Planet of the apes: Ngaga Camp in Odzala-Kokoua National Park is engulfed by the lowland rainforest of the Congo Basin, Africa’s most biodiverse landscape and home to 60,000 lowland gorillas
SCOTT RAMSAY
In the middle of the Congo jungle, a family of gorillas looked down from their perches in the towering trees above us.
Thunder boomed across equatorial skies and soon it started raining, a deluge of heavy water that plummeted from dense clouds. At 3.7 million sq km — 16 times bigger than the UK — the immense Congo Basin drains the second largest river on the planet, and is the second largest rainforest system on the planet, after the Amazon (5.5 million sq km). Even today when most of the planet seems mapped and Googled, the vast rainforests of Central Africa are seemingly mythical in the finds of humans.