Walking safari in Rwanda

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Rwanda is well-suited to organised walking holidays as all the most popular and iconic activities are undertaken on foot. This includes gorilla tracking and hikes the 4,507m Mount Karisimbi and the 3,711m Mount Bisoke in the Virunga mountains, as well as chimp tracking and other forest walks in Nyungwe National Park. For dedicated walkers, the 227km Congo-Nile Trail, which runs roughly parallel to the eastern shore of Lake Kivu, and takes ten days to complete on foot, is highly recommended.

If you plan on walking a lot, bring suitable footwear and a few pairs of thick socks. A walking stick can be useful on the steep slopes if the Virungas and Nyungwe.

Akagera National Park

The ideal complement to the primate-oriented wildlife-viewing offered at Volcanoes and Nyungwe National Parks, Akagera is a classic savannah reserve that has undergone an ambitious recent rehabilitation programme to become a fully-fledged Big Five safari destination. As with Rwanda other national parks, the setting is spectacular: a chain of low grassy mountains that slope down to a tract of undulating most savannah hemmed in by an extensive wetland comprising a dozen lakes, extensive…

Nyungwe Forest National Park

Sprawling magnificently across the elevated ridge that divides Africa’s two largest drainage systems, the Nile and the Congo, the 1,015km² Nyungwe Forest National Park protects East Africa’s largest tract of montane rainforest in Eastern Africa. The park is a remarkably rich centre of biodiversity, with more than 1,050 plant species recorded, among them 200 varieties of orchid, along with 85 mammal, 310 bird, 32 amphibian and 38 reptile species. The main attraction for most…

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…