Volcanoes National Park

Currency budget Rwanda

The permit is the budget: $1,500 per person for a foreign visitor, for one trek and one hour with the gorillas, booked through Visit Rwanda or an operator. Eight people per family per day, so permits are finite and the dry-season dates go first — book before anything else in the trip. Lodges here are priced in dollars and run from simple guesthouses in Musanze to some of the most expensive rooms in Africa at Kinigi. Bring dollars for porters and guide tips.

ATMs & cards

Musanze has Bank of Kigali, Equity and I&M machines in the town centre; Kinigi, at the park, has nothing to rely on. Draw francs in Kigali or Musanze, and bring clean dollar notes for tips.

Porter fees and tips for the rangers and trackers are cash; dollars are welcome.

Wherever you are: if the machine offers to charge you in your home currency, decline. That is dynamic currency conversion and the rate is set by the ATM's operator, not your bank.

Safety all of Rwanda

The trek is the risk worth thinking about: steep, wet and at altitude, and harder than people expect — hire a porter at the start and take gloves for the nettles. The gorilla rules on distance, masks and not trekking with a cold are absolute, because the gorillas catch our illnesses. The park runs along the borders with the DRC and Uganda; the UK FCDO says borders here are poorly marked and that fighting in the DRC can affect the Rwandan side, so stay with your ranger group. Its advice against travel covers part of Rusizi District, in the far south-west, not this park. Nights are cold at this height. Plastic bags are banned in Rwanda and confiscated on arrival.

Our own assessment, not a sourced index.

Entry & visa Rwanda visa rules

Health & emergencies all of Rwanda

Required to enter

• Yellow fever certificate, but only if you are arriving from a country where yellow fever is present

Orientation, not medical advice — entry rules change and what you need depends on your own history. Check with a travel clinic four to six weeks before you go.

Food tip

Lodge food, mostly, and in the simpler places it is home cooking: beans, potatoes from the volcanic soil, which are famously good, and tilapia from the lakes. In Musanze, brochettes and grilled potatoes are the evening meal, and isombe, pounded cassava leaves, comes with most lunches.

Getting around

• Hire car with driver — how most visitors arrive, and the driver takes you to the trailhead from park headquarters, which can be an hour’s drive on rough track
• Bus — the express coaches between Kigali’s Nyabugogo station and Musanze run all day and take about two and a half hours
• Moto — around Musanze town, with the helmet the rider hands you
• On foot — the trek itself, through farmland and then bamboo and nettles, at 2,500m and above; it can be one hour or five
• Airport: Kigali (KGL), 2h30 by road

eSIM

A data eSIM for Rwanda, installed before you fly and working the moment you land:Works hereWorks here

Must-see

Nearby day trips

Say a few words

Kinyarwanda

• HelloMurahomoo-RAH-ho
• Good morningMwaramutsemwa-ra-MOOT-seh
• Good afternoon / eveningMwiriwemwee-REE-weh
• How are you? (news?)Amakuru?ah-ma-KOO-roo

Almost every Rwandan speaks Kinyarwanda, which is unusual in Africa and part of why the country feels so unified. English, French and Swahili are official too; English replaced French in schools in 2008, so the young answer in English and their parents often in French. A muraho before anything else is expected, not decorative.

Religion

Christian — Catholic, Protestant and Adventist

Overwhelmingly Christian: about four in ten are Catholic, and Protestant, Pentecostal and Seventh-day Adventist churches account for most of the rest, with a small Muslim minority. Sunday services are long, full and sung. Several churches, at Nyamata and Ntarama among them, are now genocide memorials, because people who sheltered in them in 1994 were killed there; they are visited as graves, quietly.

Do's and don'ts

Do

• Greet before anything else — muraho, and a handshake that lingers; getting straight to business reads as cold
• Give and receive with the right hand, or with both, the left touching the right forearm
• Plan around Umuganda, the community work on the last Saturday morning of each month, when shops close and traffic largely stops until about midday
• Visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial early in the trip; it explains the country, and people will assume you have
• Follow the gorilla rules exactly: seven metres, no flash, an hour with the family, and no trek if you are ill

Don't

• Do not ask anyone whether they are Hutu or Tutsi; ethnic labels are avoided in public life, and promoting division is a crime
• Do not bring plastic bags — they have been banned since 2008 and are taken off you at the airport
• Do not litter or cross the road carelessly in Kigali; the city is famously clean and the rules are enforced
• Do not photograph police, soldiers or government buildings, or inside a memorial where signs ask you not to
• Do not treat the memorials as sightseeing; they are graves, and many of the guides lost family there