Wake up early and drive from Kigali to Rubavu to visit the Pfunda Tea Company, whose tea factory spans rolling hills of tea bushes stretching to the horizon. Behind this plantation: 3,600 local farmers in the Pfunda Tea Cooperative who supply every leaf that enters the factory. You'll suit up—apron, gloves, basket—and learn what tea pickers know by heart: only the top three leaves and the bud. Your hands will do what theirs do: pluck, sort, fill your basket. The slopes are steep. The work is real. Inside the factory, you'll follow your harvest through drying, grinding, fermentation, and packaging. Each stage transforms what you just picked from green leaf to black tea. The experience ends where it should: tasting the tea you helped create, still warm from processing.

Gisenyi

After lunch, take a short tour of Gisenyi—a colonial beach resort on Lake Kivu's northern tip. You'll pass fading old mansions from its resort heyday, see new upscale hotels that have revived the waterfront, and drive by Bralirwa, Rwanda's only brewery where Primus and Mützig are bottled. The tour ends at your hotel on the lake. Spend the rest of the afternoon at the beach or pool—swimming, reading, watching the water. Across the lake, Goma sits in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Mount Nyiragongo rising behind it, an active volcano that occasionally glows red at night.

This doesn't happen every night. Weather, water currents, and overfishing controls determine when boats go out. Fishing also pauses during full moon periods and September-October to allow fish stocks to replenish. You'll know by late afternoon if it's happening. Around 4:30 PM, you'll join fishermen departing in three-hulled boats. They paddle several kilometers offshore, singing and whistling rhythmically to synchronize their strokes. You'll board your own boat with a guide and paddle out alongside them. As darkness falls, lanterns illuminate across the water—fishermen use light to attract sambaza (small endemic sardines) and tilapia into their nets. The singing continues while they work. You'll return to your hotel on the shores of Lake Kivu by 8:00 PM.

A short boat ride across Lake Kivu brings you to Coopac coffee farm. You'll pick ripe coffee cherries alongside farmers—depending on the season, cherries range from green to deep red—and learn how the trees grow and produce. Next stop: Gashashi washing station on the lake's shores. An agronomist walks you through the complete process—selection, weighing, depulping by machine, 12-hour dry fermentation, water fermentation, hand-grading, and sun-drying on raised tables by the shore. You'll see how trained sorters distinguish quality by eye and touch. The traditional tasting follows: fully dried beans pounded in a pestle, roasted over open fire in a saucepan, ground between two stones, then boiled. You'll drink it with Coopac members who, over the past decade of hosting visitors, discovered their own love for the coffee they grow. Before departing, you receive three types of beans as a gift: dry parchment, depulped green, and roasted brown—your crop-to-cup journey in three stages.