Day 78 – Tell the gorillas we’re coming!

Kigali to Kinigi, Kinigi Guest House

A view of Kigali from our hotel

There are many ways to go and see the gorillas that live around the Uganda/Rwanda/Congo border. What a lot of people do is pay a tour company to do all of the work i.e. arrange gorilla permits, transportation and accommodation. The gorilla permits for Parc National des Volcans (PNV) in Rwanda cost $500 per person – the tour quotes we received ranged from $1025 per person (with one night’s accommodation) to $3822 per person (3 nights). As a result, we decided to do it the cheap way and arrange everything ourselves!

We booked a taxi to take us to town, and we arrived at the Rwanda Tourist Board office in town around 8am to see if there were permits available – as this is the low season we secured permits for tomorrow, but we’ve heard it’s common to have to wait a few days, and in high season they need to be booked months in advance. Cost so far - US$500 per person.

We then purchased our bus tickets for the 12pm bus to Musanze, the closest major town to PNV. These cost us just 1700 Francs each – less than US$3 per person. The taxi to and around town to get all the tickets, cost us another $8 per person (which is a bit on the high side). If we’d stayed closer to town we could have avoided the taxi altogether.

We returned to the hotel for brekky, and booked accommodation close to PNV at Kinigi Guest House. The very pleasant and helpful hotel manager drove us to the bus station – so that cost us nothing. We had a little trouble with the bus – the minibus we’d booked didn’t have room for our luggage, but we only had to wait five minutes for the larger bus.

The country around Kigali is very picturesque, with terraces all over the hillsides with various crops – it’s as if no space has been left uncultivated. The day was also beautiful and sunny, so the trip was quite enjoyable.

PNV as viewed from Kinigi Guest House

In Musanze we quite conveniently ran into a driver who had just brought someone into town from the guest house we were staying at – so we had an easy trip to our guest house in Kinigi near the PNV headquarters, which cost us 7000 Francs – about US$6 per person.

The guest house is a budget place, but still nice enough for us, and situated very close to PNV. Cost was 25000F – about US$22 per person. Many of the staff speak French (Rwanda has a Belgian/French colonial history)  – but our Form 2 French was done so long ago that it was completely useless to us, it didn’t even help us with translating the dinner menu! Dinner was French inspired and quite nice. Overall, including drinks, it cost us about US$16 per person.

 It’s not possible to enter PNV without a vehicle, and these need to be arranged separately. We’ve organized one through the guest house for US$80. That’s $40 per person - so, all up our gorilla trip is costing us (in addition to the gorilla permits) just $95 per person.