DR Congo

The largest block of intact lowland tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin and accessible only by water or air, Salonga National Park stretches across 36,000 square kilometers in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo, making it the largest tropical rainforest reserve in all of Africa, and one of the most important ecosystems on earth. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. A carbon sink of global significance. A place so vast and so intact that it remains, in large parts, scientifically unexplored. What lives here exists on a different register from almost anywhere else in Africa. Salonga protects approximately 15,000 bonobos, possibly 40% of the entire world population, making it the largest expanse of legally protected bonobo habitat on earth. The bonobo — our closest great ape relative alongside the chimpanzee, matriarchal, peaceful, and found only in the Congo Basin moves through these forests in ways science is still working to fully understand. To encounter one in Salonga is not just a wildlife sighting. It is a meeting with something irreplaceable. The Congo peafowl, a bird so rare it remained undiscovered by science until the 20th century, lives here. Forest elephants move through the undergrowth. Golden cats hunt the shadows. Sitatunga antelopes wade through the swamp forest. Pangolins, ancient and armored, forage through the leaf litter of a forest that has never been logged, never been farmed, never been anything other than exactly what it is. Salonga does not offer itself easily. It rewards the committed traveler who understands that the most extraordinary places on earth are not always the most comfortable to reach, and that the reward for getting here is something that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.

Established in 1925 to protect the mountain gorillas of the Virunga volcanoes, Virunga National Park has spent the century since quietly accumulating superlatives. With a bird checklist of 706 different species, more birds than in the entire United States of America, it is the most biodiverse protected area on the African continent. It contains the largest concentration of hippopotamuses in Africa, 20,000 individuals living on the banks of Lake Edward and along the great rivers of eastern Congo. Both savanna elephants and forest elephants reside here, one of the few places in the world where both species coexist. And it does all of this against a backdrop of active volcanoes, Rwenzori peaks, and a landscape so varied it encompasses equatorial forest, high alpine moorland, savanna grassland, and volcanic lava fields within a single park boundary. At its heart, as it has always been, are the gorillas. Mountain gorillas in the volcanic south. Eastern lowland gorillas in the lowland forest. Twenty-two primate species in total, three of them critically endangered mountain gorillas, eastern lowland gorillas, and chimpanzees, all sharing a park that has fought, sometimes at terrible human cost, to keep them alive. Over 800 rangers protect Virunga around the clock, in a region that has known armed conflict for decades. They do it because they understand that what lives inside these borders cannot be replaced. Not anywhere. Not ever. Mount Nyiragongo, one of the world's most active volcanoes, rises within the park's southern sector, its summit crater holding a permanent lava lake that glows orange against the night sky in one of the most dramatic natural spectacles on earth. To hike to its rim at dusk and watch the lava churn in the darkness below is to feel the planet's raw, volcanic energy in a way that no words adequately describe. The okapi, endemic to the tropical forests of the DRC, once thought locally extinct, has rebounded in the park since its rediscovery in 2006. This extraordinary animal, striped like a zebra, bodied like a horse, related to the giraffe, moves through the northern forest as it has for millennia, shy and solitary and magnificent. Virunga is not an easy park to visit. Its security situation is complex and requires careful planning with trusted operators. But for those who come for the gorillas, the volcano, the hippos on Lake Edward, the 706 species of birds, the okapi in the northern forest, it is not simply a safari. It is a confrontation with what is most ancient and most precious about the natural world.