Volcanoes National Park

Volcanoes National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Volcanoes National Park is the Rwandan side of the Virunga mountains, two and a half hours from Kigali to the town of Musanze, and it exists in the traveller's mind for one thing: the mountain gorillas. The gorilla permit, sold by the Rwanda Development Board at 1,500 dollars a person for foreigners, is the cost of the visit and is included, booked months ahead, in the tours, which are otherwise transport, a guide and lodging: the two-day trips from Kigali drive up the afternoon before, sleep near the park headquarters at Kinigi, report at seven for the briefing, are assigned one of the dozen habituated families in a group of eight, and walk with trackers and porters for anything from forty minutes to five hours to spend exactly one hour with the gorillas before returning to Kigali the same evening.

One-day versions leave Kigali at four in the morning and are possible. The longer tours add the golden monkey trek, a cheaper and lighter walk in the bamboo, the hike to Dian Fossey's grave and the Karisoke site, the climbs of Bisoke to its crater lake in a day or Karisimbi in two, and continue to Lake Kivu, Nyungwe's chimpanzees and Akagera in a week's circuit of Rwanda. The minimum age for the gorillas is fifteen, and anyone with a cold is turned back. Porters, hired at the trailhead for a small fee, are former poachers and the best money spent. Uganda's Bwindi and Mgahinga sell the same hour for about half the price, with a longer journey.

Visiting Volcanoes National Park: what you will see

The park is the oldest in Africa, set aside in 1925 by the Belgians to protect the gorillas and once part of the vast Albert park, and it now covers 160 square kilometres of the Rwandan slopes of five of the eight Virunga volcanoes, Karisimbi at 4,507 metres, Bisoke with its crater lake, Sabyinyo with its jagged crest, Gahinga and Muhabura, bordering the Virunga park in Congo and Mgahinga in Uganda. The forest climbs from the potato fields at the stone wall that marks the boundary through a belt of bamboo, where the golden monkeys live, into hagenia and hypericum woodland hung with lichen and carpeted with wild celery, nettles and thistles, the gorillas' salad, and on to giant lobelias and groundsels and the bare summits.

About a third of the world's thousand or so mountain gorillas live in the Virungas, and the families visited in Rwanda, Susa, Amahoro, Kwitonda, Sabyinyo and the rest, are descendants of the groups that Dian Fossey habituated from her Karisoke camp between Karisimbi and Bisoke from 1967 until her murder in 1985; her grave lies there beside those of her gorillas, Digit among them, reached by a muddy three-hour hike. The hour with a family, the silverback feeding a few metres away while the infants tumble over the visitors' boots, is as close as people come to another great ape in the wild, and the revenue from it, a tenth of which goes to the villages, has made the gorilla Rwanda's most valuable citizen; the annual Kwita Izina ceremony names the year's babies. Buffalo and forest elephants are present and avoided, and 200 bird species include the Rwenzori turaco. The park was a battlefield in the 1990s and reopened in 1999.

Volcanoes National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The treks leave the Kinigi headquarters at about 7.30 am every day of the year after the 7 am briefing. The long dry season from June to September and the short one from mid-December to February are the easiest underfoot and sell out first; the rains from March to May and in October and November make the slopes a mudslide and the nettles taller, but the gorillas come lower, the permits are easier to get and the forest is at its finest.

It is cold and wet at 2,500 metres in any month, and gloves, gaiters and a rain jacket are the kit. Allow two days from Kigali for the gorillas, three with the golden monkeys or Bisoke. Lake Kivu at Gisenyi is an hour west, Kigali two and a half hours south-east, and the twin lakes Burera and Ruhondo are below the volcanoes.