5 Day Rwanda Gorillas And Akagera Big Five Safari

Our driver guide collects you at Kigali International Airport and we head east, roughly 110 kilometres and two to two and a half hours to the 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 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 most of the trip within earshot of pods grunting in the shallows, with Nile crocodiles hauled out on the mud and African fish eagles working 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. Back to the lodge as the light goes, with hippo calling across the water after dark.

Out of the gate at six, when the light is best and the lions are still moving. The southern sector starts you among the lakes with waterbuck, bushbuck, impala, olive baboon and the Giraffe Area often producing Masai giraffe early. Then north, and 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 grazing in the open. This is lion country. 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. Wildlife numbers have climbed past twelve thousand animals. Leopard stays the hard one and our guide will tell you so rather than promise otherwise. Picnic lunch on the plains, a slow return through the afternoon, and if you would like a night drive we can arrange one from the lodge, which turns up genets, civets, bushbabies and hyena.

The long day, and worth setting expectations on. We take a final morning drive through the lake circuit on the way to the gate, then cross the country west and north through Kigali to Musanze. Total driving time runs to about five to six hours including a lunch stop in the capital, all of it on tarmac, and if you missed the Kigali Genocide Memorial on arrival this is where we fit it in. The country changes as you climb. The dry warmth of the east gives way to the cool green of the northern highlands, hills terraced to the ridgeline, and by mid afternoon the Virunga chain is standing ahead of you: five volcanoes, with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest of them. We check you into your lodge near Kinigi, close to park headquarters so tomorrow does not begin with an extra hour in the vehicle. If there is light left, walk out through the potato fields behind the lodge. Dinner, boots by the door, bag packed tonight rather than in the morning.

You leave in the dark, and Kinigi is cold at six. Dancers perform while everyone assembles, coffee goes round, and trackers who went out at first light 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 manage. Then out through farmland to the boundary wall and into bamboo, nettles and volcanic soil that holds water for days. It might be forty minutes to the family. It might be four hours. Volcanoes National Park was gazetted in 1925 and is the oldest national park in Africa, and the massif it protects holds more than half the world’s mountain gorillas. When you reach them, you get one hour. Hire a porter at the trailhead; it is the best decision most trekkers make. The afternoon is yours.

A gentler morning to finish. Back to Kinigi for the seven o’clock briefing, then out to the lower bamboo at the foot of Sabyinyo to track golden monkeys, a bright orange and gold guenon found only in the Virunga region and nowhere else on earth. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each running to around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walking is easy compared with yesterday, usually under an hour on fairly level ground. You get an hour with them, though sitting still is not part of the arrangement: where the gorillas settled and let you watch, these crash through bamboo, drop, regroup and vanish. Photographers find them maddening and everyone else laughs. The minimum age is lower than the fifteen required for gorillas, which makes this the morning that works for families. Back for lunch, then the drive south to Kigali, two to two and a half hours, arriving in good time for an evening flight. We can swap in the Musanze caves or the Dian Fossey campus if you would rather.