Rwanda

Rwanda is now firmly on the map for a stimulating adventure safari. It is small, so it’s easy to get around, despite the hilly terrain. (Not for nothing is Rwanda called ‘The Land of a Thousand Hills’!) Good tar roads wind through fertile hillsides terraced with coffee-plantations. Indeed, most places are within a three hour drive of Kigali, the capital.  So, from a practical point of view, this means you can combine gorilla trekking tours in Rwanda with a safari in neighbouring Tanzania, with direct flights from the Serengeti. But it also makes for a great ‘stand-alone’ destination.

Gorilla Trekking  in Rwanda

The rare promise of seeing some of the last wild population of mountain gorillas is the lure for most visitors. The charismatic Great Apes live in the high-altitude rainforest of the Volcanoes massif. This national park is home to over half of the estimated population of around 1000 mountain gorillas.  There are 12 habituated mountain gorilla groups in the Volcanoes National Park. So this is one of the best places in the world for a gorilla trekking tour.

Unexpected treats on a Rwanda Safari Tour

One or two days of gorilla trekking is likely to be the highlight of your Rwanda safari. Other ‘must sees’ include the ancient high-altitude forest of Nyungwe National Park, the scenic Lake Kivu and plains game and predators in Akagera National Park.

How to get there & get around

Rwanda is well-connected to the Serengeti and Kenya (Nairobi), but also to Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lusaka (Zambia) and Harare (Zimbabwe). So it is now very easy to combine a Rwanda safari, to see the with the mountain gorillas, with either East or Southern Africa. Most people combine it with Kenya or Tanzania because of the shorter flight connections with direct flights from the Serengeti. But South Africa is also a possibility with connecting flights.