8-Day Rwanda Safari: Volcanoes, Nyungwe Forest and Akagera

Your driver-guide is waiting just past customs at Kigali International Airport with an Amazing Gorilla Safaris board, for the short transfer into the city. With no activities planned for the rest of the day, the evening is deliberately unstructured — time to rest ahead of tomorrow’s drive north.

The drive to Kinigi covers barely two hours on some of the best-maintained roads in East Africa, climbing through Rwanda’s famous “thousand hills” terraced countryside. You arrive at your lodge by early-to-mid afternoon, the Virunga volcanoes visible from most rooms here, in time for an evening trekking briefing.

A 6am wake-up for the drive to park headquarters, where the 7am briefing opens with a performance by the Kinigi intore dancers before groups of up to eight are assigned to specific families based on fitness and tracker reports. The trek climbs through increasingly misty, moss-draped forest on the volcanic slopes before the strict hour with your assigned family.

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The longest single drive of the trip, heading south through Rwanda’s terraced hill country and past Huye, the country’s old colonial university town, before climbing into Nyungwe’s cooler, wetter montane rainforest — a genuinely different ecosystem from the volcanic north, and one of the oldest rainforests in Africa. Arrival in the afternoon with time to settle in.

An early start for chimpanzee tracking through Nyungwe’s dense montane forest — a more physically demanding walk than Uganda’s Kibale, given the terrain’s steeper elevation changes, though sightings remain reliable. The afternoon shifts pace entirely: Africa’s highest canopy walkway, a suspended bridge roughly 70 metres above the forest floor, strung between three viewing platforms with views out across the forest canopy to the Albertine Rift beyond.

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A long transfer across the country, Nyungwe’s rainforest giving way gradually to Akagera’s drier savannah in the east — genuinely the full range of Rwanda’s landscape in a single trip. Arrival with time for an evening game drive.

A full day across Akagera’s savannah, lakes and wetland, tracking lion and both rhino species — all reintroduced here after local extinction — alongside elephant, buffalo and leopard, plus a boat trip on Lake Ihema for hippo, crocodile and strong birdlife.

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The drive back to Kigali, timed against your onward flight, with a lunch stop en route.