I’m in Kigali, writing on a French keyboard that makes typing seem like a game of hit-and-miss, like trying to play poker while looking through a chicken.

Overview: Kenya is full of guns. In colonial days, they tried to exterminate the elephants (whose populations are now on the rise, thankfully); today, the good guys have guns, the bad guys have guns, and pretty much every building or parking lot has a guard with a semi-automatic rifle. This includes all the little villages, not just Nairobi. Guns are everywhere in Kenya. The government seems to have just enough money for security and corruption with nothing left over.

Uganda is in slightly better shape (i actually saw a Lexus dealership, which puts it above Kenya), but ALL roads there are Jeep trails, including the main ones that look like tarmac on the map. Driving in Uganda is a contact sport – dodging potholes that are always as deep as they are long while dodging trucks that are NOT trying to dodge you.

Rwanda is France compared to the other two, though there isn’t a single movie theater in the entire country. There are smooth paved roads everywhere, as though Bill Clinton could show up at any time and there would be hell to pay if his Mercedes bumped his latte.

I am driving on the right side of the road in a right-hand-drive car, which is sort of like being a mailman: the steering wheel is on the right, which puts me near the side of the road, while Beatrice, who has no control, is sitting nearest the on-coming traffic. This requires two people to pass a slow-moving vehicle, and a valium for Beatrice, who is scared shitless for good reason. Everyone travels by the side of the road, often pushing bicycles loaded with 100kg of bananas or potatoes, so theres really only a center lane left for traffic. the large trucks and buses make a sport of driving down the middle – they laugh as the other drivers like us are forced off the road onto the dirt at 80 kph.

Monday we saw the gorillas! We hiked 2.5 hours and 2.5 kilofeet to a misty forest where every third bush is a stinging nettle. I had given Beatrice a hard time about her bringing so much gear (she has enough mosquito repellent to denude Vietnam), but she was comfortable tromping after the gorillas and taking GREAT photos while i got the full immune-system response and was covered with welts. They taught us to find lobelia leaves, break them, and rub the juice on our skin to calm the redness, so I was easy to spot – I was the guy covered in lobelia leaves.

Oh yeah, we spent an hour with the gorillas. Its cold that high up on the side of the volcano, so they are covered with hair so long they look like black yetis, and they are HUGE! They have harems. The silverback was about 240 kilos. His head was the size of a middle-age warthog. They happily munched greens and relaxed as we, the papparazzi in gore-tex gear, took their photos. It seemed as though they were posing for the white monkeys with the lenses.

- by David Siegel