Consider Rwanda: The genocide is a fresh memory still, the neighbors are shady, and the health and social challenges staggering. But there's also a determined government, hands-on international aid, and travel riches galore. Klara Glowczewska goes on a reconnaissance and has the time of her life

Guhonda was some 450 pounds, measured over six feet when fully upright, and was shaggily, luxuriantly hirsute. Our eyes met repeatedly but fleetingly as he surveyed his terrain, and I was struck by how very nearly human his gaze was—97.7 percent of his DNA is identical to ours. Guhonda is a silverback (or sexually mature male) mountain gorilla, of the subspecies Gorilla beringei beringei. He is the dominant male in the Sabyinyo group, one of seven mountain gorilla families in Rwanda's northern Parc National des Volcans. I was crouching about ten feet away from him on the vertiginous, rain-forested slopes of a dormant volcano, seven of which, some up to 15,000 feet high, form the mountainous backbone of central Africa—"so high up," Dian Fossey wrote, "that you shiver more than you sweat." It had taken us—seven travelers, two armed trekkers, and one guide—two-and-a-half hours of climbing, grasping at vines and tree trunks and giant ferns to keep from falling backward, to reach the lair of the world's most critically endangered primate. There are, by last count, only some 650 mountain gorillas left in the world, and more than half of them are here in Rwanda.

Not only were there no bars separating us from Guhonda and the other seven members of his clan but, potentially more alarming, the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (and Uganda, as well) was within spitting distance of here. I'd heard choice expletives used in recent days to describe this eastern bit of the DRC: "Sh— hole of the world" probably said it best. Far from the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, it is a lawless realm of armed militias, some composed of ex–Rwandan Armed Forces members, former interahamwe (Hutu death squads), and other extremists, who pillage, murder, rape (on an almost unprecedented scale), conscript child soldiers, and are committed to, among sundry shadowy ambitions, the overthrow of the current Rwandan regime of President Paul Kagame (see page 194).

The border, I'd been told, was tight as a drum. Nine years ago, eight tourists doing just what we were now doing had been kidnapped and killed just across the border in Uganda, in a particularly grisly way, by Hutu rebels protesting American and British support for the governments of Uganda and Rwanda. The Rwandan government—determined to develop tourism, among other economic goals—cannot allow another such incident and is taking every precaution. All of which explained the presence of the armed guard who had been trailing us at a discreet, "I'm not really here" distance. "Occasionally one runs into a stray elephant or buffalo, before the terrain gets really steep," we'd been told. Fair enough—we had in fact stumbled upon an elephant footprint in the mud at the start of our trek. But we weren't fully buying the explanation: After all, our two trekkers were already armed. This guy was on a different mission, one seemingly best left unspoken.