Small, compact and mountainous, Rwanda is primate paradise, including Mountain Gorillas.
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Rwanda is now firmly on the map for a stimulating adventure safari. Naturally its biggest drawcard are the gorilla trekking tours, which are within a three hour drive of Kigali, the capital. (Rwanda is small and compact, so it’s relatively easy to get around.) So you can combine a gorilla safari in Rwanda with a Big Five safari in neighbouring Tanzania or Kenya. (There are direct flights from both the Serengeti and Nairobi to Kigali).
But it also makes for a great ‘stand-alone’ safari destination, especially to see a variety of primates, and general wildlife. And it's very scenic: good tar roads wind through fertile hillsides terraced with coffee-plantations. (Not for nothing is Rwanda called ‘The Land of a Thousand Hills’!)
The rare promise of seeing some of the last wild population of mountain gorillas is the lure for most Rwanda safari visitors. The charismatic Great Apes live in the high-altitude rainforest of the Volcanoes massif. This national park is home to over half of the estimated population of around 1000 mountain gorillas. There are 12 habituated mountain gorilla groups in the Volcanoes National Park. So Rwanda is one of the best places in the world for a gorilla safari.
One or two days of gorilla trekking is likely to be the highlight of your Rwanda safari. But other ‘must sees’ include the ancient high-altitude forest of Nyungwe National Park, home to chimpanzees and colobus monkeys and nearby scenic Lake Kivu. Whilst Akagera National Park has a wide variety of plains game, elephants and predators, mainly lions and leopard.
Rwanda is well-connected to the Serengeti and Kenya (Nairobi). But also to Cape Town, Johannesburg, Zimbabwe as well as Europe. So it is now very easy to combine a Rwanda safari tour to see the mountain gorillas, with either East or Southern Africa. Most people combine it with Kenya or Tanzania because of the shorter flight connections with direct flights from the Serengeti. But South Africa is also a possibility with connecting flights.
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