National Post ePaper

OFF THE BEATEN PATH

IN EAST AFRICA, RARE MOUNTAIN GORILLAS ARE THE CENTREPIECE IN A NEW PARADIGM FOR WILDLIFE TRAVEL

Henry Wismayer

LOTS OF PEOPLE WERE SCRAMBLING TO CONVERT BOOKINGS INTO FUTURE ARRANGEMENTS … BUT THE START OF THE PANDEMIC WAS ACTUALLY A VERY INTERESTING PERIOD; EVERYBODY SUDDENLY HAD TIME TO TAKE STOCK AND THINK ABOUT NEW IDEAS. — MIHA LOGAR

In wistful moments, when I find myself daydreaming about the faraway places that have seldom felt so distant, I often linger on a border region of central Africa.

To the outside world, it’s a place that can be conjured by a single word: Virungas. That’s the Kinyarwandan name for the eight volcanoes — two active, six dormant — that stand sentinel over the tripartite border of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. In between them, deep freshwater lakes, carved by millenniums of tectonic shifts on the western branch of the Great Rift Valley, dot verdant lowlands. And on the volcanic slopes, which grow thick with Afromontane forest, live the 1,000 or so remaining mountain gorillas, arguably the most coveted wildlife encounter on Earth.

In many respects, these remote and geopolitically volatile borderlands might seem like an unlikely place to seek solutions for the crisis of travel in the COVID era. But here, too, people are grappling with existential questions: Will the coming months see travel, aided by vaccine rollout, rebound to something like 2019 levels? Or is the rest of 2021 better viewed as an opportunity to reform and reset, to build something better from the rubble?

For Miha Logar, a travel industry veteran in this part of East Africa, the answer was obvious from the moment the first cancellations pinged into his inbox.

“It was clear pretty quickly that this was going to change everything,” he says. “We knew we had to innovate to survive.”

Logar, who is originally from Slovenia, first arrived in Uganda in 1999 as a student journalist researching a thesis on the potential of the internet to transform the lives of female farmers. Two years later, bewitched by the area, he launched the social enterprise that would become his life’s work.

“I had this idea of creating a window onto this region of Africa,” he tells me, on a video call from his home in Musanze, in northern Rwanda.

Starting out with a collection of huts on the north shore of Lake Bunyonyi, in Uganda’s southwest corner, Logar has since pursued all sorts of ventures. Over the years he has opened a hostel in Kabale, curated an ethnographic museum, organized a regional cooking contest, and overseen a boutique publishing operation. But it has all been in the service of one abiding mission: to formulate an identity for the region Logar has come to call home, and to shape its tourism economy in a way that directly benefits local people and nature.

Today, Logar, who is 46, presides over an organization that runs tours in all three countries of what he calls “the Gorilla Highlands,” the putative brand of the transboundary region in which it operates. Most of these tours are determinedly off-track, lingering in backcountry that no other tour groups cover.

In early 2020, as the coronavirus surged across Europe, the large group bookings of German tourists and British students, which had been the backbone of the calendar in previous years, were soon postponed indefinitely, then cancelled.

In common with most sub-saharan countries, coronavirus rates in this part of Africa have stayed low over the intervening months. But inbound travel over the last year has nevertheless collapsed to a trickle.

“Lots of people were scrambling to convert bookings into future arrangements, asking clients to pay now, travel later,” Logar says. “But the start of the pandemic was actually a very interesting period; everybody suddenly had time to take stock and think about new ideas.”

Logar’s response was characteristically inventive. On Feb. 1, he launched Gorilla Highlands Experts, a membership service for people who want to learn about and engage with this singular part of East Africa. After a free trial period, subscribers pay $10 per month for access to a proprietary menu of online resources, events and virtual tours. As travel opens up, members will also be invited to take part in special events such as the Gorilla Highlands Mega Trek, a multi-week transboundary journey from Lake Bunyonyi in Uganda to Bukavu in Congo, scheduled for December.

Daily content is produced by the “Experts” of the project’s handle, a roster that includes primatologists, historians, cartographers and local musicians. One day, award-winning chef Ramadhan ‘Rama’ Sindayigaga is sharing twists on regional specialties like spicy sambaza fish. The next, photographer Marcus Westberg, whose photos accompany this article, is contextualizing some of his favourite images. Several national park staff members will be chipping in with blog posts, too.

“Not many people know about our park,” says Gloria Mwenge Bitomwa, tourism director of Kahuzi Biega National Park, in Congo, west of Lake Kivu.

“This platform gives us an opportunity to raise awareness.”

In the same way Substack or Patreon might enable people to support creators directly, this new model will become a locus for people who have already been to the Gorilla Highlands region, as well as a planning portal for people who might wish to go there in the future, Logar hopes. The membership fees, he says, will help sustain the project during slack periods. But, perhaps more ambitiously, the model could also counteract the atomized way that many people perceive and experience the wider world.

The one-stop-shop concept was inspired by a problem that long predated the pandemic: Visitors to the Gorilla Highlands were not staying long enough. In many ways this was a consequence of prevailing travel habits. Ever-improving transport links, combined with East African tourism’s long association with animal-watching and all-inclusive luxury, meant that most visitors to the region were landing in Kampala in Uganda or Kigali in Rwanda knowing nothing of their destination beyond the megafauna that might inhabit its wild corners.

The Virungas could scarcely be a better exemplar of this phenomenon. “Usually, travellers with a lot of money tend to travel fast,” Logar says. “They come here for one or two days then leave straight away because they have three or four other countries on the itinerary.”

This highlight-hopping tendency has inclined visitors toward short stays oriented around central Africa’s shiny object — mountain gorilla tracking — in marquee conservation areas, like Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, or Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. However, the Gorilla Highlands project has always focused more on its catchment’s less tangible assets, the stuff you don’t see in the international promotion campaigns. “We like to travel slow, stay in the community, go overland,” Logar says.

“That way the financial contribution is far more likely to reach local people.”

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2021-06-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

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