Wherever you stop in this country,” said Alex Kagaba, “the ground will always produce people.”
We’d parked on a dusty escarpment along the shore of Lake Kivu to take in the view.
This time I thought he might be wrong.
A couple of breeze-block homesteads, tin roofs gleaming, stood out on a hillside swathed in deep green, but for once we weren’t passing through the settlements that lined our route; weren’t being waved at by neatly-clad schoolchildren.
Then, sure enough, an unheard signal: first one, then another, then half a dozen boys appeared, jogging down the tar road.
Grinning, the first tried his luck: “Hello mzungu! Give me money!” before the second tried a different tack: “Give me a pen!”
It seemed a reasonable request, and I turned to dig one out of my bag, before Alex intervened.
“No! This is not the way children are taught to behave in Rwanda.”
A rapid lecture ensued, carried out in the local language, Kinyarwanda.
“I’m asking them why you should give them anything when they haven’t worked for it,” said Alex, as the boys listened respectfully, while looking increasingly sombre.
“Now, Ben. You have some pens?” I handed over a couple.
Another rapid-fire exchange: who was top in their class at school? What was the name of the governor of the western province? The pens were distributed to the brightest and best, and a joke or two from Alex sent the boys on their way, smiles restored.
You don’t get something for nothing in Rwanda. 2019 will mark a sombre anniversary: it will be 25 years since the 1994 genocide that led to the death of up to a million Tutsi at the hands of the ruling Hutu majority.
The awful culmination of the Rwandan Civil War, the roots of the massacre lay in the residue of a colonial-era divide-and-rule policy that emphasised previously non-existent ethnic divisions.
A hundred days of violence, murder and rape lasted from April 7 to mid-July, with national ID cards that listed ethnic classifications making it easy for Tutsi to be rounded up and killed.
In the aftermath, following the takeover of the capital Kigali by the Tutsi-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by the current president Paul Kagame, two million Hutus were displaced, becoming refugees.
By any standard that’s a lot to recover from. Yet almost a quarter of a century later, everything has changed. Rwanda – one of the smallest but most densely populated countries in Africa – seems full almost to bursting point, with more than 50% of the population under the age of 20, born after the genocide.
Kagame, criticised internationally when a change in the constitution allowed him to accept a third term in office in 2017, has nevertheless brought stability since he was first elected in 2003, and has pushed to rejuvenate his country.
Rwanda is safe, it is clean (indeed it is almost entirely litter free, thanks to a ban on plastic bags and the monthly Umuganda Day, whereby everyone does their bit to clean up) and international investment is encouraged.
Alex is among the vast majority of Rwandans who see Kagame as a force for good. His stories, like those of everyone I meet, are punctuated with two phrases – “before the genocide” and “after the genocide” – that to a visitor might sound almost blithe, were they not so obviously loaded with meaning.
Unsurprisingly he lauds the new Rwanda, one that’s all about reconciliation, education, entrepreneurship, hard work and now tourism.
There’s the beginnings of a tourism circuit of the country – from Kigali to the savannah of Akagera National Park in the east, where lion and eastern black rhino have been reintroduced, to Nyungwe Forest in the south-west, up to Volcanoes National Park in the north, where those icons of Rwanda’s ecotourism, the mountain gorillas, hang out.
In 2019, a new national park, Gishwati-Mukura, will protect a pocket of the rainforest between Nyungwe and Volcanoes, a reminder that before human encroachment rainforest ran the length of this country.
Luxury travel brands have been swift to see the potential. In 2017, Wilderness Safaris launched Bisate Lodge, a six-villa property next to Volcanoes National Park; in 2019 it will open Magashi camp in northern Akagera.
Singita, another high-end operator, has focused on the gorillas, with Kwitonda Lodge and Kataza House due to open in 2019. One&Only, too, has a new property in the pipeline called Gorilla’s Nest, and in October it opened its first luxury lodge in Rwanda, on the outskirts of Nyungwe Forest.
Nyungwe House dazzles from the moment you arrive; from a distance you’d hardly know it was there. The lodge is bent in the middle in order to maximise the rainforest views to the south and east. Its red roof keeps a low profile, hemmed by a working tea plantation, with 22 rooms and suites set out in five clusters near the forest edge.
One&Only has upgraded an existing property, once known as Nyungwe Forest Lodge, to bring it in line with the standards delivered elsewhere in its portfolio. A spa has been added, the pool has a new bar area, and various stretches of decking give a more lodge-like sense of outdoor space.
The rooms are cosy and tranquil, each with a balcony, a four-poster bed and tasteful flashes of modern African art. The main property is as decorous and low-lit as you’d expect, with fireplaces adding a homely touch.
There’s also a programme of activities such as tea tasting and spear throwing in which guests can immerse themselves.
It’s a glorious expression of luxury on the cusp of the wilderness, and watching the sun rise over the forest while you devour lightly poached eggs is the sort of life-affirming experience that Rwanda excels at. Which is very lucky, because rising early is also a necessary part of tracking the local chimpanzees.
Nyungwe National Park contains some of the best preserved montane rainforest in Central Africa, its 970km² of dark canopy occupying an extraordinary position as “the water tank of Rwanda”, with rain that falls here draining to the Nile in the east, and to the Congo in the west.
Lurking amid the foliage are 13 primate species in all, among them Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee.
Jean Claude Nyirimbazi takes me to find them: a half-hour trot along narrow paths lined with tall strangler figs and tiny orchids, with the dense forest stretched like florets of broccoli over the distant hills and the croak of a black-billed touraco occasionally rising over a buzz of insects. A tracker appears from nowhere, beckoning us over.
The chimps are in the trees: lolling, jumping, grooming, yawning, baring their bottoms. One thuds to the forest floor, knuckling along the leaf litter. We’re as close as can be, me gawping and wondering whether to take a picture.
It’s impossible not to anthropomorphise: we share 99 per cent of our DNA, after all. Then a few minutes later a sudden alarm sees the whole troop of 20 or so animals suddenly descend: within a minute they’ve vanished.
Alex and I head north, tracking the course of Lake Kivu from the chaotic border outpost with the DRC at Cyangugu, via the scruffy but charming lakeside villas of Cormoran Lodge at Kibuye and on towards Volcanoes National Park.
Rwanda has been dubbed “the land of a thousand hills” and for once it’s a slogan guilty of understatement rather than hyperbole.
The volcanic landscape undulates in green-clad waves, the road twisting around them. Tea plantations are marked out in terraces like contour lines drawn by a giant cartographer; and the tea pickers are always busy.
We stop for lunch at Virunga Lodge, high on a ridge, with the brooding Virunga Volcanoes and the Musanze valley to the west and lakes Ruhondo and Bulera to the east. Here I see just how inhabited Rwanda is: the volcanoes are isolated pockets of forested sanctuary amid the spread of humanity below.
I rise before daylight at the Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, one of the oldest properties in the area, and recently given the spit and polish treatment. Then, as part of a group of six, it was off to meet our guide at the park entrance.
Edward Bahizi tells us that we’ve been assigned the Sabyinyo group, one of a dozen gorilla families that have been habituated to humans, and that we will have to walk for about 90 minutes to see them.
It costs $1,500 (R27,300) to spend an hour with the gorillas, and only 96 permits are issued daily, which makes this a form of luxury travel in its own right, one that gives back directly to local communities while safeguarding conservation efforts.
The Sabyinyo group is 19 strong, ranging in age from the oldest silverback, at 47, to one of the youngest gorillas, around two weeks old and clinging to its mother when we meet.
Our strictly enforced hour is everything I imagined it would be: enchanting, dramatic, occasionally comic – with an added frisson when, out in a clearing, we are mock-charged by a silverback as we turn to leave.
All that effort made to preserve our animal cousins makes the events of 1994 seem still more dreadful. Each year 100 days of mourning start on April 7, when Rwandans pay their respects at memorials scattered throughout the country.
At a former technical college at Murambi, 50,000 Tutsi were slaughtered over a three-day period. It’s a stark, awful place.
After an unblinking historical overview, I am taken by Liliane Musabyemariya, the memorial manager, to a series of outhouses behind the college that were originally intended as dormitories. Now the dead rest here.
The rooms contain hundreds of human skulls, arranged neatly on wooden shelves, bones are stacked in piles, and there are piles of the clothes worn by victims when they were thrown into communal graves.
We get to the end of our tour, and I probably shouldn’t ask, but I do; it seems to matter, suddenly. “Are you Tutsi or Hutu?”
Liliane pauses, looks me straight in the eye: “It’s not written on our identity cards any longer; there is no distinction. I am Rwandan.”
What else to see in Rwanda
1. It has very big and very famous animals
The key reason to visit Rwanda is its mountain gorilla population – and rightly so.
These glorious creatures haunt Volcanoes National Park, in the far north-west of the country where it rubs up against Virunga National Park in the DRC and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda to create one colossal cross-border expanse of wildlife and wonder.
2. But there is more to the mountains than primates
As its name suggests, Volcanoes National Park also knows a thing or two about vast fire-breathing peaks. It incorporates five of the eight volcanoes which give the ridge line of the Virunga Mountains a lava-born grandeur.
Mount Karisimbi is the highest at 4,507m and snow is present on its summit during the annual dry season of June-August ( its name loosely translates as “snow” in the local language, Kinyarwanda).
For all this, it can be conquered on foot (thankfully, the volcano is regarded as inactive).
3. Here be lions, too
Rwanda is rarely considered a classic safari destination, but for those seeking things that roar and growl in the night, Akagera National Park is home to the Big Five (lion, rhino, elephant, buffalo, leopard).
Spreading out on the east flank of the country, shaped by the border with Tanzania and the River Kagera, this verdant enclave of savannah and wetland suffered during Rwanda’s turbulent 90s, when poaching and subsistence hunting robbed it of most of its inhabitants.
But it has re-gathered itself since 2009, when it was taken under the wing of rescue and rehabilitation group African Parks.
4. The treeline is alive with the flutter of feathersThere are further members of Rwanda’s National Parks club. Pinned to the south-west of the country, where it borders Burundi, Nyungwe Forest National Park is an example of Africa at its most raw – a dense patch of pristine jungle where chimpanzees leap from branch to branch, and more than 300 bird species caw and call in the upper leaves.
5. Its capital is an intriguing place for a day or two
Pitched roughly at the geographic centre of the country, Kigali could be called a work-in-progress, fanning out in that sprawling fashion of major African cities, across hillsides and slopes.
With a population of more than a million, this is no tiny conurbation, but it reveals its charms gracefully.
Rwanda: Getting there
Ben Ross was a guest of Visit Rwanda, RwandAir and Red Savannah which arranges six-day itineraries for Rwanda from the UK, including full-board stays at One&Only Nyungwe House, Cormoran Lodge, Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge and The Retreat Kigali.
Also included are gorilla trekking and chimpanzee permits, a half-day kayaking trip, land transportation and return flights on RwandAir.
South Africans travelling to Rwanda for under 90 days do not require visas prior to travel, as they are issued with visas on arrival.
You can fly to Kigali from Cape Town or OR Tambo airports via RwandAir or Ethiopian Air. For more information see visitrwanda.com
– additional reporting by Chris Leadbeater/The Telegraph