Nyungwe Forest National Park is a great option for a weekend trip from Kigali – easy to organize, beautiful scenery, and relatively affordable.  The windy drive through the park is stunning (if you can take your eyes off the potholed road). And also as you drive on the ridge among huge trees and lush canopy forests, with views out over deep valleys. And the well-maintained hikes take you down into the forest canopy, which gives the aura of being prehistoric and remote. It’s a good bet that someone in your group will make a Fern Gully reference.

Nyungwe is wide – over an hour to drive from one end to the other – so take that into account for planning hikes and accommodations.  The near end is about an hour and half from Butare (4 hours from Kigali), and the far end is almost to Cyangugu and the DRC border.  There are a couple lodging options for different price ranges, including a campsite area among trees and monkeys.

Driving through the park, we saw plenty of baboons and black-and-white mountain monkeys, along with some interesting birds. We didn’t see nearly as much wildlife during our hikes, as supposedly it’s harder to see things when you’re under the tall canopy.  But we did have monkeys around our campsite in the morning, including an unknown evil-looking grey monkey and two mountain monkeys getting monkey-busy.

One word of advice: this is a RAIN forest! We went in mid-June, leaving sunny Kigali in shorts and t-shirts. Rain poured down during one of our hikes and continued through most of the night, leaving us soaked.

Lodging

Over halfway through the park (coming from Kigali) is the Uwinka visitor centre, with some forest info and where you can book hikes and activities. The campsite is also here, with a number of sites set in small private clearings. We were the only people camping on a Saturday and opted for a remote site a couple hundred meters down a dirt path. Each site has a covered concrete hut for a cooking fire and eating, and they’ll even send a guy to start your fire in the evening and morning. There’s also a decent bathroom, and I think they offered to warm up water for showers if we wanted.  The camping fee is $30 per person per night if you’re also paying for hikes ($20 for residents), and $50 ($30 for residents) otherwise.

The 2 other lodging (and eating) options are a couple kilometres outside the park on the west side, 30 minutes from Uwinka. The new Nyungwe Forest Lodge, in the middle of a tea plantation, looks super nice and gets good reviews. But rooms are $175 a night per person (I’ll never get this per person charging policy) including all meals. 2 km west is the ORTPN Resthouse (aka Gisakura Guesthouse), which seemed basic with shared bathrooms, but decent and only $50 a night for a room with a double bed.  This ends up being cheaper than camping – but it’s a lot less character building than sleeping in a puddle in a leaky tent. Right next door is the other visitor centre where hikes can be arranged.

Hikes

The Uwinka and Gisakura visitor centers offer different hike options, and you pay based on the hike distance. For a weekend trip, the best option is two hikes for $70 per person ($55 for residents). Each hike requires you to take a guide and someone to watch your car, with this fee included in the cost. Most hikes start a few kilometers from the visitor centers, and since they don’t provide transportation, we had to cram five of us, plus the guide and car watcher, into our rented RAV 4 to reach the trailhead.

At Uwinka, you’ll find a number of hikes of various lengths that used to be named after colors but now have new names. There’s also a sketchy-looking canopy walk high above a valley, though it’ll cost you $60. We arrived at Uwinka on Saturday at 1 pm and immediately set off on the Umugote (blue) hike, which supposedly offers the best chance of seeing monkeys and birds. Unfortunately, it started pouring just as we began and didn’t stop, so we got drenched, and the animals stayed hidden. But the hike itself is really nice, winding through dense forest filled with ferns. It took us about 3.5 hours to complete the loop and 1.5 hours to dry out by blasting the car heater

After camping Saturday night, we drove to the Gisakura visitor centre in the morning to do the highly recommended 4-hour Waterfall Trail. Despite seeing little wildlife, it’s got spectacular views of hidden valleys and the trees of the canopy, and the 14-meter waterfall didn’t disappoint.

You can also track chimps for $90 ($70 for residents), but you’ll need to leave around 5 am, and they cautioned that you might not catch up to these hyper chimps.

Transportation

The drive from Kigali to the Nyungwe Forest National Park is straightforward – the only turn is a right at a small sign just before Butare.  The road is paved the whole way, but the potholes start from Butare and get worse and worse as you go west through the park. We got a flat on a nasty pothole, so make sure you have a spare tire.

The trip could include Kibuye, Gisenyi, or Ruhengeri by driving up the road along Lake Kivu, but it would be challenging because that road is in very poor condition

Taking the bus to Nyungwe Forest National Park actually seems doable, but it limits your hike options. You could take the Cyangugu bus all the way to the Gitarama visitor centre, start the waterfall hike from there (an extra 30 minutes walk through the tea plantation to get to the trailhead), and then stay at one of the 2 lodges. Or, get off at Uwinka, do one of the hikes near there, and camp. For the bus back, best to buy a seat in Kigali for the Sotra Tours Cyangugu-Kigali bus. And then wait on the side of the road at the right time to try to flag it down.