“We like to be humble,” a fellow diner told me at a restaurant back in Kigali. “We don’t like to boast, or for one person to stand out.” I consider Rwanda the “quiet man of Africa,” so much so that conversations between newly acquainted compatriots above a certain age can be oddly restrained. The usual African icebreakers (“What’s your ethnicity?” “What of your parents?”) are sidestepped, personal histories buried beneath pain and conflict-averse silence. At Kigali’s Genocide Memorial, I read the names and ages displayed beneath personal photos of the victims in happier times. It brings home the horrors the country has overcome—and leaves me even more awed by what it’s managed to accomplish. Many young Rwandans don’t want to be defined by the genocide, and those who experienced the horror don’t want to revisit it. Instead, they work tirelessly together to reimagine Rwanda’s future. Fiery emotions lie dormant, like the volcanoes that dot the country’s northwest landscape.
I see those volcanoes rising from the horizon on my approach to the six-year-old Wilderness Bisate. The lodge’s six villas, shaped like oblong orbs with thatched roofs, are an intriguing blend of sci-fi and rustic; their sinuous balconies flow with nature rather than defy it. I find myself at eye level with a hagenia treetop that attracts yellow-bellied waxbills and Rwenzori double-collared sunbirds. The sight of the latter’s electric green-and-red plumage flitting among the branches grips me for several soothing minutes. Looming in the distance are the Bisoke, Karisimbi, and Mikeno volcanoes, a lenticular cloud hovering over Karisimbi’s summit like a billowy UFO. Much of the land between Karisimbi and the lodge may be converted to forest one day, as part of Bisate’s effort to restore pristine wilderness.
As I set out on a late-afternoon hike with Bisate’s agronomist, Jean-Moise Habimana, the valley reverberates with noises of village life lived outdoors: children shouting playfully, cows mooing, ingoma drums pounding in unspecified celebration. Habimana points out chameleons clinging to grasses and a jackal slinking among the bushes. We pass villagers standing waist high in a sea of white pyrethrum flowers, a natural pesticide that Rwandans harvest and sell. Plants like these are not indigenous—they were introduced by Europeans in the 1930s—which is why Bisate is on a mission to return this area to its natural state. I, like all guests, am invited to plant a tree. The lodge has enlisted a team of agronomists, including Habimana, to take inventory of all trees and sow native saplings. So far, Bisate has planted nearly 90,000 indigenous specimens, including redwoods and lobelia, to replace the invasive eucalyptus. The newly reforested acres are already working their magic: Golden monkeys and elephants, among other creatures, are back. Habimana points out a camera trap; fixed to a gate less than a mile from the lodge’s villas, its lens has captured serval cats, African buffalo, and bushbuck. Then Habimana whips out his phone to show me amazing footage of a hairy gorilla arm fleetingly entering the frame one night. When reforestation is complete, guests could conceivably glimpse these great apes from their balconies. But for now, at least by day, they stick to the main forest, where bamboo is abundant and humans are not.
I go searching for them in Volcanoes National Park the following morning with a group of guests from nearby lodges. We begin by walking through bean and pyrethrum fields, past cute children who holler “Hello!” and a porch where a man sculpts bas-reliefs on a wooden cane. After less than an hour of hacking through thickets of bamboo, we encounter the Hirwa (“lucky one”) gorilla family. Lying in a shaded clearing and chewing bamboo, the animals have the look of mine workers resting after their labors. I wonder what they’re thinking about. It certainly isn’t us: A female emerges from behind me and brushes past like I’m leaf-patterned wallpaper. Her proximity—a matter of inches—is momentarily terrifying but utterly exhilarating. Later, an adult male sitting 15 feet from me suddenly stands and beats his chest. I instinctively ball up in terror, but nothing happens. Gorillas are given to these sudden displays of dominance, says our guide, Fidele Nsengiyumva, who, well-versed in their emotions, never flinches. “They make 16 different sounds,” he explains, including belches for contentment and whines for distress. Isango, a 300-pound adult male, takes a long pee and then stamps his feet hard, a series of thunderous whumps to the soil. The toddlers, meanwhile, are as unintentionally entertaining as their human counterparts. One holds a twig between his lips like a B-movie gangster, his hands resting on a branch slung over his shoulders.
