Highlands and medium-altitude regions, for instance Kigali, Lake Kivu and Volcanoes and Nyungwe National Parks, are warm to hot by day, and comfortably cool by night. Low-lying Akagera National Park is hot by day, and warm by night. January falls into the so-called short dry season and most parts of the country receives a medium...Read More

The self-styled ‘intellectual centre’ of Rwanda, Huye (formerly Butare) stands at a breezy altitude of 1,755m to the southwest of Kigali. During the colonial era, it was the second-largest town in the joint territory of Ruanda-Urundi (after the capital Bujumbura, which lies in modern-day Burundi) and it came as a surprise when it was overlooked...Read More

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...Read More

 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...Read More

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...Read More

 Lake Kivu | Credit: myafritrip.com Shared between Rwanda and the DR Congo, beautiful Lake Kivu extends for 2,370km² across the floor of the Albertine Rift, and hemmed in by a steep terraced escarpment that rises up to 1.5km above its surface. Ranked among the world’s 20 deepest and 20 most voluminous freshwater bodies, it is...Read More

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...Read More

rolling hills of rwandaCharacterised by rolling green hills terraced with cultivation, Eastern and Central Rwanda is not so scenically spectacular as the western part of the country and it supports far less endemic wildlife than the Albertine Rift. That said, the region does incorporate the national capital Kigali, the starting point of most extended explorations...Read More

 Lake Kivu Rwanda’s main tourist attractions are concentrated in the far west of the country, and are mostly associated with the Albertine Rift, the well-watered arm of the Rift Valley that runs along the Congolese borders with Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. The dominant geographic features of western Rwanda are Lake Kivu, a vast inland...Read More

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...Read More