Nyungwe Forest National Park

Before we visited Nyungwe, it was a bit difficult to find information about it, and the place has been going through some changes since the Bradt travel guide was published, so this is just a few bits and pieces that might be helpful to visitors.

Assuming I’ve got the hang of posting pdfs to a blog, you can see the current park fees by clickinghere. They’re pretty self-explanatory, except possibly for one thing. We weren’t sure whether paying for something expensive (e.g. primate tracking) for several days would also grant you to access to other, cheaper things (e.g. nature walks) during the same period. It doesn’t, so if you want to do two days of chimp tracking and one day of nature walks then that’s what you pay for, so it works out quite expensive if you stay for several days but want to do different things each day. We opted for three days of nature walking, figuring that we were bound to see some cute and fluffy monkeys along the way. We were right, though the monkeys weren’t habituated, which means they will run away when they see/hear you coming – but you still get to see them, and we felt it was all a bit more authentic, somehow.

We visited Nyungwe in early March, which meant we were there just before the improvements came online (typically). The new visitor centre at Uwinka, built with USAid money, looks pretty impressive:

The new visitor centre should be open by the time you read this

We also saw work in progress on the new walkway that will give you views of the canopy:

Work in progress on the new canopy walk

It should make for quite a gentle nature walk, without the gradients and soft ground that make other trails at Nyungwe harder work than they should be. Didn’t look quite so gentle or pleasant to work on, though:

And when it’s finished, it should look like this:

Artist's impression of completed canopy walk (from Uwinka tourist info)

All this – the new visitor centre, the canopy walk and some other minor changes – were scheduled for completion by the end of March. It might have slipped a little bit since then, but most things seemed fairly close, so it shouldn’t be too much later.

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