Earth's Most
Primal Frontier

I stepped off the plane into the violet-grey dawn of Kinshasa and immediately felt the scale of the country I was entering. The Congo River — 4,700 kilometres long, the world's deepest at over 200 metres — was already visible from the road, a sheet of dark copper in the early light, wider than most seas I've crossed.

The city hums with a particular energy: Lingala music leaking from street-side speakers, pirogue boats threading the riverbank, the smell of grilled fish and roasting corn drifting across the Boulevard du 30 Juin. This is Africa's third-largest city, and it refuses to be quiet.

The summit of Nyiragongo is at 3,470 metres. You arrive at the crater rim after a 3–4 hour hike through misty afro-alpine forest, and then — nothing prepares you — a lake of liquid lava appears below, bubbling and churning in deep reds and molten oranges, illuminating the night sky from within. The world's largest persistent lava lake. Alive. One of the most extraordinary sights on the planet.

We slept in metal huts on the crater rim, cooking our dinner by the light of a volcano.

The gorilla families of the Virunga Massif — shared between DRC, Rwanda and Uganda — represent roughly half of the world's mountain gorilla population. Our guide, Patrice, had tracked these particular families for eleven years. He knew their sounds before we saw them. And then, through the bamboo, a silverback the size of a boulder turned and regarded us with quiet, ancient authority.