Rwanda

There are wildlife encounters, and then there is Rwanda. A small country, the size of Galicia, harbouring the planet's last mountain gorillas. Fewer than a thousand individuals remain in the wild, scattered among the mists of the Virunga volcanoes. And you can visit them. The gorilla tracking experience is hard to describe in words. You walk for hours through mountain jungle, following trackers who locate families each day. And suddenly, among the vegetation, they appear. Enormous, gentle, profoundly familiar. An hour with them—the maximum time permitted—passes in a heartbeat. But Rwanda is more than gorillas. It is also chimpanzees in Nyungwe Forest, one of Africa's oldest montane forests. It is Akagera National Park, where they have reintroduced the Big Five. It is Kigali, one of Africa's cleanest and safest cities, with a recent history that deserves to be known and respected. And it is those thousand green hills that give the country its name, covered in tea and coffee plantations producing some of the world's finest beans.