Kigali Holidays

This half-day tour introduces you to Rwandan food, a cultural staple. Your host has run restaurants and has developed relationships with all kinds of nearby farmers: people growing macadamia nuts, chia seeds, cassava and sweet potatoes. The tour starts with a visit to one of Kigali’s colourful farmers markets to shop for some of the ingredients for the cooking class later. The tour is customised to your interests so you may visit a farm outside Kigali or meet the locals with a visit to a milk bar.

You'll take part in a short cooking class that focuses on Rwandan-inspired recipes. You'll pop on an apron and learn how to prepare various local fruits and vegetables, cook a few dishes and have a tasting, followed by a nice lunch. You can also incorporate cocktail making using lemongrass, passionfruit and tropical fruits to create innovative non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages.

Food is a big part of the overall experience and this tour allows you to interact with farmers, explore community markets and discover new recipes that they can take home with them afterwards.

On this walking tour, you get to explore a fascinating area of Kigali – its oldest neighbourhood. You will discover how people live whilst helping to support an important local community project.

The tour starts at Nyamirambo Women’s Center, a Rwandan NGO launched in 2007, where you will be given a brief introduction as to what they do. You will then have a Kinyarwanda lesson so that when you’re walking around you’ll know some important words, like how to greet people in the local language. It’s just a few words, and you get a hard copy to take away with you so you don’t forget. As you tour the centre you will meet some of the women who work here, producing products such as children’s clothes, handbags and homewares.

Next head out to see what the people of Nyamirambo get up to in their everyday lives. You may visit people who are selling milk or stop at a hair salon where they do braids. You will see women selling fruit and vegetables and a family compound where the women pounding cassava leaves will be happy to let you help them. The pounded leaves are used to make a very popular traditional dish called isombe, which is like a soup or a stew and is very healthy. You can call into a local tailoring shop, where you can choose the fabric, they measure you and make a dress or shirt for you.

You will finish with lunch at the home of one of the ladies in the group. It’s local food, and you get to taste popular Rwandan dishes such as cooked banana, beans, vegetables, sweet potato and cassava.