Review: One&Only Nyungwe House, Rwanda

There was a tragic story out of the Seychelles years ago of a British couple who got married, flew out on honeymoon, and were back in the same church less than two weeks later for his funeral after a shark attack. This story really stuck with me. And as I stood in One&Only Nyungwe House, I found myself repeatedly thinking: how lucky. That’s an upgrade on having to stay here.

Getting there

It only took a 25-minute helicopter flight from Bisate on an AW139, followed by a 2-minute drive to the lodge.  How quickly life can change.  One moment you’re on the glorious cliffs of Dovor, 27 minutes later you’re storming the beaches of Normandy.  I immediately regretted taking the helicopter.  If we took the 5-6 hour drive, I could’ve spent less time here.  Instead, I paid a premium to expedite disappointment.

I knew I wouldn’t like this… and somehow it’s worse.  Yes, I immediately understood why I was never keen to come here.  You see, getting around Rwanda is not easy; it’s either an expensive helicopter or long, long drives.  Whilst this is my third time in Rwanda, I have never been convinced to go anywhere other than Volcanoes National Park.  Clients didn’t convince me it was worth it.  Not even those pictures of chimps with six packs could lure me in.  I finally decided to spend the full week in Rwanda and try what else it had to offer in the supposed luxury category.  Always trust your gut, children.  Even if your gut is consistently excreting methane at an unnatural rate.

You’re given a five-minute massage on arrival.  A nice touch (pun intended), in theory.  In practice, the masseur was working through some personal trauma using my spine as the outlet. I cannot even comprehend what my forefathers did to her relatives.

Setting

You’re in a tea plantation, next to one of Africa’s oldest rainforests, surrounded by monkeys…and then you’re dropped into what feels like a budget business hotel room that had a botched transition.  The environment is special.  The hardware is not.  

I was here in the rainy season, and it did indeed live up to its name by doing just that most of the afternoons.  I would find a way to blame One&Only for this, but it was actually quite pleasant to sit on the terrace and listen to it.

Facilities

The second you walk into the main area, you understand the problem.  It’s old.  It’s dated.  It’s completely soulless.  Just like One&Only’s other Rwandan property, Gorilla’s Nest, it has all the hallmarks of a corporate resort, not an intimate lodge.

Reception flows straight into a boutique.  Yes, that’s your first impression.  That outlines their priorities.  Then you’ve got one large shared space doing everything — lounge, bar, restaurant — all with the atmosphere of the Bates Motel.  There’s a boardroom, in case you wanted to fly your team to Rwanda and humiliate them in person.  Not by doing anything, just making them have to stay here.

The one redeeming feature is the pool area.  Heated infinity pool, bar next to it, spa and gym nearby — this is easily the best part of the property.  It’s just a shame it feels like it belongs to a different hotel.  Oh, and the sweet station in the middle of the lounge, even if they did seem to restock it every other business day.

Spa / Gym

The gym is tiny, outdated, and if anyone else walks in while you’re using it, you’re both suing each other for sexual assault, so close to each other you are.

The spa is better.  Two treatment rooms, decent outdoor relaxation space, perfectly acceptable for a safari lodge.  And then you see the prices.  $260 for a 60-minute treatment.  In Rwanda.  At this hotel.  It’s impressive, in the same way a scam is impressive.

Room

I mean, erm, wow, what a lousy room. I thought they’d stuck me in the janitor’s closet by mistake.  The rooms look like they were sent back in time to actively kill the experience. It’s a mood-destroying, vacuum of joy.

These are some of the worst rooms I’ve seen at this price point. There are 23 rooms. 20 of them are these… things, one of which I was placed in (#18). The other three are two-bedroom suites, which we’ll have to assume are the only places on the property where Pennywise doesn’t reside.

Coming here after Bisate Reserve is like leaving Versailles and checking into Guantanamo Bay. I’m sure they’d describe the rooms as “cosy” or some other piece of fiction — I’ll call it what it is: small. So small there’s nowhere to put luggage without it becoming part of the décor. And that decor and furniture looks like it was chosen in a rush, as if someone had ten minutes, a catalogue, and a near-fatal concussion.

At the end of the bed, you’ve got two chairs and a sofa that could comfortably seat one adult, and at least half a chihuahua, all pointed at the TV. There’s a fire stove near the bed — although, to be fair, everything is near the bed.  Everything is crammed together. The bath is basically in the bedroom. 

Step outside and you’re greeted by a thrilling view of… bushes.  Just bushes.  The terrace at least gives you a bit of breathing room, along with two chairs to sit and contemplate how you ended up here.

Then you go into the bathroom, and somehow it gets worse.  The shower looks like it was stolen from a public swimming pool, and if it ever featured in a porno, the scene would last about five seconds before everyone involved sought a therapist and a deep clean.  Everyone has a breaking point.  

The water takes so long to warm up that galaxies are formed and imploded in that time, which unfortunately means you’re forced to spend even longer in there.  There is a bath, which I assume is the selling point, and shutters that open up so you can stare out at… the same bush.  What a treat.  The whole bathroom has about as much African character as Hilaria Baldwin has Spanish heritage. I struggled to even be bothered to photograph the room.  There’s a bed.  There’s a bathroom.  What more do you want from me?!

And then everything else just slowly ground me down. The wooden floors are so slippery they double as a slip and slide and feel like an insurer’s worst nightmare. The plug sockets are so weak my laptop takes hours to charge — my laptop, the only thing keeping me sane. Even the umbrellas annoyed me, requiring the strength of a medieval blacksmith just to close them. The backpacks annoyed me.  Yes, even the backpacks.  They’re so tiny and fiddly, I’m sure I’m now qualified to disassemble bombs.

At one point, the air-con started flashing in the middle of the night.  Later, something was on the roof making the bed rattle.  Could have been monkeys.  Could have been the Babadook.  Didn’t the three little pigs teach us how to build a house at some point?  Must not have translated well. Luckily, I found a way to cope with the room: I found myself playing a game of “spot the luxury,”.  Sadly, I repeatedly lost.

There are a few positives.  Air conditioning works.  They give you a cap for trekking.  That’s about where the list ends. I almost never bother taking a key with me at a safari lodge (please don’t rob me now I’ve said that), but here I found myself clutching it like I didn’t trust the place.

Service

Everyone is friendly.  Everyone is trying.  No one seems to know what’s going on.  Well, almost everyone is trying, as they put zero effort into my stay list.

It’s not bad service.  It’s just completely uncoordinated.  It feels like a team without a system.  Or a plan.  Or supervision. At times, it felt like the staff were the ones who were on holiday.  

As far as I could tell, there was only one other guest here, and yet the service somehow still wasn’t proactive.  Even the basics were missed.  I’d arrive at dinner in the pouring rain and no one would come to greet me or help with the door. 

What I found strange was the contradiction.  On one hand, my welcome drink — which I didn’t like — sat abandoned in the main area for nearly three hours without anyone noticing or removing it.  On the other, I couldn’t sit down for more than a few minutes without being asked if I wanted another drink.  By about 30 people.  

There’s no real issue with the people themselves.  Everyone is kind, warm, and clearly trying.  But there’s no structure, no consistency, and no memory.  Preferences don’t carry through and are forgoten by he time you’ve finished speaking the words; you’re constantly dealing with new faces, and you find yourself repeating the same things over and over.

Messages sent on WhatsApp — which I do appreciate as a system — went unanswered, forcing me to call instead.  The operations manager, whose name was on the welcome note, asked me how my second trek was going… on my first full day.  It’s like auto-pilot for dummies.  It shouldn’t be this hard.

Even the small touches lack follow-through.  Snacks in the room aren’t restocked.  The communal snack area isn’t much better.  Stories get repeated endlessly — charming once, tedious by day two when you’re hearing the exact same explanation about jams from a different person.

Food

The restaurant has this very dark, oppressive aesthetic.  It feels more like somewhere you’re sent as a punishment for unspeakable acts against a walrus.  Fortunately, the weather behaved, so I sat outside whenever possible.

Food, confusingly, is actually good.  My first lunch was excellent — beef minestrone followed by a very solid beef tagliata.  Sure, that’s as African as Justin Trudeau, but at least it was done well.  

They also have an in-room dining menu, which again emphasises the whole “this is a resort” issue, but I’ll give them credit: it’s extensive, and the breakfast offering in particular is impressive too.

What I did like is the variety.  They rotate between à la carte, family-style, and tasting-style meals, which felt designed for the obese.  Which is the first thing this actually felt like a safari lodge.  Nowhere likes to fatten you up more.

Breakfast starts with a brought-to-table spread of fruit, pastries, cheese, and meats, followed by a long list of hot and cold dishes that you can order on top.  Dinner and lunch alternate between no-choice, tapas-style procession of five dishes, which quickly turns into a feast, whether you planned for one or not.

Some of it is genuinely creative — a carrot and pineapple salad I wouldn’t have chosen in a million years was actually very good, but whoever decided to pair tilapia with BBQ sauce has created a mystery that future historians will spend decades debating.  And my issue is always the same, whether it’s “family style” or tapas procession, I hate not being given a heads-up on what it is.  Like what kinda monster orders fish cakes?!

Activities

The real draw is the forest itself.  Nyungwe is massive, ancient, and full of life.  This is where you go for chimpanzees, canopy walks, and hikes.  However, to start the chimpanzee trek, it was an hour and a half drive, on some roads that have probably given me permanent brain damage.  So it’s not even that convenient a location.

To their credit, there is a good list of things to do, both in Nyungwe Forest and on premise. They actively push you to do things, which is refreshing, especially when everything on premise is included.

• Chimpanzee trekking (the main event)
• Colobus monkey trekking
• Canopy walks, hikes, zip lining
• Tea experiences, spear throwing, biking

Chimpanzee trekking is the main event. A shared trek is $250 with a maximum of eight guests, or you can do what I did and pay $2,000 for a private one — which at least buys you an extra two hours in bed, leaving at 7am instead of the usual 5am start.  Unlike gorillas, there’s no picking your group in advance. The chimps are constantly on the move, so it’s more a case of heading out and being assigned whichever group they manage to locate first.

I enjoyed the trek. It’s nowhere near as fun as the gorillas, but there’s no time limit, which helps. At one point they came down from the trees — after urinating uncomfortably close to my face — and I managed to get within a few metres of them, which was actually pretty amazing.

I also did the colobus monkey trek. Didn’t get anywhere near them. Naturally, I then returned to my room to find one trying to break in.

The rest of us are trying to escape.

The Good

• Pool

The Bad

• Rooms
• Style
• Feel of the place
• Price

The Luxurious

• Chimps

Conclusion

One&Only Nyungwe House is a corporate, soulless resort wearing safari clothing, completely undermined by poor rooms, service and the overall experience dragging everything down.  It feels empty.  It feels overpriced.  And most importantly, it feels completely replaceable.  With Wilderness reportedly building something nearby Bisate for chimpanzee trekking, there’s about to be very little reason to come here at all.

If you really want to experience Nyungwe, come for the chimps.

Just don’t stay here.