12 Day Rwanda In Depth Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight and takes you into the city. Depending on your arrival we go straight to the Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi, resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, inaugurated in 2004. Allow three hours and take the audio guide, which sets a better pace than the printed panels. The permanent exhibition covers how the genocide took shape, with a children’s memorial and a section on genocide elsewhere in the twentieth century, and the wall of names outside is still being added to. Photography is restricted in parts of the site and staff will tell you where. Afterwards we take you to your hotel and leave the evening free, because the visit stays with people and nobody should go from Gisozi into a market. Dinner somewhere quiet in Kiyovu or Kimihurura and an early night after the flight.

The capital on its own terms, which almost no Rwandan itinerary allows for. We start at the Kandt House Museum, former home of the German physician who became the first colonial administrator and founded Kigali, covering Rwandan society before colonisation and the period that followed. Then Camp Kigali, where ten Belgian UN peacekeepers were killed in the opening days of the genocide, marked by ten stone columns of differing heights, one for each man’s age. In the afternoon, the Nyamirambo walking tour run by the Nyamirambo Women’s Centre: a local guide takes small groups through the oldest quarter of the city, into a hair salon and a tailoring workshop, past the mosque and into a family home, finishing with a meal you help cook. We close at the Inema Arts Centre, founded by two self taught painter brothers and now the best known gallery in the region, with resident artists working on site.

East out of the capital, roughly 110 kilometres and two to two and a half hours to Akagera’s southern gate, stopping at Nyakarambi where a women’s cooperative still makes imigongo, the geometric relief paintings worked from cow dung mixed with ash and earth pigments, a tradition from the old Gisaka kingdom. Lunch at your lodge, then down to Lake Ihema for a boat safari of one to two hours. Ihema is the second largest lake in Rwanda and holds one of the densest hippo populations in East Africa, with Nile crocodiles on the mud and African fish eagles working the papyrus edge. Late afternoon brings elephant and buffalo down to the shoreline to drink, which is why we put you on the water at that hour. Dinner at the lodge with hippo calling across the water after dark, and a look at tomorrow, which is the fullest wildlife day of the whole trip.

Out of the gate at six, when the light is best and lions are still active. The southern sector gives you the lakes with waterbuck, bushbuck, impala and baboon, and the Giraffe Area often producing Masai giraffe early. Then north past the Mutumba Hills, where the country opens into short grass plains at Kilala and Mohana with zebra, topi, eland and buffalo grazing in the open. Akagera lost its last lion around 2001, had them flown back from South Africa in 2015, and added black rhino in 2017 and white rhino in 2021, so all Big Five now live inside its 1,122 square kilometres, with numbers past twelve thousand animals. Picnic lunch on the plains. After dinner we take you out on a night drive, available only to guests staying inside the park, which turns up bushbabies, genets, civets, white tailed mongoose, hyena and the park’s best odds on leopard.

The long crossing, and worth naming honestly rather than burying. A final morning drive through the lake circuit on the way out, then west and north through Kigali to Musanze, about five to six hours in total on tarmac with a lunch stop in the capital. The country changes as you climb, from the dry warmth of the east through the middle of the country and up into the cool green of the northern highlands, hills terraced to the ridgeline with pyrethrum and potatoes. By mid afternoon the Virunga chain is standing ahead of you, five volcanoes with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest, cloud usually on the shoulders of Sabyinyo and Muhabura. We check you in near Kinigi, close to park headquarters, so tomorrow does not begin with an extra hour in the vehicle. Dinner early, boots by the door, and pack your daypack tonight rather than fumbling for it in the dark.

You leave in the dark and Kinigi is cold at six, mist on the peaks, dancers performing while everyone assembles. Trackers went out at first light and are already sitting with the families, radioing positions back. The briefing runs at seven. Rangers split you into groups of eight trekkers per gorilla family and cover the rules: seven metres back, no flash, mask on during the hour, nobody treks with a cold. Families are assigned that morning on fitness and overnight movement, so speak honestly about what you can walk. Then out through farmland to the boundary wall and into bamboo, nettles and volcanic soil that holds water for days. Volcanoes National Park was gazetted in 1925 and is the oldest national park in Africa, and the massif holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. You get one hour. Hire a porter. Afternoon at the lodge with your feet up.

A full day in the north with nothing hard in it, deliberately placed between your two treks. We start at Kinigi for the seven o’clock briefing and golden monkey tracking in the lower bamboo at the foot of Sabyinyo, a bright orange guenon found only in the Virunga region. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walking is easy, usually under an hour. Afterwards the Musanze caves, a lava tube system running a couple of kilometres beneath the town, formed by the same volcanic activity that built the Virungas, with lamps taking you past bat colonies and collapsed roof openings that throw light into the tunnels. In the afternoon we drive east to the Twin Lakes at Burera and Ruhondo, where a local boat works the shoreline with the volcanoes standing behind the water. Back to the lodge, and your second permit is tomorrow.

Back to Kinigi in the dark, and this is the day people tell us they remember most. You go in knowing the drill, knowing what the ground does under your boots and how the light behaves under cloud, and rangers assign you a different family so the terrain and the group composition both change. The first trek teaches you the forest and the second is where you actually see it. Photographers in particular rarely regret the second permit. Back for a late lunch and a shower, then the short drive west to Rubavu on Lake Kivu, only about an hour through farmland and eucalyptus, arriving in the late afternoon. Lake Kivu covers about 2,700 square kilometres and is the sixth largest lake in Africa. At dusk the night fishermen paddle out in threes, canoes lashed together, singing in unison to keep time. The sound carries a long way over still water.

The rest day, and after two treks in three days you will use it. Kivu holds no crocodiles, no hippos and no bilharzia, rare among African lakes, so swimming and paddling are straightforward. The morning is yours: swim, take a boat out among the islands, kayak the shoreline, or cycle the first section of the 227 kilometre Congo Nile Trail which starts at Rubavu. In the afternoon we call at the Kinunu coffee washing station, roughly twenty kilometres south, where drying beds face out across the water and cherries from hundreds of smallholder farms are hand sorted, pulped, fermented overnight and dried, finishing with a tasting. The Nyamyumba hot springs nearby are worth an hour, a set of pools where locals soak feet and legs in water hot enough to need care getting into. On a clear night the lava glow of Nyiragongo shows across the border in the Congo, which is a strange thing to watch from a lakeside terrace.

Down the Kivu road, about two and a half to three hours, to the ridge dividing the Congo and Nile watersheds. Gishwati Mukura is Rwanda‘s fourth and smallest national park, roughly 34 square kilometres across two forest blocks, gazetted in 2015 and named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2020. What makes it unlike anywhere else you will go is that this forest had been almost entirely cleared by farming, logging and mining, and what you walk through has been deliberately grown back. The last stretch of road is dirt and climbs steeply. We check you into the community owned guesthouse, then take the waterfall trail in the afternoon, about seven kilometres out across a working tea plantation before dropping into secondary forest and following a river valley to a fall. Butterflies everywhere in the open sections. It gets properly cold on that ridge after dark, so the fleece you packed for the volcanoes earns its place again tonight.

An early guided walk on the Umushwati trail, about eight kilometres through the heart of the Gishwati block. The forest holds a community of twenty to thirty eastern chimpanzees that survived the clearance, alongside golden monkeys, L’Hoest’s and blue monkeys, though these chimps are not habituated the way Nyungwe’s are and a track can turn up nothing. Our guides say so plainly. Birding is the surer return, with 232 species recorded in the Gishwati block and a good run of Albertine Rift endemics. What you take away is the restoration itself, and guides talking about which slopes were bare in their childhood. Late morning we drive south to Nyungwe, three to four hours, arriving in the tea by mid afternoon. Nyungwe protects close to 1,000 square kilometres of rainforest and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, the first site in Rwanda listed. Canopy walkway this afternoon if the light holds, running about 160 metres between towers at some 60 metres above the forest floor.

Breakfast at four thirty, moving by five, because chimps are loudest in the hour after leaving their nests. Most of our guests trek at Cyamudongo, a separated forest block of about 19 square kilometres holding a habituated community of roughly thirty chimpanzees, where the smaller search area gives better odds than the main forest. Groups are capped at eight trekkers. You hear them long before you see them and the ground is steep and slick underfoot. When the community is found you get one hour, often spent craning upward at a fig tree. Back for a late breakfast and a shower, a stop at the Gisakura tea estate, then Kamembe for the forty minute flight to Kigali. That flight is what makes the last day workable, turning a six hour drive into a short hop and putting you at the airport in reasonable order rather than after dark. If your international departure is the following morning we will book you a final night in Kigali instead.