Rwanda Gorilla Trekking & Wildlife Safaris

If there is a Rwanda safari that brings you any closer, on foot, to wild; One second you are bushwhacking through thickets of bamboo in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, pulling yourself up a steep lava slope, toehold to toehold. The next, you turn a corner and sunlight streams through the canopy to illuminate a matted clump of black against a curtain of rain forest green. You’ve known this was coming and still you gasp. Seated perhaps 30 feet away is one of the roughly 1000 mountain gorillas remaining, a saggy-breasted female, and soon you see that she is cradling an infant in her lap. She wraps one arm around the 6-month-old while scratching her own ear with an extended index finger.

For a great Rwanda gorilla trekking experience,  you need to be fairly fit, equipped for the humid, muddy conditions of a rainforest hike, and in good health – mountain gorillas in Rwanda are susceptible to human illnesses but don’t have our immunity, which means a common cold can be deadly to a whole family of gorillas and you won’t be permitted to trek if you are unwell. Even in the dry season, the rainforest is a challenging environment: it’s humid, wet and muddy with some steep slopes, plenty of insects and thick vegetation. It is absolutely worth the effort to spend time with gorillas in the wild, but be prepared to exert yourself on the trek.

With the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, which share 98 percent of our DNA, we look into a mirror, and they are looking impassively back.

What else after the Rwanda Gorilla Safari?

While in Rwanda, besides visiting the mountain gorillas, you can take a game drive safari across the boarder into the Akagera National Park and several other Rwanda attractions worth checking out. Most tourists on African trip combine Tanzania safari adventures with gorilla trekking Rwanda in addition to a safari in Kenya or Mount Kilimanjaro Trekking in Tanzania.