Rwanda vs Uganda

Golden monkey in Volcanoes National Park

Rwanda and Uganda host a broadly similar set of attractions. Foremost among these mountain gorilla tracking, and while neither country could be said to offer a definitively better tracking experience than the other, our experience is that the more open nature of the forest in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park makes it slightly more reliable for photography than Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. For those with limited time, it is also far quicker to reach Volcanoes National Park from the Rwandan capital Kigali (3-4 hours) than it is to reach Bwindi Impenetrable National Park from Uganda’s main air gateway Entebbe (a long one-day drive, but better split over two days). In Uganda’s favour, tracking gorillas there is a lot cheaper than in Rwanda, and overall it boasts a more diverse selection of other national parks, scenic landmarks and cultural attractions.

Rwanda vs Kenya

The Great Migration Mara river crossing in Kenya Rwanda offers several attractions not found in Kenya or indeed in most other safari destinations other than Uganda. Foremost among these is the opportunity to track mountain gorillas in the Virunga mountains and chimpanzees in the Nyungwe National Park. Rwanda offers far greater diversity than Kenya when it comes to forest primates, Furthermore, although its checklist of 700 bird species theoretically compares poorly with the…

Kigali

Credit: Umulinga Founded as recently as 1907, Kigali served as a minor administrative centre in the colonial era, and had a population of fewer than 6,000 when it was selection as capital of newly-independent Rwanda due to its central location in 1962. Today, this strikingly neat and modern-looking highland city sprawls attractively across a series of hills spanning altitudes of 1,300-1,600m, and hosts a population well in excess of one million. Thanks in part to a longstanding…

Volcanoes National Park

Protecting the Rwandan sector of the Virunga Mountains, the 160km2 Volcanoes National Park is best-known as the place where Dian Fossey launched her pioneering study of mountain gorillas in the wild in 1966, and where the Oscar-nominated film Gorillas in the Mist was shot on location in 1988. It is one of Africa’s most scenic national parks, comprising a chain of six extinct and three active volcanoes whose steep forest-swathed slopes are linked by fertile saddles formed by…