Virunga

Virunga is the oldest national park in Africa — drawn in 1925 as the Albert park — and the most various: seven thousand eight hundred square kilometres running north from Lake Kivu along the Congo's eastern border, from the volcanoes of the Virunga massif, where a third of the world's mountain gorillas live in the bamboo of the Mikeno sector, past the Nyiragongo, whose crater holds the largest lava lake on Earth and whose eruptions of 2002 and May 2021 sent the lava to the edge of Goma, to the hippos of the Semliki, Lake Edward and Ishango, where a bone notched twenty thousand years ago is the oldest arithmetic anyone has found, and on to the snows of the Rwenzori. Its headquarters at Rumangabo hold the Mikeno Lodge and the Senkwekwe centre for orphaned gorillas; its rangers, more than two hundred of whom have died for it, are the reason there is still a park; and Goma, the city on the lake at its gate, is where every journey into it began.

When the doors open, the traveller will come in through Goma — from Kigali in three hours, or by the lake from Bukavu — and take the park in the order it asks: a night at Rumangabo among the orphans and the rangers; the morning at Bukima, walking up through the fields and into the forest to sit an hour with a gorilla family in the bamboo; the climb of the Nyiragongo, five hours to the huts on the rim and a night watching the lava lake breathe red below; a day on Lake Kivu at Tchegera, the crescent island with the volcano across the water; and, with time and the roads, the north — the Semliki, the hippos, the lodge at Ishango, the mountains.

The Guide's honesty, which here is a vow: this postal waits with its lamps lit. Virunga's tourism has been closed since the war returned to the Kivus — the M23 rebellion of 2022 reached the park's sectors, Goma fell in January 2025, and the Guide sends no travellers where it cannot promise them a road home; the gorillas have their rangers, the volcano keeps its lake, and neither is going anywhere. When the mornings at Bukima are ordinary again — a tracker's whistle, a family in the bamboo, the huts on the rim with the lava below and nothing louder —, the doors below will fill like all the others, and Virunga will be the first climb out of Goma. Africa's oldest park never left the map; neither does the Guide.