7 Day Rwanda Culture History And Gorillas Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight, and depending on your arrival time we go straight into the city. The Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi is the resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and was 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 and includes 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 rest of the day free, because the visit tends to stay with people and nobody should go from Gisozi straight into a market. Dinner somewhere quiet in Kiyovu or Kimihurura, and an early night after the flight.

The city on its own terms. We start at the Kandt House Museum, the former home of Richard Kandt, the German physician who became the first colonial administrator and founded Kigali, covering Rwandan society before colonisation and the colonial 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. Nothing about it is staged and the money stays in the neighbourhood. If time allows we finish 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. Overnight in Kigali.

Out of the capital heading south through hills terraced to the ridgeline. First stop is Nyanza, seat of the Rwandan monarchy, where the reconstructed royal residence stands in woven wood and thatch beside the more modern palace of King Mutara III Rudahigwa. The reason to come is the inyambo, the sacred long horned cattle of the royal court, animals with horns curving well over a metre that are still paraded and sung to by their herders. They respond to the singing. Guides explain the structure of the old court and the ubuhake system of patronage that ordered Rwandan society for centuries. Then on to Huye and the Ethnographic Museum, given to Rwanda by Belgium in 1987 to mark twenty five years of independence, with seven galleries covering farming and hunting tools, pottery, weaving, ironwork, housing, clothing, instruments and oral poetry. It is a proper museum rather than a stop, and it deserves a full afternoon. Overnight in Huye.

The longest drive of the trip, running back north through Kigali and on to Musanze, about five hours in total on tarmac with a lunch stop in the capital. The country changes as you climb, from the warmer south through the middle of the country and up into the cool green of the northern highlands, and by mid afternoon the Virunga chain is standing ahead of you, five volcanoes with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest. Before checking in we visit the Gorilla Guardians village near Kinigi, founded by a former warden of Volcanoes National Park who wanted paid work for people who had been poaching inside it. You get Intore dance and drumming, traditional medicine and the role of the healer, archery, banana beer brewing and the layout of a traditional homestead. The part that matters is the conversation: what poaching paid, why they stopped, and what tourism replaced it with. Check in near Kinigi, close to park headquarters. Boots by the door tonight.

You leave in the dark. Kinigi is cold at six, mist on the peaks, dancers performing while everyone assembles and coffee going round. Trackers went out at first light and are already with the families. The briefing runs at seven, groups are split to eight trekkers per gorilla family, and rangers read through 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 where each group has moved overnight, so speak up honestly. Then out through the potato fields to the boundary wall and into bamboo and nettles. Volcanoes National Park was gazetted in 1925 and is the oldest national park in Africa, and the massif it protects holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. When you reach the family you get one hour. After yesterday at the cultural village, the connection between the two lands differently. Hire a porter at the trailhead, and take the afternoon off.

A full day in the north with nothing hard in it. 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 and nowhere else. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each running to around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walking is easy, usually under an hour. You get an hour with them and they never sit still. 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 down into the tunnels. In the afternoon we drive east to the Twin Lakes at Burera and Ruhondo, two crater lakes with the volcanoes standing behind them, where a local wooden boat takes you along the shoreline past fishing settlements and terraced banks.

A gentle finish. After breakfast we call at Buhanga Eco Park near Musanze, a small patch of ancient forest tied to the coronation rituals of Rwandan kings, where the guides explain what happened here and why the trees were never cut. It is shaded, short and interesting for the history rather than the wildlife, and it closes the cultural thread the trip opened with at Nyanza. Then the drive south to Kigali, two to two and a half hours through the terraced hills, arriving around the middle of the day. If your flight is in the evening we finish at Kimironko market, the biggest in the city, for agaseke peace baskets coiled from sweetgrass and sisal, and imigongo, the geometric relief paintings from the southeast. Hire a market guide at the entrance; it costs little and turns a slightly overwhelming space into a good last hour. Caplaki Craft Village is the calmer alternative. Drop off at your hotel or the airport.