60 minutes overtime
this week on 60 minutes we went to rwanda and it was one of the first big trips we've taken after
a year and a half when travel was restricted we went there because of mountain gorillas
it was very uplifting i don't know about you but i love animals and particularly primates and
gorillas are very special because when you look into their eyes you see yourself you see humans
i'd actually gone to see the gorillas before gosh i hate to admit it but maybe 20 30 years ago
and even then the climb was very difficult so i decided that i would go into stamina training
you're going pretty quick which i did for almost two months
but then i got to rwanda and we started the trek up
oh boy and i hadn't been trained for the altitude we're at eight thousand two hundred feet mountain
gorillas very rocky the terrain kept changing it's even hard going down we had porters with us and
it is encouraged because it's a great source of revenue for the communities i had a border named
fidel and he all but carried me most of the way so fidel you seem to know every little rock for me to
so he was born here ah so it's like he walking through his village
whenever i stumbled he was right there
so fidel thank you once we got into the park it was quite beautiful it's a lush bamboo forest
we had to sort of squeeze ourselves in a way through the stalks
we finally found the gorillas
you get pretty close and you can see how they spend their time
one of my favorite things is a shot in the piece of this
little baby gorilla just three months old and the mother kept tucking the baby under her arm
and moving and the poor cameraman kept having to maneuver to get a shot every time he got in place
the mother she must have known what was going on because she'd turn and then start climbing
it happened several times we were about to give up and all of a sudden the mother fell asleep
and we were able to get the perfect shot of this little three-month-old baby see the baby
you know we all go to zoos we all see animals there
but to be in the habitat you can see how close to us they really are when mothers hug their babies
it just is the way we do it and they groom okay we don't groom but there you are
and all of a sudden these teenage boys start wrestling oh my goodness yeah they're happening
serious they're having a ball it's just the way our teenage boys wrestle they're playing
you are struck by how close we are to these animals and you can't not
become a conservationist it just overwhelms you how important it is that these people
that these people i call them people that these animals remain on this earth and
that we help do whatever we can to build the population continue to build the populations
you