Forces of Nature

There’s a battle being fought at the heart of Africa, where rebel insurgents and the hunt for oil threaten Virunga National Park’s precious mountain gorillas. T+L reports on the pioneers who, by inviting the world in, are helping to save one of the planet’s most extraordinary ecosystems.

It was 3 a.m. on a moonless night in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I was unable to sleep. Perhaps it was the altitude. I was camped on the lip of a volcano at 11,400 feet, my mattress protected from the elements by a small A-frame hut. Far below, Mount Nyiragongo’s stew of lava glowed redder than blood. Growing restless, I got up and sat as close to the mile-wide crater as I dared, just a few feet from the edge. The wind whipped at my layers as I stared down into the swirling liquid, its surface a mosaic of steam and bubbles that sporadically spit and burst.

There beside Nyiragongo’s vast bowl, I couldn’t forget what had come before, the last time the volcano blew. It can, at times, contain a higher volume of lava than any other crater in the world, and when it exploded on January 17, 2002, lava flooded down its slopes in a stream that in places grew to more than half a mile wide. Unstoppable, it made its way to Goma, 12 miles away, at a time when the city, deep in the midst of civil war, already looked like hell on earth. More than a tenth of the city was destroyed, 400,000 people were evacuated, and whole communities were left homeless.

If it felt like I was sitting beside the earth’s volatile, beating heart, in many ways I was. Mount Nyiragongo is one of two active volcanoes in a string of eight known collectively as the Virungas. This mighty range straddles three countries and forms the divide between English- and French-speaking Africa. The mountains are protected by three contiguous reserves: Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda, and Virunga National Park in the eastern DRC. Between them, they cover some 3,000 square miles of territory at Africa’s geographical center. They are also a key continental watershed, their springs feeding both the Congo and the Nile rivers. All this makes the Virungas the regional axis around which everything seems to turn, with the area contained within the DRC the wildest and most undiscovered of all.

sourced:travelandleisure.com