Spot wildlife, sip rum in Rwanda

The East African nation, an under-the-radar destination for safaris, is also where a Singaporean set up a distillery in 2022

- Clara Lock Assistant Life Editor

“I used to trap these. I know how they taste,” he says, matter-of-factly. But he gave up that life - a difficult one, fraught with dangers like the lethal black mamba snakes that call the park home - to become a guide around 10 years ago.

“Nobody buys a house from poaching,” says Mr Twizeyimana, who used to sell game meat and hides for profit.

Today, the younger generation views poaching as a fool’s errand. As one of 30 official park guides, Mr Twizeyimana says he now owns two houses and makes more than 10 times what he used to.

His is one of the success stories emerging from community-based tourism initiatives in Rwanda. Locals run collectives, lead tours, make and sell products or benefit from a symbiotic relationship with tourism, as people living around the park do.

Here, around 10 per cent of entrance fees goes towards the community, contributing to schools and providing water and electricity for homes.

In return, villagers act as eyes and ears for the park, reporting suspicious activity such as people carrying snares in the vicinity, who might be poachers.

Rwanda, a landlocked East African nation, is known for high levels of safety and security relative to its neighbours - a fact I reassure many people with, including my parents, when I relay plans to go there alone. The country has recovered tremendously from the horrific 1994 genocide, in which a campaign to wipe out the country’s ethnic Tutsi population lasted around 100 days and left between 800,000 and one million dead.

Foreign investment, lush greenery, clean streets and minimal corruption - the country ranked higher than most other African nations in a 2023 ranking by global anti-graft watchdog Transparency International – have earned Rwanda the moniker “the Singapore of Africa”. It is a comparison made by foreign policy analysts, as well as multiple locals during my two weeks there in August.