Travel deep dive
Nyungwe: Primates and Treetops in Rwanda's Mountain Rainforest
Nyungwe National Park covers the mountains of south-western Rwanda with a cool, wet rainforest, and its primates are the draw: chimpanzees, troops of black-and-white colobus and several other monkeys. Visits to the forest are made on foot with a park guide, from a search for chimpanzees that begins before dawn to a crossing of the walkway hung above a forest valley. The park lies a long day's drive from Kigali, and most visitors stay on its edges, where tea estates run right up to the trees.
Updated 2026-10-05
A rainforest over the ridges
Nyungwe is a mountain forest: ridge after ridge of steep, high hills under a closed canopy, with tree ferns in the gullies, mosses and orchids on the trunks and mist in the valleys on most mornings. It stands on the divide between the basins of the Congo and the Nile, and it is a World Heritage site. One main road crosses the forest from east to west, and the trailheads and the visitor centre at Uwinka lie along it. From Kigali the road comes by Nyanza and Huye, where a royal palace and a museum break the journey; from the north it comes down along Lake Kivu from Karongi. As on every road in Rwanda, the drive is timed to arrive by daylight.
Chimpanzee tracking
Chimpanzee tracking needs a permit, booked ahead through the park authority, and it begins in the dark: visitors meet their guide before dawn, when the chimpanzees are leaving the nests they build each night. Trackers go out ahead to find the group and keep the guide informed, and the walk that follows can leave the path for steep, slippery slopes under the canopy. The chimpanzees move fast and far in search of fruiting trees, so a morning may bring a long look at a group feeding and calling in the branches, or only a hurried glimpse high above.
Colobus and the other monkeys
Nyungwe's black-and-white colobus live in troops that can number in the hundreds, spreading through a whole stretch of canopy and leaping from tree to tree with the long white hair of their shoulders streaming. A separate guided walk follows them, and they are often seen from the trails as well. L'Hoest's monkey, dark with a white beard, spends much of its time on the ground and is often met on the paths and by the roadside; the grey-cheeked mangabey keeps to the canopy.
The canopy walkway
The canopy walkway is a footbridge hung on cables across a forest valley, high above the forest floor, so the crossing passes at the level of the treetops, where monkeys feed and birds move through the leaves. It is reached on a guided trail that drops steeply into the forest from the visitor centre at Uwinka, and the climb back up is the harder half of the outing. The bridge sways gently underfoot, and the drop below it is plain to see.
Trails, waterfalls and birds
Away from the walkway, the park's trails run from short loops near the road to walks that fill a whole day, through tall forest, bamboo and swamp. A waterfall walk starts at Gisakura on the western edge, leading down through the tea and into the forest to the Isumo waterfall. Birdwatchers come for the birds of the Albertine Rift, the chain of mountain forests along Africa's western Rift Valley, many of which live in few other places; early morning on a quiet trail is the time to see them.
Tea on the forest's edge
At both ends of the road the forest stops abruptly at tea estates: level rows of clipped, bright green bushes over the hills, picked by hand, against the dark wall of the trees. Most of the places to stay lie on these edges, and the leaf grown here goes into the tea Rwanda drinks.