4 Day Rwanda Gorillas And Culture Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight and takes you into the city. We start at the Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi, resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and opened in 2004. Allow three hours, take the audio guide, and give yourself the rest of the day to let it settle. Afterwards we go on to Nyamirambo, the oldest and liveliest quarter of the city, for a walking tour run by the Nyamirambo Women’s Centre. A local guide takes small groups through the streets, 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 call in 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. Dinner somewhere good in Kiyovu or Kimihurura, and a night in Kigali. Tomorrow we head for the volcanoes.

A relaxed start, then north out of the capital. The road climbs through hills terraced to the ridgeline, past markets and bicycle taxis stacked with bananas, and after two to two and a half hours the Virunga chain appears ahead. Before we reach Musanze we turn east to Burera and Ruhondo, the twin crater lakes, where local wooden boats work the shorelines and the volcanoes stand behind the water. An hour or two on the lake, or a walk along the terraced banks, is the most relaxed half day in northern Rwanda and it costs almost no travel time. In the afternoon we visit the Gorilla Guardians village near Kinigi, founded by a former park warden who wanted paid work for people who had been poaching inside the park. You get Intore dance and drumming, traditional medicine, archery, banana beer and the layout of a homestead, and more to the point you get the conversation about what poaching paid and what replaced it. Check in near Kinigi, close enough that tomorrow’s start is survivable. Pack your bag before you sleep.

You leave in the dark. Kinigi park headquarters is cold at six, mist sitting on the peaks, dancers performing while everyone assembles and coffee going round. Trackers went out at first light and are already with the families, radioing positions back. 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. You cannot choose your family; allocation happens that morning on fitness and where each group has moved overnight, so be honest about what you can manage. Then you walk, through farmland to the boundary wall and into bamboo, nettles and wet volcanic soil. It might be forty minutes. It might be four hours. 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 the family is found you get one hour, and it goes faster than anyone expects. Hire a porter at the trailhead. The rest of the afternoon is yours at the lodge, and you will want it.

Nothing early this morning. After breakfast we take you to the Musanze caves, a lava tube system formed by the same volcanic activity that built the Virungas, running for a couple of kilometres beneath the town. Guided walks go in with lamps past bat colonies and collapsed roof openings that throw shafts of light down into the tunnels. The floor is uneven basalt, so wear the boots you trekked in. Afterwards, if you would rather add something else, we can swap in the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund campus near Kinigi, which covers the research that has run continuously in these mountains for over fifty years, or the Buhanga Eco Park, a small patch of ancient forest tied to the coronation rituals of Rwandan kings. Then the drive south to Kigali through the same terraced country, arriving early afternoon. If your flight is late we will stop at Kimironko market for agaseke baskets and imigongo, or at Caplaki Craft Village, which is calmer. Drop off at your hotel or the airport, and the end of your trip.