Rwanda: Gorillas, Chimps & Big Five

Rwanda: Gorillas, Chimps & Big Five is a week-long expedition built around three of East Africa’s most extraordinary wildlife encounters. An hour with a mountain gorilla family in Volcanoes National Park — the only great ape on earth whose numbers are still rising.

A dawn chimpanzee trek in Nyungwe, a UNESCO World Heritage rainforest that holds a fifth of all the primate species in Africa. And Big Five game drives in Akagera, a park that lost its lions entirely to the war and got them back in 2015, its rhinos from 2017. Along the way, cross a 160 m canopy walk suspended 70 m above the forest and drive the Lake Kivu shore road through the hills that earned Rwanda its two nicknames — the Land of a Thousand Hills, and the Switzerland of Africa. That calm was hard won. This is a country rebuilt after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, so the last day belongs to Kigali: the Genocide Memorial, the Rwanda Art Museum in the former presidential palace, and the galleries where a young generation of Rwandan artists is working now. Wildlife, history and the creative present.