3 Day Rwanda Gorilla Trekking Safari

Our driver guide meets you at Kigali International Airport, loads the bags into our vehicle and talks you through the plan over coffee. If your flight lands early enough, we take in the Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi first. It is the resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, and it gives you the context for everything else you will see in Rwanda. Allow three hours and expect it to stay with you. Then we head north. The road climbs steadily out of the capital through hills terraced to the ridgeline with beans, potatoes and pyrethrum, past markets, bicycle taxis loaded with bananas and children walking home in blue and khaki uniforms. Roughly two to two and a half hours later the volcanoes appear ahead, five of them along the Virunga chain, with cloud usually sitting on the shoulders of Sabyinyo and Muhabura. We check you into your lodge near Kinigi, close enough to the park headquarters that tomorrow’s early start is survivable. Dinner, an early night, and a bag packed before you sleep.

You leave the lodge in the dark. Park headquarters at Kinigi is cold at six in the morning, with mist on the peaks behind the buildings and Intore dancers performing while everyone assembles. Trackers went out at first light and are already sitting with the families, radioing positions back, which is why treks now take far less time than they once did. The briefing runs at seven. Rangers split everyone into groups of eight trekkers per gorilla family and read through the rules: stay seven metres back, no flash, mask on during the hour, and turn away if you need to cough. You cannot pick your family. Allocation happens that morning based on fitness and where each group has moved overnight, so speak up honestly about what you can manage. Then you walk, through farmland to the stone wall marking the boundary and into bamboo and nettles. It might take forty minutes. It might take four hours. Volcanoes National Park was gazetted in 1925, making it the oldest national park in Africa, and the Virunga massif it protects holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. When you reach the family, you get one hour. Hire a porter at the trailhead. Afternoon back at the lodge, or a short visit to the Gorilla Guardians community village if you still have legs.

A gentler morning, and a good one. Breakfast at the lodge, then back to Kinigi for the seven o’clock briefing and out to the lower bamboo at the foot of Sabyinyo. Golden monkeys live only in the Virunga region and nowhere else on earth, a bright orange and gold guenon feeding on fresh bamboo shoots. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each running to around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walking is easy compared with yesterday, usually under an hour on fairly level ground. You get an hour with them, though stillness is not part of the deal. Where the gorillas settled and let you watch, these crash through the bamboo, drop, regroup and vanish. Photographers find them maddening and everybody else laughs a lot. The minimum age is lower than for gorilla trekking, which makes this the morning that works for families. Back to the lodge for lunch, then the drive south to Kigali, arriving in time for an evening flight or a last night in the city. We can stop at a craft cooperative or the Musanze caves on the way if your schedule allows.