Mountain Nyiragongo is among the best active volcano in Africa, this volcano is everyone’s wish destination to go to before leaving Africa. This amazing mountain is located in the volcano region of Virunga National Park found in DR.Congo along the Albertine rift valley and it is known for its ever eruptions that exhibits the activeness of this great historical mountain.It offers to the visitors a true geographical panoramic view during night and in the dawning times because of its sprawling hot lava into the sky.
After visiting a Ugandan tour company I and my five friends planned for this long life experience trip for more done three months before visiting Uganda to go for this surprising strata lava mountain hiking at Mountain Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We made arrangements and finally we traveled to Uganda to find our excellent tour operator Moses the Managing Director Nature Adventure Africa Safaris Limited.
At Entebbe Airport, Moses welcomed us with a maximum honor where after we boarded our 4X4 Wheel Toyota Land cruiser up to Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala where we had our rest as we were preparing for the tomorrows journey. Very early in the morning we started our journey to DRC we used the southern route that is Kampala-Masaka – Mbarara – Kisoro route which took us a full day (12hours) to cross the border between Uganda and DRC to Virunga National Park.
On reaching Virunga, we were welcomed to the park by the disciplined park rangers together with the park administrators who led us to Bukima Tented Camp from where we slept. Here we were charged economically for a double room full board.
In the morning after, we headed to Kibati ranger station where we had to start our activity from and this took us 45 minutes from Bukima tented camp. We started the journey to the top of the mountain at exactly 10:00aam , because there’s still the potential of encountering danger along the trail up to the volcano, we were accompanied by two armed rangers – one in the front and one in the back of the us. Well enough we had Moses who used to give us some stories that morale boosted us as we were climbing.
From here we had to stay in one group for security reasons and since we were to spend an overnight on the summit and we were international visitors, we were charged $300 per individual permit. Interestingly, we saved some of the costs for example; we had our own gear equipment’s such as, sleeping bags, jackets, fleece top, hat and rain poncho. A cook accompanied us to the top since we chose to take a meal package through the park and this package included, snacks, lunch, dinner on day1and snacks and break first for the next descending day2.
We hired a porter at $ 24; this is because we wanted to be speedy as we were climbing to the top. It took us 6hours to reach the top and in this we had four rest breaks as we were fed by snacks plus some drinking water. This kept us energetic as well as in good health, the last bit was kind of rough (it’s really steep), but the lava lake – which is the most magnificent thing I have never seen with my own two eyes – makes the walk more than worth your while. It gets better and brighter as the night gets darker (and red smoke pours out of it!), prompted us to sit for hours in the cold and stare into the shifting lava. We slept in Nyiragongo Volcano Summit Shelters at the top and the charges were included in the permit we bought earlier.
The next day in the morning, we descended from the top of the mountain and this took us four hours in the terrains up to Kibati Ranger Station to check out and at around 3pm we started our journey back to Kampala, we reached at 3am at Grand imperial Hotel where we spent an overnight as we waited for our flight in the mid-day. We left the hotel at 9:00am to the airport since it is mandatory for those who are to flight to be at the airport two hours before the flight, indeed we had a great and a safe journey to Nyiragongo Mountain with Nature Adventure Africa Safaris Limited and we look forward to go back with the same company because of the invaluable exceptional services that were rendered to us while on the tour.
