Akagera National Park

Overview

Akagera sits on the Tanzanian border and is the only savannah in Rwanda — lakes, papyrus swamp and rolling grassland, entirely unlike the forested volcanoes most visitors associate with the country. Its recent history is the reason to come. The park lost most of its large mammals in the years after 1994, and lions and black rhino were absent altogether. Both have been reintroduced since 2015, and Akagera is a Big Five reserve again. It is one of the more convincing conservation recoveries on the continent and is now largely self-financing through tourism. Game density is lower than in the Serengeti or the Mara, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. What it offers is a genuinely different landscape two and a half hours from Kigali, and boat trips on Lake Ihema with some of the densest hippo populations in East Africa.