“Welcome to the jungle,” says Kwizera Diogene as we climb over a wall of volcanic rocks into dense greenery. There’s rustling among the trees, the sound of animals moving through branches. We look around for signs of life.
There is one animal that most people come from around the world to Volcanoes National Park to see: the mountain gorilla. But these are not them. The trees around us are alive instead with something smaller and nimbler: golden monkeys.
We watch them move through the canopy, leaping from branch to branch, pausing to groom and feed. Their coats are bright tangerine and black, their faces grey, with puffed-out cheeks in which they store food as they eat. They occasionally look back at us with expressive orange eyes.
The golden monkey is the only other primate that lives alongside mountain gorillas in these mountainous forests. Volcanoes National Park is one of only two areas where they still exist: the Virunga massif, which spreads across Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); and Gishwati Forest in north-western Rwanda.
Like the gorillas,
