Nyungwe National Park

Nyungwe is Rwanda’s least discussed park and, for many travelers, its most surprising highlight. Covering over a thousand square kilometers in the country’s southwest, it protects one of the oldest and largest montane rainforests in Africa, a landscape so ecologically vital that it supplies the majority of Rwanda’s fresh water and feeds both the Nile and Congo river systems from a single ridge.

Chimpanzee trekking is the park’s signature activity, and it offers a markedly different experience from gorilla trekking further north: chimpanzees are louder, faster, and considerably more unpredictable, moving quickly through the canopy in a way that makes each sighting feel electric rather than serene. Nyungwe is also home to a remarkable thirteen primate species in total, including Angolan colobus, L’Hoest’s monkey, and grey-cheeked mangabey, along with excellent birding for the Albertine Rift endemics found nowhere else. The park’s other signature experience, the canopy walk, suspends visitors on a swaying bridge some seventy meters above the forest floor, offering a rare bird’s-eye perspective on the rainforest canopy and a highlight many travelers rank above the trekking itself.

For travelers with time for a fuller Rwanda circuit, Nyungwe pairs naturally with Lake Kivu on the drive south from Volcanoes National Park, rounding out a itinerary that moves from gorillas to chimpanzees to open water within a single, compact country.