Kahuzi-Biega National Park is a mountain forest in the South Kivu province of eastern DR Congo, above the city of Bukavu on Lake Kivu, the only place on Earth to walk up to habituated Grauer's gorillas, the largest primate alive, on a mountain fought over for thirty years, and it is tracked from the station at Tshivanga at dawn, with an hour spent a few metres from a family led by a silverback of 200 kilograms. Grauer's gorilla is the eastern lowland gorilla, bigger than the mountain gorilla of Rwanda and far rarer, its numbers cut by three-quarters in the wars and the mining of the region, and the families of the highland sector have been habituated since the 1970s; the trackers go out at dawn to find the family, then lead the visitors off the path into nettles, vines and mud, reading last night's nests and freshly chewed stems, and once the family is found the clock starts, the animals eating, dozing and grooming as if no one were there. The famous silverback Mugaruka lost a hand to a poacher's snare when young and led a family for years, and the bamboo the gorillas once gorged on for three months a year has stopped shooting in parts of the forest.
The park takes its name from the two volcanoes at its heart, and the trail to the summit of Kahuzi at 3,308 metres takes four hours, passing from bamboo into a subalpine belt of heather and tree groundsel, while the Tshibati trail runs a couple of hours through rainforest along a river to three waterfalls stepping down through the trees, with a plunge pool cold enough to make the walk back easy. The Batwa were living in this forest when the park was drawn around them and were evicted without being asked, a wrong the park is still arguing over. June to August are the only genuinely dry months, when the clay slopes firm up. Kahuzi-Biega is the mountain of the biggest ape, and the war has not stopped the trackers.