Gorilla trekking is one of the sought after tourism activities that largely contribute to the influx of tourists into the East African region. Most tourists visit Uganda mainly to take gorilla safaris, a popular adventure where travelers visit the mountain gorillas and meet face to face in the wild. Among these countries is Uganda and particularly in the impenetrable forest of Bwindi and Mgahinga national park.In a bid to conserve these primates,the government of Uganda through its department of Uganda Wildlife Authority introduced gorilla permits issued to whoever wants to visit these primates in order to limit on the number of clients that do visit these primates on a daily basis.
Initially these permits have all along been bought in person from the Uganda wildlife offices and especially through the tour operator companies.However,the Uganda Wildlife Authority is set to launch online gorilla-tracking, to promote tourism around the primates globally. Through the friendagorilla.org website to be launched very soon, gorilla lovers worldwide will have a chance to befriend any of Uganda’s gorillas from the ten habituated groups at a cost of one dollar or its equivalent.
The website will also have other sections like Geo-Track, where one can track gorillas using actual Global Positioning System co-ordinates that the authority’s gorilla trackers will be provided with regularly. In addition, the site will have a section for virtual tracking. Gorilla lovers will be able to track the gorillas online in real time. Fees for the electronic tracking are yet to be determined. Currently, the authority charges $600 per permit per in high season and $350 in low season per day to track a single family.
Saachi & Saachi is an art digital positioning company that has been contracted to work on this project and they said that they will have cameras placed strategically in the forest and when you log on, you will see a gorilla moving in the forest from your screen.
To befriend the primates, subscribers will pay the one dollar by way of short messages using their mobile phones, Master or Visa card. Online trackers will able to add gorillas as friends on Internet social sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.
If it succeeds, the project will make $700,000 annually. The money will be used to hire more trackers to bring the number to 45 from 25; buy communication equipment for the trackers and a special power generator that is less noisy.The money raised will also go towards conservation efforts through community projects and help bring the gorillas to the living rooms of many more people.
The online gorilla tracking project is one of the major marketing efforts undertaken by the government, considering that gorillas are the country’s biggest tourism attraction. Last year the industry earned the country $600 million, of which $225 million was from gorilla tourism.Corporates have also been given a chance to support the project by sponsoring web pages for a whole year.The new marketing strategy coincides with the UN declaration of 2009 is the Year of the Gorilla.
The aim is to raise awareness on the need to conserve gorillas, which are considered endangered because of human activities like habitat destruction through logging, burning and clearing of land for agriculture, hunting and trapping by poachers, diseases and armed conflicts.
There are about 880 gorillas left worldwide,about 420 (nearly half of the population) are in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. The rest are found in the Virunga habitat shared between Rwanda, Uganda and DR Congo, with Uganda’s Mgahinga Gorilla national park protecting the northern volcanic slopes.
The designers of the online strategy are optimistic that the new marketing tool will attract more gorilla tourists from the United States and Europe where millions of people have access to the Internet and use social sites.
