed. They've seen one. They're over the next hill. It's all part of the process, but it definitely helps crank up the tension as well.
And then you crest a hill, and stop. The guide tells you that the family is in this valley, and you start to descend. You wait, and the gorillas put on their show. The leaves rustle. There's an alarmingly close grunt. A hairy grey-black arm appears, then vanishes.
And they appear, ambling out into the clearing as if they own it, which I guess they do.
Your guide tells you your one hour starts now, and the gorillas are far too close and far too big for this to feel as safe as you're assured this is as their group moves through yours like you're made of different kinds of matter.
Relief and fear and wonder and anxiety at your limited time swirl together, and yeah, maybe your eyes would get a bit watery from that potent emotional cocktail all on their own.
But I think what got me, in the end, was this.
It's the fact that we are so physically similar, and clearly both thinking, feeling, complex, and yet the gulf between us is so much bigger than that 2% difference in our DNA would suggest. Even that tiny difference is so vast that we have basically nothing in common.
We are clearly so similar, and yet we also clearly don't live in the same world.
You want to empathise, to understand, so badly, but you realise so quickly that you have no foundation, no common ground to start from.
It's like looking out across a canyon which wasn't visible until you got to the edge.
And it was that - not the heat, or the exhaustion, but that sense of interspecies empathetic vertigo - that really teared me up.
And hey, if you want to get a little taste of that without having to fly to Uganda and trek through a tropical mountain forest for six hours, can I recommend An Immense World by Ed Yong? No gorllias, but it does a better job than anything else I've read at trying to put you inside another living thing's world, as unfiltered through our human experience as possible.
We'll be back next hotspot with another Grace-a-gram - this time, exploring the other safari we've been on.
Catch you then!
Rocky and Grace.
* and yes, a little bit colonial.