Rent a car in Rwanda to gain unparalleled freedom in your travels. A road trip in Rwanda’s national parks gives you the flexibility to make unplanned stops, see roadside attractions and small towns. There are many attractions to see and do in Rwanda providing many stops and adventures.
Having a rental car in Kigali allows you to go off the beaten path, stay at unique lodging, pick exactly what you want to do and see, leave when you want and explore at your own pace. The options are limitless when you rent a car in Rwanda to have a more adventurous trip.
Visit Kigali Memorial Center
This is one of the central memorials not to be missed when you visit Rwanda for a tour. In span of 100 days, an estimated one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were systematically butchered by the Interahamwe and army. This memorial honors the estimated 250,000 people buried here in mass graves and tries to explain how it was that the world watched as the genocide unfolded. This is an intensely powerful and moving memorial for which you should dedicate at least half a day.
Visit the Volcanoes National Park
Explore Volcanoes National Park, home to endangered mountain gorillas, offering a rare chance for intimate encounters. The 160km Volcanoes National Park protects the Rwandan sector of the Virunga Mountains, a range of six extinct and three active volcanoes that straddle the Ugandan and Congolese borders and protect more than half the global population of the charismatic mountain gorilla.
Mountain gorilla trekking is the main popular tourist activity in the park, so don’t miss out to visit this park for a-lifetime-experience. However, a wide variety of other hikes and activities are offered, making it possible to spend several days in the area without running out of things to do.
But, the most popular activity after gorilla tracking is a visit to a habituated troop of the rare golden monkey, an Albertine Rift endemic whose modern range is more-or-less restricted to the Virunga’s. Also quite popular is the hike to Dian Fossey’s former camp and grave on the forested slopes of Karisoke. Fewer visitors embark on the more demanding day treks to the summits of Bisoke famed for its beautiful Crater Lake or Muhabura, and fewer still are up for the overnight hike to the highest point in the range, the summit of Karisimbi.
Visit the Akagera National Park
One of East Africa’s diverse national parks with both the white and black rhinos, giraffes, zebras. Located in the Eastern province of Rwanda, the park can easily be accessed from Uganda via Mirama hills border and from Kigali.
Named after the river that runs along its eastern boundary, Akagera National Park is Rwanda’s counterpart to the famous savannah reserves of Kenya, Tanzania and the like. The park provides opportunities for those wishing to see the coveted Big Five. The park provides opportunities for those wishing to see the coveted Big Five.
Akagera also still retains a genuinely off-the-beaten-track character: this is one African game reserve where you can still drive for hours without passing another vehicle, never knowing what wildlife encounter might lie around the next corner.
As for the coveted Big Five, buffalo are plentiful and easily seen, elephants are quite common but more difficult to track down, and leopards are present but secretive as ever. For the best part of two decades, lion sightings here had been little more than the stuff of rumour, but with the June 2015 reintroduction of seven lions (two males and five females) flown in from reserves in South Africa, Akagera is once again home to the most charismatic member of the quintet.
Visit Nyungwe National Park
The endless mountain and valleys don’t stop as you head south towards the border with Burundi. While the gorillas in Volcanoes National Park tend to garner almost everybody’s attention, southwestern Rwanda id home to East Africa’s largest montane forest, Nyungwe Forest National Park, one of the most primate rich areas in the world, the region is also home to the historic colonial and intellectual center of Huyu Butare, which plays hosts to one of East Africa’s best ethnographic museums.
For most visitors who come to Rwanda, primates are the main attraction in this park. All the 13 species are represented, including a chimpanzee population estimated at around 500, which can usually be tracked at short notice, but several other monkeys are readily see, including the acrobatic Ruwenzori Colobus and the localized L’Hoest’s monkey. Nyungwe is also highly alluring to birders, botanists and keen walkers, with its 130km network of walking trails, and is it is the site of the region’s only suspended canopy walk.
National Museum of Rwanda
If you’re in Huye, do allow time to visit this beautifully presented collection of exhibits on Rwandan history and culture. As you approach Huye on the Kigali road, you’ll see its colorful fence on the right. Opened in 1988, and presented to Rwanda as a gift from Belgium’s King Baudouin I.
It is situated on more than 20ha of land containing indigenous vegetation and a traditional craft training center as well as the main 2,500m² museum building, whose seven spacious rooms illustrate the country and its people from earliest times until the present day. At the reception desk, various English-language pamphlets and books are on sale, and most displays are labelled in English as well as Kinyarwanda.
Lake Kivu
One of the top must be visited in Rwanda. Running along the Congolese border for 90km, the 2,370km² Lake Kivu is one of a string of ‘inland seas’ that submerge much of the Albertine Rift floor as it runs southward from the Sudan to Zambia.
It is very a beautiful lake, hemmed in by steeply terraced escarpments containing several peaks of 2,800m or higher, including the smoking outline of volcanic Nyiragongo in the far north, and it has long served as a popular weekend getaway for residents of this otherwise landlocked country.
Lake Kivu is very pleasant to take a swim from the hotel beaches. Also, boat tours are available with as absolute highlight the swimming herds of cows that go from island to island. And a lovely sunset in the evening thanks to the west facing direction.
