The Congo Nile Trail: Rwanda at Ten Kilometres an Hour

Rwanda is small enough to cross in a day, which is exactly why almost nobody sees it properly. Travellers arrive for the gorillas, drive between two or three places, and leave with an impression formed largely through a car window. There is another way to travel this country, and it runs for something like two hundred kilometres along the eastern shore of Lake Kivu, through hills and villages and coffee terraces, at the speed of a bicycle or a pair of boots.

The Congo Nile Trail is the best thing in Rwanda that nobody books.

What it actually is

The trail follows the ridge and shoreline country between Rubavu in the north and Rusizi in the south, tracing the lake that forms the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The name comes from the watershed it follows, the high ground dividing water that eventually reaches the Congo river from water that finds its way to the Nile.

 It is not a wilderness path. This is a route through inhabited country, on dirt roads, tracks, past farms, villages, schools and markets. That is the whole character of the thing. You are not escaping into empty landscape, you are travelling through a working one, at a speed slow enough that people can say hello to you and you can answer.

The full route takes around ten days on foot or five by mountain bike. Most travellers do not do the full route, and there is no reason to. Sections of two or three days give you the essence of it.

The riding

By bike, the trail is genuinely demanding. Rwanda is not called the land of a thousand hills as a marketing flourish, and the route climbs and drops continuously, often steeply, frequently on rough surface. Fit cyclists find it hard. Unfit cyclists find it educational.

What you get in return is the finest cycling country most people will ever ride through. The lake appears and disappears below you, blue between the hills. You drop into bays and climb back out. Coffee terraces run down the slopes toward the water, and in season the drying beds are spread with beans. Villages come every few kilometres, and in every one, children run alongside you shouting, which is either delightful or exhausting depending on the hour and the gradient.

Support vehicles can carry bags, and guides ride with you, which converts the experience from an expedition into something a reasonably fit traveller can genuinely enjoy.

The walking

On foot, the trail becomes a different proposition, slower and more social. You cover less, you stop more, and you spend more time in the villages you pass through rather than sailing past them.

Walking sections of a few days, staying in simple guesthouses or camping, is the most immersive travel available in Rwanda. It is also, for travellers whose image of the country is formed entirely by the gorilla parks, a corrective. You see the agricultural country that most Rwandans actually live in, the terracing, the coffee and tea, the markets, the extraordinary orderliness of the landscape.

Lake Kivu

The lake is the constant, and it deserves its own paragraph.

Kivu is large, deep, and free of the crocodiles, hippos, and bilharzia that make most African lakes off-limits, which means you can swim in it. After a day of climbing in the heat, this matters enormously. The water is clear and cool, the shoreline is scattered with bays and small beaches, and fishermen work the lake at night in wooden boats lashed together in threes, singing as they paddle out, their lamps visible across the water.

Sunset over Kivu, with the Congolese hills darkening on the far side, is among the best evenings the region offers, and you have earned it by then.

Coffee, properly

The hills above the lake grow some of the finest coffee in the world, and the trail runs directly through the growing country. Washing stations along the route welcome visitors, and stopping at one turns an abstract product into a process you can follow with your own eyes: the cherries, the pulping, the fermentation tanks, the drying beds where women turn beans by hand, the sorting.

 Rwandan speciality coffee has built a serious international reputation over the past two decades, and much of it comes from cooperatives whose members farm very small plots on these slopes. Buying a bag at the source, after riding past the trees it grew on, is a considerably better souvenir than anything in an airport.

Fitting it into a trip

The trail sits in western Rwanda, which makes it geographically convenient in a way that surprises people. The northern end at Rubavu is a reasonable drive from Volcanoes National Park, so a few days of riding or walking can follow a gorilla trek directly. The southern end lies near Nyungwe Forest, which allows a route that strings gorillas, trail and rainforest into one journey across the country.

That combination, moving from the volcanoes to the lake to the rainforest, is the most complete way to see Rwanda, and it is a considerably more interesting trip than the standard two-night gorilla visit. You can see how the pieces fit across our Rwanda destinations. For those planning independently, the official Rwandan tourism site keeps route information and accommodation listings for the trail.

Travelling at a speed that lets a country answer back

Most of us travel too fast to be seen. We move between sights in vehicles, at speeds that turn everything between them into scenery, and we arrive home with a set of destinations rather than a sense of a place.

What the Congo Nile Trail offers is not a landmark. There is no single view on it that will make your photographs. What it offers is the experience of moving through a country at a pace that makes you part of the traffic rather than separate from it, where an old man can start a conversation, where you stop because a hill has beaten you and end up buying bananas from someone who finds the whole situation hilarious.

Rwanda is a country that reveals itself in these encounters far more than in its parks, remarkable as those are. Ride it slowly, or walk it slowly, and it stops being the place where the gorillas live and becomes somewhere you actually know a little.

 Two hundred kilometres is a lot to ask. Three days of it is not, and three days will change what you think this country is.

If you want your Rwanda to include the country between the parks, tell us and we will build the trail into it.