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Published: August 9th 2009
I am back from an amazing two day trip to Akagera National Park in eastern Rwanda!
Brief history of the park: The park was created in 1934 by the Belgians as a nature reserve and was originally 2,500 square kilometers in size. The park borders Tanzania to the east with the Akagera River the natural boundary. During the 1994 civil war in Rwanda, many people fled to Tanzania and as they started to return, they were resettled on park land so that only 1,085 km2 now remain in the park. Akagera is similar in landscape to the famous savannahs of Kenya and Tanzania and there is plenty of wildlife to be seen. Six giraffes and 26 elephants were brought in and have done well - there are now 80 giraffes and over 100 elephants!
My tour guide Robert picked me up at 1:15pm and it took about 2.5 hours to get to the park. Most of the way was paved, but the last 45 minutes was not. As we got to one of the last towns before the park, we say three Westerners sitting on a bench surrounded by at least 30 kids. Robert stopped to see if they
were OK and it turned out he knew the guy from a previous trip they had done. Nick and his two friends had taken a bus from Kigali, but their driver did not meet them at the designated spot. When they called him, he said his car had broken down so he wasn’t coming. We asked them to come along with us and it was really fortunate that we found them since they were a lot of fun. They were headed to the park just for the day and were afraid they’d have to miss it if they couldn’t find a ride. Nick and Sarah are from London where Nick is in medical school. He’s observing at a hospital in Kigali for the summer, one that I’m hoping to visit this week. Jen is from Richmond, VA and is a volunteer with World Teach. She’s teaching biology and chemistry to upper secondary school students in the north.
We went to the park where we met our guide Celine. She was very nice and knew everything about the park and the animals in it. We headed off to the Giraffe Area and very quickly saw five giraffes! They are very
interesting animals and more graceful than it seems like they should be. There were two males, two females, and a baby. Celine said there was another baby in the group, but we didn’t see it then (although we did see it on Sunday morning’s game drive. There were oxpeckers all over the giraffes, eating the insects out of the giraffe’s fur. They were even on the giraffes’ lips and noses, but the giraffes didn’t seem to mind a bit.
After the giraffes, we saw a herd of impalas, males and females with some young ones. We then drove a little ways and found at least 20 zebras. Like the antelope, they were grazing and didn’t seem too concerned about the car.
We drove around for another hour or so and saw a number of birds, some baboons, a few playful vervet monkeys who were shy, but also wanted to ply peek-a-boo from their tree branches, and a young male giraffe. We then headed to Lake Ihema, the second biggest lake in Rwanda after Lake Kivu. We were looking for hippos and we found some! They were all in the water and would pop up, take a breath, and
then back under. It was hard to catch them quickly enough to get a good shot and mine were pretty blurry. It was getting dark so we headed back to the park reception area.
On the way back we had a very, very lucky thing happen: we saw a leopard! It came out of the bushes underneath a tree, saw us, stopped, turned around, but didn’t go very far back in. We were able to see if for at least 30 seconds before it turned around and slowly walked away. Robert said he’s been coming to the park for 10+ years and has never seen a leopard and Celine has only seen them at night.
We decided to go to the Akagera Game Lodge where I was staying and have a beer before Nick, Sara, and Jen headed back to Kigali. They were taking motorbike taxis to the nearest town and then hoping to catch a bus back to Kigali. Sarah had a 3am flight to the UK so she was anxious to get back to town. It was about 8pm before their taxi bikes showed up, but we didn’t hear from them so we assume they made
Tiger Attack!
Sarah, Nick, Jen, and I are attacked by a tiger! We kept joking that we wanted to see a tiger and Celine, our Park Guide, kept patiently explaining that there are no tigers in Africa.it back safely.
Robert and I had dinner and then I called it an early night. It was 9:30pm by this time and we were meeting for a quick breakfast at 6:00am. We wanted to be the first car out in the morning and Celine was willing to get an early start also.
We headed back into the Giraffe Area looking for the herd of buffalo that move through there in the morning. We found them easily and there must have been 40-50 animals. They were not thrilled with the car, but there was a mud hole nearby and they wanted to drink and get dirty more than they wanted to get away from us so it worked out all around.
We headed back to Lake Ihema and Lake Hago to look for hippos and elephants. We passed the group of vervet monkeys again and then, as we got near the fisherman’s village at the start of the lake trail, Celina saw a monitor lizard. She and I got out of the car and walked very slowly to see how close we could get. When we were 20 feet away, it started getting twitchy. At 15 feet,
it started towards its hole, and at 10 feet it disappeared completely. It must have been five feet long.
There were quite a few olive baboons in the fisherman’s village and they would come very close to the car. They are mean animals and omnivores, but we were OK as long as we stayed in the car. On the way to the lake we saw many birds, including two pelicans which are rare to see at this time of year. We also passed more impala and a bushback. As we got closer to the water near Lake Hago, we saw another group of impala and two very large warthogs. I did not know they got that big! They are shy animals and ran when they saw us which caused a mini-stampede of the impalas.
As we drove along, all of a sudden we all saw a Nile crocodile, the world’s largest reptile, under a bush, quite a ways from the water. He was easily nine feet long! He saw us and immediately turned and ran very quickly into the water and disappeared. Celine said he must have been hunting something to be so far from the water.
Water Monitor Lizard
This lizard was five feet long, maybe six When we got near the water, we saw several hippos. There were three that stayed with at least their heads above water for more than a few seconds. One of them even jumped out of the water and dove back in - very cool! We wanted to see some out of the water because they are very large animals and also pretty cool looking. I tried talking them out, but they were having none of it.
We drove along for a little ways and then stopped and got out of the car to have a look around. Using binoculars, we spotted an elephant across the lake! It had two white birds on its back and it was walking along the lake shore. As we watched it, it went deeper and deeper into the water until all you could see was the top of its head. Looking further down the shore, we saw hippos out of the water! There was a group of five of them leaving the water to feed on grass. There was no way to get to the other side of the lake so we watched them with the binoculars for quite a while.
When you
are on safari in Africa, everyone talks about the Big Five: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and buffalo. I saw three of them on this trip!
Overall, these are the animals I saw:
Giraffes
Zebras
Buffalo
Leopard
Warthogs
Antelopes: impalas, topi, reedbucks, bushbucks
Hippos (in and out of the water)
Olive baboons
Vervet monkeys
Elephant
Water monitor lizard
Nile crocodile
Birds: storks, kingfishers, oxpeckers, egrets, ibises, pelicans, fish eagle, and many, many others
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Lorri
non-member comment
Safari
Wow! The safari sounds like it was awesome. And you saw a leopard!! Very cool and it sounds like that was more than a bit of good luck to see him/her. Looking forward to seeing more pics.