Rwanda Travel Guide

A gorilla day begins with a briefing at the park headquarters at Kinigi, below the five volcanoes of the Virunga range, and ends with an hour beside a family and its silverback after a walk that can be short or take most of the day. Musanze is the base, and a second day there goes to the golden monkeys in the bamboo, the climb of Bisoke or the twin lakes Burera and Ruhondo.

Nyungwe National Park covers the mountains of the south-west with a cool, wet rainforest, where chimpanzee tracking starts before dawn and troops of black-and-white colobus move through the canopy. A walkway hung across a forest valley crosses at treetop height, and the tea estates on the forest's edge are where most visitors stay.

Akagera, the savanna of the east on the border with Tanzania, is where the trip turns from treks on foot to game drives among zebra, giraffe, elephant and the rest of the Big Five. The park's boats go out on Lake Ihema past hippos and crocodiles, and a day or two there usually closes the loop.

Lake Kivu fills the western border below steep farmed shores, with the beach town of Rubavu at its northern end and the quiet bays and wooded islands of Karongi halfway down. At dusk the fishing boats go out in threes with their lamps, and a winding lakeshore road and the Congo Nile Trail follow the shore between the two towns.

On the road south from Kigali, Nyanza keeps the palace of Rwanda's kings, rebuilt in reed and thatch, with the long-horned inyambo cattle on its grounds, and Huye, the university town, has the Ethnographic Museum. The two towns break the long drive to Nyungwe.

Kigali spreads over a run of hills, with the memorial at Gisozi, Kimironko market and the painted shopfronts of Nyamirambo each on a hill of their own and a motorbike taxi between them. Nearly every journey begins and ends in the capital, and a day or two there fits at either end of the loop.

Rwandan cooking is plain, filling country food: the midday buffet of beans, plantain, cassava and isombe, goat brochettes from the charcoal grill in the evening, fried sambaza on the shore of Lake Kivu and milk by the glass at the milk bars. Coffee and tea grow on the hills, and banana beer is the festive brew of the villages.