Nguynwe National Park



Standing next to an elephant skull.





Enjoying the view before the hike.



Walking across the canopy bridge.

Swaying 200 feet above the ground.

Another view of Nguynwe.  At the top right of the picture is Lake Kivu.

Rwanda has three national parks: Volcanoes National Park (gorillas and volcanoes), Akagera (savannahs, rhinos, elephants), and Nyungwe (monkeys and rainforests).  The Rwandan government is pushing tourism to the parks, especially towards Akagera and Nyungwe.  With the success of Volcanoes, Rwanda tourism is trying to parlay tourists into extending their visits to the other two parks.  With increasing infrastructure and knowledge of these areas, visits are expected to rise in the next ten years.

For a weekend trip, the training group went to Nyungwe because it is the closest park to our town.  Even though the park is close, it still took two hours to get to the park, and an additional hour drive through the park to get to the center.  In Africa, it takes time to get around, even to the close places. 

Nyungwe is a very diverse park, which contains 1000 plant species, 120 species of butterflies, and 75 species of mammals.  Due to varying altitudes of landscape and location in Africa, Nyungwe can support such a rich variety of animals, from chimpanzees to elephants (now extinct from the park).  Nyungwe also sits on a continental divide, water that falls on the southwest portion of the park drains to the Congo River, and water that falls on the northeast portion drains to the Nile River.  In fact, Nyungwe is the southernmost tributary for the Nile River (the Nile technically starts in Uganda at the northern end of Lake Victoria in a town called Jinja). 

Our group took a hike to the new “canopy trail.”  There are a ton of trails to hike, and one of the highlights is seeing primates, especially when tracking the chimpanzees.  Hikes vary from waterfalls to springs to uphill climbs.  The hike took about three hours, and was highlighted by the canopy walk (newly installed) where you swing about 200 feet above the ground.  It’s fun but unnerving (that’s partially why it is fun; you do sway a good amount).  To cap it all off, we were caught in a torrential downpour on the way back.  We learned firsthand why it is called a rainforest.