Nyungwe Forest


Day 53 & 54 - 30th & 31st July 2019

From Kirongo we drove south along the lake before heading east for Nyungwe Reserve National Park, Uwinka Campsite which would be our home for the next two nights.  Nyungwe Forest  is renown for hiking and birdlife.  My birding bucket-list on this holiday was to see the Great Blue Turaco and Nyungwe is just about the only place you find it.


We were keen to do birding and a monkey trek, but our day turned out to be quite a disaster – instead of back-tracking toward the lake to Giyakuru for the monkey trek, we headed toward Kigali (which we understood was the direction to travel from the people who work at Uwinka).   Thank goodness we were on the road really early to catch the 08h00 tour, because we drove for 45 minutes in the wrong direction before turning back to Uwinka and then going another 30 minutes the other way!  At least we had a good cup of decent coffee at the Nyungwe Eco Lodge before turning back.   When we arrived, they told us that the trek was for the colobus monkey (which we had already seen in Urusha NP), so Peter and I decided that we weren’t going to pay US$60 per person to do the excursion.  Johan and Joanne did the excursion and were, I think, rather disappointed.  Their highlight was that there was a baby in the group which sort of pushed the rating up to 5 out of 10.

The forest is really, really old and very, very, beautiful.  We found the excursions at Nyungwe to be really expensive (ranging from US$50 – US$60 per person for a nature or bird walk).  As our birding in Amani Forest had been so difficult because of the high canopies, we were not keen to take a guide to do a trail for birds.  We rather walked the main tar road near Uwinka that provides areas that put one in line of the forest canopies.  Our highlights doing this were the beautiful Olive Bee-eaters hovering over their nests in the side walls of the mountains where they have been cut out for the roads and – wait for it …… the Blue Turaco Pictured above!!

Day 55 & 56 – 1st &  2nd August 2019

The road to Kigali was good and we once again slept at the Step Town Hotel. 

Because we had agreed that we would not stay in Benaco again, we didn’t have to do the full 60km’s of the really bad road in Tanzania.  We could turn off about half way toward Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, shortening the bad road by about 35 km’s.  We had heard from fellow travellers that the road to Lake Tanganyika was as bad as the road back to Benaco, but this was not so – the road was gravel, and in some place very narrow, but otherwise quite fine.  The only frightening thing was the buses careering at around 100km’s per hour on dirt and coming straight for you – unless you get out of the way, I reckon you’re a gonner! And getting out of their way was sometimes extremely tricky because of either the narrowness or camber of the road.  

We slept over at Swidish Modern Hotel, in the middle of nowhere and quite near the Burundi border, as we could not make Kigoma in a day.

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