Forest of Hope Guest House and Camp Site

Set along the southern boundary of the Gishwati forest, inside Gishwati-Mukura National Park, the station sits close to a local school and a health clinic, with Volcanoes and Nyungwe national parks both a short drive away. It is run jointly by the Forest of Hope Association and faculty from West Chester University. The building doubles as the Forest of Hope Guest House, and its dormitory sleeps up to 24 in bunk beds, alongside four single rooms with private shower and bathroom. Meals are full board. Researchers come for the forest itself: a montane rainforest fragment that lost most of its cover by the early 2000s and has since been replanted and studied hard. Long-term fieldwork here has tracked around thirty eastern chimpanzees and, more recently, a population of golden monkeys found nowhere else outside the Virunga range. Visiting teams have included primatologists from West Chester and Emory, geneticists from the Max Planck Institute, and student groups from Yale. A trail system through the forest is kept up through a maintenance fee charged to research groups. Anyone planning fieldwork needs a permit from the Rwanda Development Board first. The station asks for a copy of the research proposal at booking, so staff can coordinate access and logistics before a team arrives.