10 Day Best Of Rwanda Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight and takes you into the city. Depending on your arrival time 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 and inaugurated in 2004. Allow three hours and take the audio guide. It gives you the context for everything that follows, including the conservation work you will see in the parks, and doing it first rather than on your departure day is deliberate. Afterwards we take you to your hotel and leave the evening free, because the visit tends to stay with people. If your flight lands late we move the memorial to tomorrow morning instead. Kigali sits at around 1,500 metres, so the evenings are cool and the restaurants in Kiyovu and Kimihurura are worth eating in properly on your first night. Overnight in the capital, and our guide will run through the next nine days with you so you know what the early starts look like.

East out of the capital, roughly 110 kilometres and two to two and a half hours to Akagera’s southern gate, with a 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. 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, so you spend the trip within earshot of pods shifting in the shallows, with Nile crocodiles hauled out 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 then rather than in the morning. Dinner at the lodge with hippo calling across the water after dark, and a look at tomorrow’s route, since the northern plains take most of a day to work properly.

Out of the gate at six, when the light is best and lions are still moving 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 entirely: 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 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 wildlife numbers past twelve thousand animals. Leopard stays the hard one. Picnic lunch on the plains, a slow return, and a night drive from the lodge if you want one.

The long crossing, named honestly. A final morning drive through the lake circuit on the way to the gate, 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 stands ahead of you: five volcanoes, with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest of them and cloud usually sitting on the shoulders of Sabyinyo and Muhabura. We check you in near Kinigi, close to park headquarters so the morning 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, mist on the peaks, dancers performing while everyone assembles and coffee going round. 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, and the massif holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. You get one hour. Hire a porter. The afternoon is yours.

A gentler 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 on earth. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walk is easy, usually under an hour on level ground. You get an hour with them and they never sit still. In the afternoon, the Twin Lakes at Burera and Ruhondo, two crater lakes east of Musanze where a local wooden boat takes you along shorelines terraced right down to the water with the volcanoes standing behind them. It is the most relaxed half day in northern Rwanda and it asks nothing of your legs. If you would rather stay with people than scenery, we swap in 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.

A short transfer, only about an hour down to Rubavu through farmland and eucalyptus, so nobody is rushed this morning. On the way we call at the Kinunu coffee washing station, roughly twenty kilometres south of Rubavu, where drying beds face out across the water. Kinunu buys cherries from hundreds of smallholders farming plots often smaller than a quarter of a hectare, and the tour covers hand sorting, pulping, overnight fermentation and drying, finishing with a tasting of beans processed on the spot. Lake Kivu covers about 2,700 square kilometres and is the sixth largest lake in Africa, sitting at around 1,460 metres, which keeps it pleasant rather than hot. Afternoon in Rubavu, once a colonial beach resort and still lined with fading old mansions along the front. At dusk the night fishermen paddle out in threes, canoes lashed together with long poles, singing in unison to keep time on the way to the deep water. The sound carries a very long way across still water, and they return at dawn doing the same.

The rest day, and this itinerary is built around having one. Kivu holds no crocodiles, no hippos and no bilharzia, which is rare among African lakes and means swimming, kayaking and paddling are all straightforward here. How you use it is up to you. A boat out among the islands, a guided kayak along the shoreline, a cycle on the first section of the 227 kilometre Congo Nile Trail which starts at Rubavu and runs the length of the lake, or a chair and a book. The Nyamyumba hot springs a short way along the shore are worth an hour, 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 beach bar. Nobody wakes you tomorrow either, and the drive south to Nyungwe is a late morning start rather than a dawn one.

Down the Kivu Belt road, winding above the water with the Congo hills across the lake, three to four hours to Nyungwe with stops wherever the country asks for them. Nyungwe protects close to 1,000 square kilometres of montane rainforest, has stood unbroken for something like 25,000 years and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, the first site in Rwanda listed. We check in near Gisakura, then take the afternoon on the canopy walkway at Uwinka: 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 moves underfoot in the middle span. From up there the canopy runs unbroken to the horizon. Dinner early tonight, because tomorrow starts before five and the alarm will feel personal. Our guide will lay out the trekking kit with you: boots, gaiters, a waterproof and gloves, since the forest floor here is steep and wet in every month.

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, pant hoots carrying across the valleys, and the ground is steep and slick underfoot. When the community is found you get one hour. Back for a late breakfast and a shower, a stop at the Gisakura tea estate if there is time, then Kamembe for the forty minute flight to Kigali. That flight is the reason this trip works at ten days rather than eleven, since it turns a six hour drive into a short hop and puts you at the airport in good order.