Volcanoes National Park
in Rwanda

There are roughly a thousand mountain gorillas left in the world. About half of them live in the Virunga massif, and Volcanoes National Park is where Rwanda's share of that number make their home in the bamboo forests and hagenia woodland that cloak the slopes of five extinct volcanoes. An hour with a habituated family is one of the genuinely transformative wildlife experiences available anywhere: the sheer scale of a silverback at close range, the indifference of a juvenile swinging past your head, the particular stillness that settles over a group of humans in the presence of something that makes them feel, usefully, quite small. The lodges in the foothills have risen to match the occasion. Rwanda has done this exceptionally well.