Two Lifelong Dreams Come Together During an East Africa Safari

In the mist of the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, silence takes on a feeling of its own. It isn’t a silent void, but rather a heavy stillness. The drip of condensation off an ancient fern, the distant crack of a bamboo shoot, and the thrum of your own heart as you climb.

For my fiancée and me, this journey was the long-awaited intersection of two lifelong dreams: her desire to sit among the mountain gorillas and my own childhood longing for a true, expansive East African safari.

Before we left, Africa was a collection of mental postcards and childhood memories of The Lion King. But as we arrived in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, the reality was even more striking than the imagination. The landscape was lush, with hills and mountains that seemed to ripple toward the horizon.

There was a bit of pre-trip worrying about malaria tablets, yellow fever shots, and a delayed visa – but the moment we met our guide and felt the genuine warmth of the Rwandan people, those worries faded. We were finally stepping into the heart of Africa.

An Hour That Lasts a Lifetime

The trek into the rainforest to find the gorillas was, for us, the anchor of the entire trip. We requested a harder route because we wanted to truly feel the bamboo and the deep jungle underfoot. When we finally broke through the brush to find a family of 25 gorillas, including five massive silverbacks, the world simply stopped.

To sit just metres away from them is to experience something truly like no other. You find yourself looking at them and seeing something startlingly familiar. They pick their noses, they scratch themselves, and they tend to their young with a tenderness that feels achingly human.

You see their facial expressions, their gestures, and the way they interact with their family. You feel a connection that shouldn’t be there, yet it is. It’s mesmerising.

I remember having eye contact with one of the mothers; it felt like looking at another person. For one heart-stopping moment, a silverback even stormed toward me. I nearly peed my pants, I’ll be honest, but that added to the experience.

There was the option to do a separate trek to see the golden monkeys in Rwanda, but we got lucky because we saw them anyway – they were right next to the gorillas! Our guide said, “Yeah, we got lucky. We got two in one.”

The Soul of Kigali

Descending from the mountains, we returned to the winding, spotless streets of Kigali. While the city itself was a transit point for us, the visit to the Genocide Memorial was a necessary and moving opportunity to learn more about their history.

It’s a heartbreaking place, particularly the room dedicated to the children, but it gave us respect for the country’s resilience. It reminded us that the beauty we saw in the hills was matched by the strength of the people living amongst them.

Giants of the Tarangire

The transition to Tanzania brought a different kind of scale. Our guide, Frank, became our navigator through a prehistoric world of baobabs and dust. Our start was in the north of Tanzania in Arusha National Park, but the real magic began a bit more south in Tarangire National Park.

I have never seen anything like the elephants of Tarangire. Frank had a sixth sense for their movement; he’d watch them leave the river and know exactly where to position the car. At one point, a herd of what looked like 200 elephants – babies, matriarchs, and single bulls – walked right past our vehicle. They were only two to five metres away. After four days, the trip had already paid for itself in my mind.

Living under canvas at Tarangire Kati Kati, hearing the hyenas laughing in the dark and the lions calling nearby, was exactly the proper safari I had dreamed of as a boy. We loved the solitude; one night we were the only guests and got to talk to the staff and get their views on things, which was amazing.

Descent into Eden

The Ngorongoro Crater is a place that defies description, even when you’re looking right at it. From the rim at Lion’s Paw Camp, the view is breathtaking – a lush jungle at the top that drops away into a golden caldera. It looks like something straight out of a movie.

We entered the crater floor at 6:00 a.m., as the mist was still clinging to the walls. By the time we returned at 5:00 p.m., Frank had delivered on every promise. We saw lions up close with their cubs, massive buffalo herds, hippos, and even the rare black rhino.

There was a moment near a stream where we couldn’t go off-road, but the sound of the hippos was so loud it felt like the earth itself was grumbling. By the time we spotted a serval cat on the path back to our room, we felt like we’d seen the entire world in a single day.

The Endless Sea of Ndutu

If the Crater was an amphitheatre, Ndutu was a stage for the rawest drama of nature. We flew into the southern Serengeti, and looking down from the bush flight, we saw what felt like millions of wildebeest – a moving, living sea that stretched to the horizon.

But the moment that truly stayed with us happened on our final day. We found a cheetah mother with four cubs that had been born only hours before. They were tiny, no bigger than a fist. As we watched, the mother spotted a leopard in the distance. Realising the danger to her newborns, she began to move them, one by one, carrying them in her mouth to a thicker patch of grass. Watching that maternal instinct play out in real-time was a masterclass in the fragility and beauty of the bush.

The Reality of the Road

It wasn’t all perfectly polished moments, and honestly, we preferred it that way. There were the persistent tsetse flies in southern Tarangire that tested our patience and a four-hour wait at the airport on our way home due to a flight timing shift. There were moments of heat and dust and the occasional scare, like when a ten-tonne elephant bull decided to charge our car because a lion had spooked him.

But our guides were unflappable. “Just relax”, they would say with a calm smile. And we did. You realise quickly that the flies and the dust aren’t problems to be solved – they’re part of the ecosystem. Without the grit, the experience wouldn’t feel half as real.

A Chapter Written in Red Dust

Looking back, I’d rate this trip a 15 out of ten. We chose to focus on a longer safari rather than rushing off to a beach in Zanzibar, and I’m so glad we did. Every park had a different personality; every day felt like a new book.

As a chapter in our lives, this was the fulfilment of a childhood promise. It was a thrill to realise just how much of my childhood imagination was rooted in reality. Hearing our guides use Swahili words like “Simba” for lion and “Pumbaa” for warthog felt like a full-circle moment, bridging the gap between the movie I loved and the wild landscapes I was exploring.

We came for the Big Five and the mountain gorillas, but we left with something much deeper. The memory of the light over the Crater, the human-like gaze of a mother gorilla, and the sheer, overwhelming scale of the migration from the window of a small plane.

Do you have a childhood dream waiting to become a reality in Africa? Our safari experts can take the pieces of your imagination – seeing the Big Five, watching a family of gorillas, or seeing the majesty of the Great Migration – and weave them into an itinerary that surpasses expectations.

Start planning your dream Africa safari today.