Rwanda gorilla tours Travel guide All hail the silverback

Magic mountain ... a mountain gorilla makes an appearance.. Photo: Ariadne Van ZandbergenLonely Rosetta Stone software Pl Homa Khaleeli walks among mountain gorillas, active volcanoes and a garden memorial in a country in recovery. 'You cannot fall off and if you do, I will catch you," Imaani lies cheerfully. On my first day in Rwanda - and Africa - on my first ever motorbike ride, I am terrified. Wearing a helmet that bounces off my head at every bump, and with my eyes shut, I cling to the back of one of the two-wheeled taxis that ply the capital's streets. When I respond to Imaani's pleas and look around, I find the scenery is enough to distract even the most nervous passenger. Kigali, with its population of a million, creeps up four of the emerald ridges that give the country its nickname, "the land of a thousand hills", before sinking into the mist-filled valleys between. Officially the most densely populated country in Africa, Rwanda's small size (about half that of Scotland) means even its capital has the peaceful air of a village. One woman from the Ivory Coast who I met on the plane confides ruefully: "People stay at home with their families at night. We say it is a place for retired people." Sure enough, it doesn't take long for the shiny banks and tangled market streets to give way to lush farms and neatly dressed office workers to women toting bananas on their heads. Advertisement: Story continues below We arrive in mid-December - the tail end of the rainy season when bougainvillea and frangipani flowers stud the green hills. With my sister bumping over the potholes on a motorbike next to me, we drive along a steep mud road up the hill after which the city is named, Mount Kigali. Whizzing past waving children, robed dancers and a Rosetta Stone Italian church choir, we smile in delight at the postcard-perfect scenes of rural life. Our motorcycle ride is a shot of holiday euphoria after an emotional morning. There are few unmissable sites in Kigali and the genocide memorial centre is one of them. Here, we wander through carefully tended gardens and flowering trellises to the concrete-covered mass graves of a quarter of a million genocide victims; new bodies are brought in every year. It's a heart-stopping reminder of the scale of the violence in 1994 when more than 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, were massacred in just 100 days in a campaign of organised violence, carried out largely by the majority Hutu population. Alongside an explanation of the history that led to the genocide (where the blame is squarely placed on colonial "divide and rule" tactics), one room documents the chilling fate of child victims: their names, ages and favourite foods carefully noted beside the brutal ways they were killed. One Rwandan woman is so overcome with grief watching a video of the aftermath of the killings, she lies sobbing quietly on the floor. With such a horrific recent past, it's unsurprising Rosetta Stone Japanese that Rwanda is far from being a tourist hot spot. But in the past 16 years the country has been transformed and this is finally being mirrored in the rising number of tourists willing to visit.