How Many Days Do You Need in Rwanda?

This is the question we are asked more than any other, and the honest answer is that it depends less on Rwanda's size than on its roads. The country is small — you can drive across it in a day — but those are mountain roads, and the parks sit at opposite corners.

Three days: the gorillas, and nothing else

Land in Kigali, drive north to Musanze, trek, and come back. It works, and for someone with a long weekend or a permit already in hand it is a perfectly good trip. What it is not is a trip to Rwanda — you will see the volcanoes and the road there, and that is it.

Five days: gorillas plus the savannah

Add Akagera in the east and you get the two headline experiences: Big Five game drives and mountain gorillas. This is the most popular shape of Rwandan trip. The cost is one long transfer day crossing the country from east to north.

Seven days: the western circuit

Seven days lets you run the length of the west — volcanoes, Lake Kivu, and Nyungwe's rainforest for chimpanzees and the canopy walk. It leaves out Akagera. In exchange you get three genuinely different landscapes and two nights on the lake where the pace finally drops.

This is the point at which most people stop feeling like they are rushing. If you can only take one week, take this one.

Ten days: all of it

Ten days covers savannah, gorillas, lake and rainforest with time in each rather than a night and a drive. Two long transfer days, everything else under two hours. It is the trip we would take ourselves.

The mistakes people make

• Giving Kigali one transit night. A day here gives the rest of the trip its context, especially the Genocide Memorial.
• Booking one night at Lake Kivu. Arriving in the afternoon and leaving after breakfast is not a stop.
• Scheduling a volcano climb the day after gorilla trekking. Both are long days on the same steep ground.
• Trying to add Nyungwe to a five-day trip. It is five to six hours from Kigali in the opposite direction to Akagera.

If you are weighing up specific routes, our itineraries page compares all four side by side, including how much driving each involves.