Travel Guide Nshenyi

About 40 kilometres south-west of Mbarara and less than ten kilometres north of Rwanda and Tanzania, this "cultural village" (www.nshenyi.com), close to the town of Kitwe, joined forces some 15 years ago with the Great Lakes Safaris tour operator to promote and introduce visitors to Ankolé culture. In a beautiful hilly region, travellers are welcomed in simple but pleasant rooms. The activities allow you to immerse yourself in the daily life of the pastoralists. You will be able to milk the superb ankolé cows with their impressive lyre-shaped horns and feed them, learn about traditional cooking, visit a village, a school or a local market, discover the flora and fauna of the hills or the banks of the Kagera river which marks the border with Tanzania, attend vernacular dances... and above all, you will be enriched by the contact with a warm population and discover life in this real backcountry! The simplest way is to arrange directly with the tour operators who have included the Nshenyi Cultural Village in their catalogue. If you wish to go by your own means to this remote region, also known for the Nsongezi Rock Shelter, an archaeological site dating from the Neolithic period, you can take the track that leaves the Mbarara-Kabale national road at Kagando (six kilometres from downtown Mbarara) or the one leaving from Ntungamo. In both cases, do not hesitate to ask the locals to tell you the way.