7 Day Rwanda Primates And Big Five Safari

Our driver guide collects you and we head south, taking the long road to Nyungwe with two proper stops in it. Nyanza first, seat of the Rwandan monarchy, where the reconstructed royal residence stands in woven wood and thatch and the sacred long horned inyambo cattle are still kept and sung to by their herders, responding to the singing in a way you rather have to see. Then Huye and the Ethnographic Museum, given to Rwanda by Belgium in 1987 to mark twenty five years of independence, holding one of the better collections on the continent across seven galleries of tools, pottery, ironwork and instruments. Lunch here, then west into tea country, ridge after ridge of clipped green, until the forest wall rises ahead. The drive covers roughly 225 kilometres over five to six hours with the stops. Nyungwe protects close to 1,000 square kilometres of montane rainforest and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, the first site in Rwanda listed. Check in near Gisakura. Dinner, then an early night, because tomorrow starts before five.

Breakfast at four thirty and moving by five. Chimps are loudest in the hour after leaving their nests, so the whole system depends on being in position before daylight. 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, pant hoots carrying across the valleys, and the ground underfoot is steep and slick with wet leaf litter. When the community is found the clock starts and you get one hour, often spent looking up into a fig tree rather than sitting at ground level. Lunch back at the lodge, then the canopy walkway in the afternoon: a suspended bridge running about 160 metres between towers at some 60 metres above the forest floor, reached on the Igishigishigi trail past giant tree ferns. It flexes underfoot in the middle span and the canopy runs unbroken to the horizon.

A short morning in the forest before we move north. Colobus tracking from the Gisakura centre is the most dependable primate sighting of the whole week, because Nyungwe holds the largest known troops of Rwenzori colobus anywhere, groups running to 300 or more animals moving together, and they often work the forest margin beside the tea, so the walking is easy and the sightings come fast. Several hundred black and white monkeys pouring through a stretch of canopy with their tails streaming is the thing guests describe most vividly afterwards. We stop at the Gisakura tea estate, roughly 1,600 hectares buffering the forest from the farmland, where pickers work the contour rows six days a week. Then north up the Kivu Belt road, winding above the water with the Congo hills across the lake, one of the better road days in East Africa. Lake Kivu covers about 2,700 square kilometres and is the sixth largest lake in Africa. Dinner by the water at Karongi or Rubavu.

The easiest morning of the trip. Kivu holds no crocodiles, no hippos and no bilharzia, which is rare among African lakes and means you can swim before breakfast if you want to. There is time for a boat out among the islands or a paddle along the shoreline, and if we are at Rubavu we call at the Kinunu coffee washing station on the way, where cherries from hundreds of smallholder farms are hand sorted, pulped and dried on beds facing the water, finishing with a tasting. From Rubavu it is only about an hour up to Musanze through farmland and eucalyptus, so you arrive with the afternoon free. Use it on the Twin Lakes at Burera and Ruhondo, where local boats work the shoreline with the volcanoes standing behind, or at the Gorilla Guardians community village near Kinigi, founded by a former park warden to give paid work to people who had been poaching inside the park. Check in close to park headquarters. Boots by the door, bag packed tonight.

You leave in the dark, and Kinigi is cold at six with mist on the peaks and 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 take a fraction of the time they once did. The briefing runs at seven. Rangers split you into groups of eight trekkers per gorilla family and go 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 overnight movement, so be honest about what you can walk. Then out through farmland to the stone 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 Virunga massif holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. When you reach the family you get one hour and it goes faster than anyone expects. Hire a porter. The afternoon is yours, and you will want it.

The long transfer, and worth naming as such. We cross the country from the volcanoes in the northwest to the savannah in the east, running down through Kigali and out again, about five hours in total on tarmac with a lunch stop in the capital. If you missed the Kigali Genocide Memorial on arrival, this is where it fits. The country changes as you go: the cool green highlands give way to warm open country, and on the last stretch we stop at Nyakarambi where a women’s cooperative still makes imigongo, the geometric relief paintings worked from cow dung, ash and earth pigments. Into the park through the southern gate, check in, then straight onto Lake Ihema for a boat safari of one to two hours. Ihema holds one of the densest hippo populations in East Africa, with Nile crocodiles on the mud and fish eagles working the papyrus, and late afternoon brings elephant and buffalo down to drink. Dinner with hippo calling across the water.

Out of the gate at six for the best light of the day and the last wildlife of the trip. We work north from the lakes towards 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. This is lion country. Akagera lost its last lion around 2001 and had them flown back from South Africa in 2015, with eastern black rhino following in 2017 and southern white rhino in 2021, so all Big Five now live inside the park’s 1,122 square kilometres. Wildlife numbers have climbed past twelve thousand animals. Birders should keep the binoculars up, since Akagera has recorded more than 500 species and this is your last chance at grey crowned crane, saddle billed stork and, with luck, the shoebill in the papyrus. We exit late morning and take the road back to Kigali, roughly two and a half hours, arriving early afternoon for your flight.