The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

INTO THE CONGO Jess i ca Si lber

F orty feet beneath me, one hundred feet above me, and for a hundred-mile radius around me, the forest was bellowing. Standing on the raised camp deck, I was eye-level with the canopy of the Congo Basin. The chirps, howls, hoots, and screams that surrounded me suggested a place rich with life, but the sounds were disembodied. My eyes probed the landscape. I saw clusters of vines seize and shake; I saw leaves release from branches and float downward. But I never saw the twitch of a tail, or the flutter of wings, or the grip of the horny foot that shook them loose. This was frustrating because I was here to see. Gorillas, specifically. Six hours earlier, I had arrived in Odzala-Kokoua National Park with seven other gorilla pilgrims—all Americans who’d endured the paperwork, cost, and 24-plus hours of flying to come to the Republic of the Congo, just to experience a moment in the presence of the world’s last western lowland gorillas. In the gray haze of morning, our aircraft rolled onto a lawn that had been scooped out of the jungle specifically to welcome pilgrims like us. I stepped out of the fuselage and took my first look at the second-largest rain forest on earth. I saw an obscure thicket of vegetation under a heavy sky.

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