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“A lush green
world filled by dramatic mountains that tumble and twist as they roll across
Central Africa…a land where the colours seem brighter than other places.
It’s true. Rwanda is beautiful. You should go there.”
-Travel writer James Bowyer in Footprint
magazine, June 2000.
In Colonial times, Rwanda was
dubbed the Land of a Thousand Hills, a reference to the thrilling beauty of its
rolling mountainous landscapes.
After independence, this small Central African nation leaped to fame as
the adopted home of Dian Fossey: the Land of Gorillas in the Mist, the
rare mountain gorillas whose range is restricted to the slopes of the Virunga
Volcanoes.
Today, Rwanda is remembered simply as the Land of the
Genocide – the site of senseless massacre, which dominated world headlines the
latter part of 1994.
The genocide is history. Recent history perhaps, but history all the
same. Peace was restored in 1995, and over subsequent years Rwanda has blossomed
in an atmosphere of renewed political stability and steady economic growth.
Meanwhile, the thousand hills are still there – every last one of them – and
so, too, are the mountain gorillas, those gentle giants of the Virungas, living
tranquilly in their misty mountain home.
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Only
ten years ago, Rwanda was Africa’s premier gorilla-tracking destination, a
status it is set to reclaim as it retreats from the front-page news to bask in
the more glamorous surrounds of the glossy travel supplements. And tracking the
magnificent mountain gorilla through the lush slopes of the Virungas remains
without question the most thrilling and moving wildlife experience to be had on
the world’s wildest continent.
Yet there is so much more to Rwanda than gorillas. Take Akagera National
Park for instance, a mesmering
tract of untrammeled African wilderness, where elephants still have the right of
way, and vast numbers of hippo and crocodile languish along tree-lined lakes. Or
Nyungwe Natural Forest, the largest extant tract of mountain forest in East or Central
Africa, home to chimpanzees, troops of 400-plus colobus monkeys, and hundreds of rare
forest birds. Then there is lake Kivu, an ocean-like freshwater expanse hemmed
in the dramatic mountains of the Rift Valley; the dramatic volcanic cones of the
Virungas; the secret delights of myriad forest-fringed waterfalls…
Best-known for its wealth of primates, Rwanda is also one of Africa’s
top birding countries, where an incredible 670 different species have been
recorded within an area intermediate to that of Wales and Belgium. For amateur
botanists, the gorgeous wild flowers of the forests and mountains are capped by
more than 100 orchid species in Nyungwe alone, as well as the otherworldly giant
lobelia, a floral refugee from a science-fiction film set.
Rwanda, in a nutshell, is a nature-lover’s paradise. It is also on of
the friendliest of nations: the warm welcome complemented by comfortable
facilities, fine food, and a rich cultural heritage.
Rwanda, we know, is a country with a past. More important than that,
however, it is a nation renascent, a country looking to its future – one in
which it will surely claim its rightful place as one of the world’s finest ecotourism destinations.
