Why is Rwanda Gorilla Trekking easy?
With regard to mountain gorilla trekking, Rwanda has become the most accessible and logistically prepared venue available to travelers in the world. While visiting the gorillas in their natural environment is an experience one cannot have anywhere else in Africa, the development of luxury tourism facilities and the unique geography of Rwanda have made it easier to visit than other locations where gorillas live.
The reason for this ease of travel is not so much due to the fact that travelers are guaranteed a short walk (the location of the wild animals is uncertain) but rather because of the facilities and infrastructure that make the entire process easier for travelers and more convenient than if they had traveled to other gorilla habitats.
Most Accessible and Shortest Transit Time To Gorilla Trekking.
Rwanda’s closeness to the international airport of Kigali (KGL) is the main reason it provides easy access to the gorilla habitats. The Volcanoes National Park (VNP), which is the only gorilla habitat in Rwanda, is a quick trip by car (2-3 hours) from the Kigali airport via good/newly maintained roads.
The highly convenient logistics of arriving and immediately traveling from the airport to the VNP gateway town of Musanze provides the ultimate convenience for visitors, who can arrive at the Kigali airport and be in Musanze with time to spare prior to starting their trek the next day.
Here you can also execute a ‘day trip’ for gorilla trekking. You can fly to Rwanda, be driven to the Virunga National Park to hike for 2 or more hours, and return to Kigali on the same long day. This process is vastly different from other primary destinations for gorilla trekking in nearby countries, where you have to endure an 8- to 10-hour-long drive over difficult terrain or take a costly domestic flight, when at the very least, it takes 2 nights of travel until you can reach the park’s entrance.
Best Service and logistics.
Rwanda’s high-quality and low-impact tourism offers excellent service and organized logistics. Upon checking into the Kinigi Park Headquarters for the daily briefing, trekkers generally receive complimentary hot coffee, tea, and a taste of the local culture before starting. Notably, the park headquarters keys groups of trekkers to specific gorilla families according to the fitness level and preferences of the trekkers.
When an elderly traveler has knee problems or requires an easier trek, usually the guides will do their best to assign an individual to a gorilla family that is closer or has a more straightforward trekking route for their trek. This is an important aspect of the personalized service for gorilla trekking and lessens the trepidation of an overly strenuous hike, as it allows more demographic groups to have a more positive experience while trekking to see the gorillas.
The Terrain and Environment are complementary to the Traveler.
Although gorilla trekking itself is an extremely physically demanding activity and occurs at very high elevations, when you are trekking in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, you will have the opportunity to trek in an environment that makes the overall experience easier for a majority of travelers. Most of Volcanoes National Park is composed of bamboo forests and open montane vegetation, especially at the lower elevations where the great majority of habituated gorilla families will be found.
This is a much more accommodating hiking environment for the traveler, and the bamboo growth is much easier to traverse through than the extremely dense growth of underbrush and heavily rugged valleys found in some of the other gorilla habitats in Africa, such as Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
Due to the openness of the bamboo forest, it is usually much more straightforward to traverse than other rainforest environments, which results in a less challenging approach by the first team of tracker guides and provides more opportunities to see and take photographs of the gorilla groups as they are located.
Some gorilla families, however, such as the Susa Group, live high on the slopes of Mount Virunga and require an arduous hike to see them; however, with the ability for travelers to request a family that lives lower down and can be accessed more readily, they will be able to control the level of physical difficulty in travelling to see the family. Rwanda has a well-deserved reputation for providing a far more structured and thus easier way in which to see this unique wildlife and its habitat.
