The Price of One Hour with the Gorillas — Epoche B1
A permit to spend one hour with a mountain gorilla family in Rwanda costs, as of this writing, well over a thousand US dollars; in neighbouring Uganda it is roughly half that. Eight visitors a day per gorilla family, sixty minutes, no second hour. Many travellers call this greed. I think the price is doing a job. Consider what it pays for. Rangers walk the forest daily, veterinarians treat snare wounds, and a share of park income is returned to the villages at the foot of the volcanoes for schools, water and compensation when a buffalo eats a farmer's beans. Since the days when this population was thought to be near its end, the number of mountain gorillas has grown past a thousand, and conservation bodies have moved the animal off the most urgent danger list. Few wild animals can say the same. There is a Swahili saying: let the guest come, so that the host may prosper. Now the other side, honestly. A woman farming the slope below the park could not buy that permit in ten years of harvests. The gorillas are her neighbours, and she will most likely never see one. When one country raised its price sharply, some tour groups simply crossed the border to the cheaper forest, which shows how quickly a wall of money moves people around rather than protecting anything. Both governments now sell cheaper permits to their own citizens and to residents of the region, which is the beginning of an answer, not the end of one. The visitor should understand what the receipt really covers. It is not a photograph. It is the continued existence of the animal in the photograph. References Hickey, J. R., Basabose, A., Gilardi, K. V., Greer, D., Nampindo, S., Robbins, M. M., & Stoinski, T. S. (2018). Gorilla beringei ssp. beringei. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2018. IUCN, Gland. Maekawa, M., Lanjouw, A., Rutagarama, E., & Sharp, D. (2013). Mountain gorilla tourism generating wealth and peace in post-conflict Rwanda. Natural Resources Forum, 37(2), 127-137. Nielsen, H., & Spenceley, A. (2011). The success of tourism in Rwanda: gorillas and more. In Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. World Bank, Washington DC.