Volcanoes National Park is a chain of five volcanoes in northern Rwanda that climb from terraced farmland into bamboo and cloud forest, and it is where you walk into the forest to sit for an hour with a family of mountain gorillas. There are only about a thousand mountain gorillas left on Earth, all of them in these mountains and in two forests nearby, and none has ever survived in a zoo; the only way to see one is to go to them. Groups of eight set out from the park headquarters each morning with guides and trackers, each group assigned to one habituated family, and the walk can take one hour or five, through nettles and mud, up the flank of a volcano. Then the trackers stop, and a silverback twice your weight sits in the vegetation a few metres away, eating, while infants roll and a mother watches you with an expression you recognise. You keep back, wear a mask because a human cold can kill them, and after an hour you leave.
The volcanoes carry old Kinyarwanda names that read like descriptions: Sabyinyo, the old man's teeth, for its jagged rim, and Muhabura, the guide, whose cone once glowed as a beacon at night. Bisoke is climbed to a round green crater lake about 400 metres across that fills its summit, a steep haul through afro-alpine slopes. A muddy trail climbs to the ruins of Karisoke, the research station where Dian Fossey studied the gorillas for eighteen years, and to the small graveyard where she is buried among them, beside Digit, the gorilla whose killing by poachers she never got over. In the bamboo belt live golden monkeys, found only in these mountains, a shorter and gentler trek. Since 2005 Rwanda has held a ceremony each year to name the gorilla infants born in the park, more than four hundred so far, borrowed from the way families name a newborn child. The gorillas have names, the park has kept them alive, and the hour you spend with them is the reason the country protects the forest.