If you read my Kigali page you’ll know that I lost my hard drive with the majority of my Rwanda photos. The same goes for Nyungwe National Park, but I was able to recover much more from here than Kigali! This park was the highlight of my visit to the country. I absolutely love nature and places around the world where you can see nothing but natural forests for miles and miles. There are a lot of activities to do here in Nyungwe, with the most popular being Chimpanzee tracking. I choose not to do this which is of course a mistake in hindsight, but at the time I had spent an arm and a leg tracking gorillas in neighboring Congo and was saving pennies by the time I got back to Rwanda. I did enjoy everything else the park had to offer. These photos above and below were taken from some of the hikes I did with local rangers.

There’s very good infrastructure in the park, such as knowledgeable rangers, good lodging, and small cafes and restaurants. I stayed at a small lodge within the forest from where I could do daily activities. There is camping available, but from what I heard it runs at a crazy fee of $50 per night! The photo above is from the breakfast area of my lodge, I was the only one there!

While I didn’t do the Chimpanzee tracking, I did take advantage of the several hiking trails in the park. You’re unable to do these along without a ranger and the ranger fees are pretty expensive and honestly unnecessary. The park is definitely worth visiting but it’s ridiculously expensive by African standards! There aren’t any parts of the trail that I did that were steep or difficult, so all the walks are very scenic and gentle. Above and below are some shots of the trails.

Of course being in the tropics of Africa you can imagine how many different types of plants and animals live here. Above is a shot of some thick ferns I came across.

There are probably hundreds of species of trees in the forest alone. Some parts of the trail the foliage would open up and you could see high some of the trees are. Below is a shot of some of the colorful bark I saw. I believe the ranger told me the species of that tree but I can’t remember!

I didn’t see any game animals or large wildlife while in Nyungwe, but probably the most interesting thing I came across was this stream of Army Ants leaving their nest. I even took a video posted below. It’s amazing how endless the stream was, I stayed here for a much longer time after I took the video and it never stopped. Army ants can be pretty dangerous and are capable of taking down even large animals if they are injured or unable to get away.

I saw some other normal bugs you’d expect to see on a hike in the tropics. The only notable one was this giant grasshopper I came across. I’ve always been a fan of flying foxes even though they can carry the ebola virus! The photo below shows a colony of flying foxes that seriously eat tens of thousands of pounds of bugs every single night.

And lastly my highlight of my visit to Nyungwe was their famous Canopy Walk. The Canopy Walk is a suspended foot bridge that at times is as high as 165 feet (50 meters) above the forest floor. Needless to say you can get some great views here and see lots of species of birds that would otherwise be impossible from the ground.

I’m not sure of either of any of the species of birds I posted here, but these two colorful ones were my favorite. I believe the one below might be a species of sun-bird if I’m not mistaken.

I saw several species in the time I was on the Canopy Walk. The issue for is was you have to have a ranger with you so I felt a bit limited about my time up here since I had people waiting on me. They told me to take as much time as I wanted to but after an hour I felt that was probably reasonable. I seriously would have been happy spending a few more hours out here alone and taking in the scenery and whatever wildlife that decided to show up!