Akagera is the only savanna park in Rwanda, strung along the Tanzanian border, and a third of it is papyrus swamp, the largest protected wetland in Central Africa. Twenty years ago it was almost finished. The park had covered some 2,500 square kilometres; in 1997 more than half of that was handed over to families and cattle coming home after the genocide, herders poisoned the lions, and the last rhino was seen in 2007. Since 2010 what was left has been fenced, guarded and restocked. Lions came from South Africa in 2015 and black rhinos in 2017, and the cubs and calves on the plains now are the proof that it held. You cross golden grassland for elephant, buffalo and zebra, with topi and eland grazing beneath flat-topped acacias and giraffes moving in slow motion between the crowns, heads above the canopy as they browse.
On Lake Ihema a boat pushes out among one of the densest hippo populations in East Africa, with crocodiles hauled out on the banks and fish eagles calling over the reed beds. The papyrus along the eastern lakes hides the bird most people come for. The shoebill is a tall grey thing with a bill shaped like a wooden clog, and it stands so still that you can walk straight past it, until it lunges and comes up with a lungfish or a young crocodile. The park's bird list tops 500 species. Red-earth tracks run north into emptier country of open savanna and scattered lakes, where the reintroduced white rhinos graze and you can drive for hours without meeting another vehicle. After dark, which few parks in East Africa allow, a guide takes you out and sweeps the bush with a spotlight for hyena, leopard and bushbabies. Not all the rhinos here came from Africa. In 2019 five eastern black rhinos were flown in from European zoos, six thousand kilometres to a continent their line had left generations before, in the longest rhino move anyone had then attempted.