Thousand Hills Expeditions

Thousand Hills Expeditions was founded in 2011 by two former Volcanoes National Park rangers who kept meeting travelers whose trips had been derailed by permit logistics — sold-out trekking dates, mismatched transfers, mornings lost at the park office. The company was built around a single promise: if the gorillas are the reason you're coming, nothing about the paperwork should be left to chance.

Today the team handles more RDB gorilla permits than any other operator on the platform, with a dedicated permits desk in Kigali that tracks availability daily and holds relationships with park staff going back two decades. Itineraries are deliberately simple — Kigali, the Virungas, home — because the company believes the trek itself should be the complicated part.

Guides are salaried rather than freelance, trained in-house each closed season, and every vehicle in the fleet is under five years old. It is unglamorous, operational work, done extremely well.