8 Day Four Parks Of Rwanda Safari

Our driver guide collects you at the airport and we head east, roughly 110 kilometres and two to two and a half hours to Akagera’s southern gate. On the way we stop 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 carried down from the old Gisaka kingdom. Lunch at your lodge, then straight 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, so you spend the trip within earshot of pods grunting in the shallows, with Nile crocodiles on the mud and African fish eagles along the papyrus. Late afternoon brings elephant and buffalo down to drink at the shoreline, which is why we put you on the water at that hour rather than in the morning. Dinner at the lodge with hippo calling across the water after dark.

Out of the gate at six, when the light is best and lions are still active before the heat pushes everything into shade. The southern sector starts you among the lakes with waterbuck, bushbuck, impala and olive baboon, and the Giraffe Area often producing Masai giraffe early. Then north, where the park changes completely: past the Mutumba Hills the country opens into short grass plains at Kilala and Mohana, low ridges running to the horizon 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 eastern black rhino in 2017 and southern white rhino in 2021, so all Big Five now live inside its 1,122 square kilometres, with wildlife numbers past twelve thousand animals. Leopard stays the hard one and our guide will say so plainly. Picnic lunch on the plains, a slow return through the afternoon, and a night drive from the lodge if you want one.

The long crossing, and worth naming honestly. We take a final morning drive through the lake circuit on the way to the gate, then run west and north through Kigali to Musanze, about five to six hours in total on tarmac with a lunch stop in the capital. If you would like the Kigali Genocide Memorial, resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, this is where it fits, and it is worth the three hours. The country changes as you climb: the dry warmth of the east gives way to cool green highlands, hills terraced to the ridgeline, and by mid afternoon the Virunga chain stands ahead, five volcanoes with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest of them. We check you in near Kinigi, close to park headquarters so tomorrow does not start with an extra hour in the vehicle. Dinner early, boots by the door, and pack your bag tonight rather than in the dark.

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. 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 where each group has moved overnight, 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, protecting five of the eight Virunga volcanoes, and the massif holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. When you reach the family you get one hour. Hire a porter at the trailhead. The afternoon is yours and you will use it.

South down the Kivu road, about two and a half to three hours through farmland and eucalyptus with the lake appearing below on the right. Gishwati Mukura is Rwanda‘s fourth and smallest national park, roughly 34 square kilometres across two separate forest blocks on the ridge dividing the Congo and Nile watersheds. It was gazetted in 2015 and named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2020, and what makes it different from everywhere else you will go is that this forest had been almost entirely cleared. 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. Dinner on the ridge, and it gets properly cold once the sun goes.

An early guided walk on the Umushwati trail, about eight kilometres through the heart of the Gishwati block, which is the main route for primate tracking. The forest holds a community of twenty to thirty eastern chimpanzees that survived the clearance, alongside golden monkeys, L’Hoest’s and blue monkeys. Be realistic: these chimps are not habituated the way Nyungwe’s are, and a track can turn up nothing at all. The guides will say so. Birding is the surer bet, with 232 species recorded in the Gishwati block and a good run of Albertine Rift endemics, and the mix of restored forest, older growth, tea edge and open ridge means you work several habitats within a short walk. What you take away is the restoration itself, and the guides talking about which slopes were bare in their childhood. Late morning we drive south down the lake road to Nyungwe, three to four hours, arriving in the tea country by late afternoon.

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. Lunch at the lodge, then the canopy walkway: 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. Nyungwe protects close to 1,000 square kilometres of montane rainforest, holds thirteen primate species, and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, the first site in Rwanda listed.

One last morning in the forest before the drive home. Colobus tracking from the Gisakura centre is the most reliable primate sighting of the whole trip, since 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 edge beside the tea so the walking is easy. Several hundred black and white monkeys pouring through a stretch of canopy is a good last image to leave with. We stop at the Gisakura tea estate, roughly 1,600 hectares buffering the forest from the farmland, then take the road east to Kigali, about five to six hours back through Huye and the southern hills. If your flight is tight or you would rather not spend the day driving, we can put you on the forty minute flight from Kamembe instead, which turns the last day into a leisurely morning. Drop off at your hotel or the airport.