In Uganda in 2009, Greg Cummings established Gorillaland Safaris, with the aim of guiding clients in safety and comfort to meet gorillas in the wild. Greg had achieved notable success as director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK protecting gorilla populations in Africa. The millions of dollars, euros and pounds he raised from companies, foundations and individuals around the world was invested into communities adjacent to gorilla habitats, which helped ensure the gorillas' survival. It's Greg's proudest achievement.
As a veteran safari guide, he has taken movie producers, heads of industry, diplomats, and celebrities to meet great apes in the wild. After trekking with him in the Congo jungle, Steve McQueen, who won a Best Picture Oscar for Twelve Years A Slave, remarked, “Basically he’s Dennis Hopper out of Apocalypse Now!”
Greg is a consummate storyteller who has appeared with Tom Brokaw on Today, participated in documentaries for the BBC, NPR, and CBC, and published articles in The Guardian, Sea Angler, and Ecologist. His books - two action adventure novels, Gorillaland and Pirates, and a memoir, Gorilla Tactics: How to Save a Species - are all set in Africa.
Karen Blixen
“These animals are not only so closely linked to us and have similar trains of thought, but they took over seven million years to develop into these perfections of nature and we cant afford to wipe them out in the blink of an eye”
“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape coul
“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.”
“I had been around other great apes, and I had never had such a feeling. Yet here, among a group of gorillas, creatures that did not look or smell like human beings, I had the distinct sense that we all understood one another. It was overpowering, and sad. When I left them, it was like awakening from a dream.”
“Gorilla Tactics is the remarkable journey of an inveterate hustler, moving from the universe of Arthur C. Clarke to the volcanoes of Virunga. Greg Cummings pursues the very rich and the very famous, always for one single goal, his passion and raison d’être, the survival of the gorilla. This is an extraordinary account of an extraordinary life.”
—Peter Gabriel, musician
“Ziz was barely two meters away from me. Weighing around 220 kilos, he was enormous. It was touching to watch such a large and fearsome beast sweetly play games with his young, letting them climb on his back and roll down his belly. Occasionally, with breast-beats and grunts, he warded off his horny adjutants from his females. He paid no attention to us bald apes. Suddenly, he rose to his full height and beat his chest. I swallowed my heart....A handful of curious females came near and began examining me. Mtwali, an adolescent female, rolled onto her back and touched my knee with her hand. She then started fondling the lapel of my raincoat, then slowly reached up and touched my cheek. My heart soared. I was deeply flattered by her advances. Meanwhile, Effie, the group’s matriarch, who was helping a new mother wean her infant, glanced at me with dark, cognizant eyes. No other wild animal had ever looked at me with such presence of mind.”
“It was ten o’clock at night. The forest seethed with ceaseless nocturnal calls: crickets, frogs, and the occasional chimpanzee pan hoot. There was another sound, unusual for that time of night. It was coming from two different locations in a densely jungled ridge that rose from the boundary of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park on the opposite side of the valley from where we were situated. In the flickering light of a hurricane lamp, Jillian and I sat silently together on the veranda of “Weaver,” a luxury tent with wooden flooring, sipping iced Amarula and Makers’s Mark, respectively, and listening intently to the darkness. Again we heard the sound in the forested ridge opposite. To the untrained ear, it sounded like the panicked flapping of a giant bird, but we knew it to be two silverbacks one-upping each other with chest beats. The somnambulant silverbacks continued their aggravated exchange for an hour. What could have gotten them up at such a time when mountain gorillas are usually tucked up and asleep in their night nests?”
“Of all my encounters with gorillas, this one’s the most memorable, for many reasons. It’s World Gorilla Day, the temperature is around twenty-four degrees Celsius (seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit), with a few high stratus clouds to take the edge off the equatorial sun, and we are tracking Sabyinyo group. I’d met them a dozen times before, but not in the last five years. I’m excited about seeing Guhonda, whom I first met in 1996 when he was a stroppy young silverback who needed little provocation to charge. We find the group about three kilometers from the Congo border. Guhonda sits like Buddha in the shadow of the canopy, not as haggard as I expected the oldest silverback in Virunga to be. His deep cognizant gaze meets mine and holds it for longer than I am prepared for. That’s not to say he recognizes me, though he seems to be prying into my psyche with his gaze. He outgazes me.”
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Welcome to Gorillaland! Come visit me and my hairy mountain cousins in the wild. We're closer than you think...