5-Day Rwanda Golden Monkey & Uganda Gorilla Safari

Your driver-guide meets you at Kigali International Airport for the short transfer to your hotel. If you land before about 2pm, visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial this afternoon. It is the most important context you can have for understanding modern Rwanda, and doing it today keeps tomorrow's drive unhurried. Later arrivals visit tomorrow morning on the way north. In the evening your guide briefs you on the week ahead and checks your trekking kit: waterproof jacket, gardening gloves, gaiters and broken-in boots.

Drive about 2–2.5 hours north on good tarmac through Rwanda's terraced hills to Kinigi, at the foot of the Virunga volcanoes. We base you in Kinigi rather than Musanze town because tomorrow's 7am briefing is only minutes away. In the afternoon, visit the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Ellen DeGeneres Campus. Its exhibits explain how mountain gorillas came back from the brink and how they are studied today. It is the right preparation for meeting a gorilla family in Uganda in two days' time. If there's time, take an optional walk or boat trip on the twin lakes of Burera and Ruhondo.

Report to the Kinigi park headquarters at 7am for your briefing. Then walk up into the bamboo zone on the lower slopes of the volcanoes to find a habituated troop of golden monkeys. The trek is usually shorter and gentler than a gorilla trek, and once you reach the troop you spend one hour with it. The monkeys move fast and the bamboo light is low, so a fast shutter speed matters more than a long lens. After lunch, drive about 30 minutes to the Cyanika border and cross into Uganda with your guide's help. From there it is roughly two hours through Kisoro and past Lake Mutanda to Rushaga in southern Bwindi. You arrive in the late afternoon for dinner and an early night.

This is the day the trip is built around. After an early breakfast, report to the Rushaga park office for the ranger briefing. You are assigned to a habituated gorilla family in a group of no more than eight. Treks last from one to six hours or more, depending on where the family nested, over steep, muddy, vine-tangled ground. Porters wait at the trailhead and we recommend hiring one: they carry your pack and steady you on the slopes, and the wage goes straight to local families. When you reach the family, you have one hour with them, often within a few metres of the silverback, mothers and young. In the afternoon, visit a Batwa community on the forest edge. The Batwa were the forest's original inhabitants, and their story completes the picture of what the park's creation meant for the people who lived here.

Leave early, around 7am, for the drive back through Kisoro and across the Cyanika border to Kigali. It takes about five hours with the border formalities, and you have lunch on the way. You reach Kigali in the early to mid afternoon, so book international flights leaving from the evening onward. If you have time before the airport, take a short Kigali city drive through Kimihurura and Nyamirambo, or stop at a craft cooperative. We can also add an extra night in Kigali or extend into Akagera National Park for a savannah finale.