3 Day Nyungwe Chimpanzee Trekking Safari

Our driver guide collects you in Kigali and we head south, because the long road to Nyungwe is more interesting than most people expect. First stop is Nyanza, 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. They respond to the singing, which sounds like folklore until you watch it. 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, instruments and oral poetry. Lunch here, then the last stretch west into tea country. The road climbs and the plantations start, ridge after ridge of clipped green, until the forest wall appears ahead. The full drive covers roughly 225 kilometres and takes five to six hours with the stops. You check into your lodge near Gisakura or on the ridge above the park, with the forest making a good deal of noise as the light goes. Dinner, an early night, and a very early start tomorrow.

Breakfast at four thirty, out of the door by five. Chimps build fresh nests each evening and are loudest in the hour after waking, so the whole system runs on being in position before daylight. Our vehicle takes you to the reception centre for the ranger briefing, then on to the trailhead. Most of our guests trek at Cyamudongo, a separated block of forest 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 will hear them long before you see them, pant hoots carrying across the valleys, and the ground underfoot is steep and slick with leaf litter. When the community is found the clock starts and you get one hour. Be ready for craning upward at a fig tree rather than sitting at ground level, because chimps move and climb in a way gorillas do not. Back at the lodge for lunch, then the afternoon belongs to the canopy walkway: a suspended bridge running about 160 metres between towers, some 60 metres above the forest floor, reached on the Igishigishigi trail past giant tree ferns. It moves underfoot. The canopy runs to the horizon in every direction.

A gentler last morning and the most reliable primate sighting of the trip. Nyungwe holds the largest known troops of Rwenzori colobus anywhere, groups that can number 300 or more animals moving together, which is very unusual behaviour for a colobus species. Tracking starts from the Gisakura centre on the western edge, where the troop often works the forest margin beside the tea, so the walking is easy and the sightings come quickly. Watching several hundred black and white monkeys pour through a stretch of canopy with their tails hanging like ropes is the thing our guests talk about afterwards, often more than the chimps. Afterwards we call in at the Gisakura tea estate, roughly 1,600 hectares of plantation acting as a buffer between the forest and the farmland, where pickers work the contour rows six days a week and are happy to stop and talk. Then the drive back to Kigali, arriving late afternoon for your flight or a final night in the city. If your schedule is tight, we can put you on the forty minute flight from Kamembe instead and save you the road.