Akagera

There aren’t many things that will make me leave my bed in the early hours of the morning, but on Saturday 23^rd October, I crawled out from under my mosquito net at 5.30am, pulled on many layers of clothing and grunted a good morning to the four other volunteers, ready and waiting in my living room. After a honey and banana sandwich for breakfast, I was soon as excited as them, because this morning, we were going on safari in Akagera National Park!

I am lucky to be living in Kibungo, which is only an hour away from the southern entrance to Rwanda’s National Park, which is named after the Akagera River. Rwanda is known as ‘The land of a thousand hills’ and so it was very different going on safari here to when I went to Lake Nakuru and the Maasai Mara in Kenya. My experiences had been of wide open plains, but in Akagera it sometimes seemed very similar to the Chiltern Hills back home! I was left with a sense that the zebras I saw grazing could easily have been horses in the English countryside! However, being stared at (in not the friendliest of manners) by a large male buffalo and seeing several hippos emerge from a lake soon reminded me that I ‘was not in Hazlemere anymore’!

Zebra grazing in Akagera National Park.

An impala in the bush.

Look! A giraffe!

I saw a wide variety of wildlife throughout the day as I stood up looking through the roof of the pop up safari truck I had hired with my volunteer friends. This included seeing the buffalos, hippos and zebras that I have already mentioned, as well as impala, waterbuck, eland, monkeys, baboons, eagles and many exotic birds (that I cannot remember the names of!). As expected, we were not lucky enough to see the elephants or the two remaining lions that day. I was very keen to see giraffes and was delighted that, when I spotted them in the distance, we drove through the bush to where they were, got out of the vehicle and walked towards them (keeping a safe distance) to take photos. Another exciting moment was when our guide shouted for the driver to stop and a HUGE black mamba (the most dangerous animal in the world) slithered right across the path in front of our vehicle. Apparently it is rare to see this snake and I was quite shocked by its size!