12 Day Uganda And Rwanda Wildlife And Gorillas Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight and takes you the short distance to your hotel on the lakeshore, which is a considerably better first night than five hours in a vehicle after a long haul. Entebbe sits on a peninsula in Lake Victoria and moves at a slower pace than Kampala an hour up the road. If you land in the morning we can fill the afternoon usefully: the Entebbe Botanical Gardens, laid out in 1898 and good for black and white colobus, vervets and a surprising number of birds within a short walk, or the wildlife centre on the lakeshore, which takes in rescued animals and is better than the term zoo suggests. Our guide will run through the twelve days with you over dinner and check your kit, particularly boots, gaiters and rain gear, because you trek twice on this trip and the forests are wet in every month.

North out of Kampala through the Luwero triangle, and about two and a half hours up we stop at Ziwa, the only place in Uganda where wild rhino exist. They were poached out of the country entirely during the 1970s and 1980s and brought back through a breeding programme. Tracking is on foot with rangers, walking through the bush to find a group and watching from a safe distance, and meeting one at ground level rather than from a vehicle is a different thing altogether. Allow around two hours. Then on north past Budongo Forest, one of the largest mahogany forests in East Africa, reaching Murchison in the late afternoon. The drive covers roughly 305 kilometres over five to six hours. We take you to the top of the falls, where the whole Victoria Nile is forced through a gorge barely seven metres wide before dropping 43 metres.

Across the river on the Paraa ferry at first light and onto the Buligi circuit, a peninsula about ten kilometres wide between the Victoria Nile flowing into Lake Albert and the Albert Nile flowing out of it. Open grassland studded with Borassus palms, and the strongest wildlife morning most visitors will have in Uganda. Elephant number well over a thousand across the park, Uganda kob run into five figures, and the lion population sits at roughly 150 to 200 animals across fifteen to twenty prides. Rothschild’s giraffe are what make this park distinctive, once close to extinction and now well over a thousand here. Back for lunch, then the afternoon launch cruise upstream from Paraa, about three hours there and back past hippo pods and very large crocodiles, ending a hundred metres from the base of the falls, where the spray reaches you and the noise makes conversation pointless.

South today, and it is a long one. We leave after breakfast and run down through Masindi, Hoima and Fort Portal, roughly six to seven hours with a lunch stop, and the country changes completely along the way. Dry Nile woodland gives out into cultivated hills, then tea estates, and finally the crater lake belt around Fort Portal, dozens of steep sided volcanic craters holding deep green water among banana groves. The Rwenzori range stands to the west if the cloud lifts, and there are viewpoints worth stopping at on the last stretch. Kibale protects around 795 square kilometres of moist evergreen rainforest and holds thirteen primate species, the highest density in East Africa. Kibale briefs in the morning rather than before dawn, so tonight is a reasonable one after the road rather than another pre dawn alarm. Our guide will talk you through what to expect before you set out.

To the Kanyanchu visitor centre for the briefing, then into the forest with rangers who track by listening for pant hoots and finding the nests built the previous evening. The ranger carries a rifle, which is for warning off forest elephant rather than the primates. Roughly 1,500 chimpanzees live in Kibale, the largest population in Uganda, and the Kanyanchu community has been tracked since 1993, which is why the odds here beat any other chimp destination in the region. The ground is gently rolling rather than the steep ridges elsewhere, so this is brisk walking, and the trek runs around three hours with one hour with the community. In the afternoon, Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary next door, community managed with revenue funding local schools, holding eight primate species and around 138 birds, the great blue turaco chief among them. Sitatunga, otter and bush pig use the swamp, and the boardwalk makes for easy walking after the morning.

South out of the forest and down onto the plains, only two to three hours, the easiest transfer of the trip. The country opens as you drop and the Rwenzori range stands to the west when the cloud lifts. Queen Elizabeth covers roughly 1,978 square kilometres and holds around 95 mammal species and over 600 birds, the longest bird list of any protected area in Uganda. We check you in on the Mweya peninsula with the water below you, take lunch and rest through the heat, then head out for the Kazinga Channel boat cruise. The channel runs about 32 kilometres between Lake George and Lake Edward, and the two hour trip passes one of the densest hippo populations in Africa, crocodiles on the mud and elephant and buffalo coming down to drink. Afternoon departures beat morning ones for both animals and light, which is why we schedule it this way round.

Out at six for the Kasenyi plains, open grassland dotted with candelabra euphorbia and the best lion ground in the northern part of the park. Uganda kob graze here in large concentrations and the lions follow them, with elephant, buffalo, waterbuck and hyena filling out the morning. Late morning we take the explosion crater drive into a field of steep sided volcanic craters with the widest views in the park back over Lake Edward, stopping at Katwe salt lake, worked by hand since long before the park existed. Then south to the remote Ishasha sector, only two to three hours, arriving with the whole afternoon for game viewing rather than an hour. Topi are common here and scarce elsewhere in the park, along with elephant, buffalo and good general plains game. Overnight in Ishasha, which gives you a dawn drive tomorrow as well and is the whole reason we sleep down here.

A dawn game drive in Ishasha, which is the whole reason we sleep down here rather than driving through. Lions here habitually drape themselves along the branches of large fig and acacia through the heat of the day, behaviour seen regularly in only a handful of places on earth, and the males carry dark manes. Early morning is when they are most often up and visible before the heat sends them into the branches or out of sight. Nobody can promise you one and our guides say so plainly. Then south into the hills, the country climbing and greening as you go, roughly three to four hours to Bwindi. The park has been continuously forested for something like 25,000 years, which is why the undergrowth earns the name impenetrable. Pack your daypack tonight rather than in the dark, and get your boots dry by the fire, because tomorrow is the hardest walking of the trip.

Breakfast early, then to the sector briefing station for half past seven. Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers go through the rules and split everyone into groups of eight trekkers per gorilla family: keep the minimum distance, which Uganda’s guidance now sets at around ten metres, no flash, no eating in their presence, voices low, and nobody treks with a cold. Trackers went out at first light and are already with the families. Then into the forest, a constant sequence of steep ridges and deep valleys with rangers cutting through the tangle ahead of you, and treks running from one to six hours. Bwindi shelters roughly 459 mountain gorillas, close to half the world population, across around twenty habituated families. When you reach them, one hour. Hire a porter at the trailhead; on this ground it is close to compulsory rather than optional. Afternoon at the lodge with your boots off.

South to the Cyanika border, where our guide handles the vehicle paperwork and walks you through immigration on both sides, then on into Rwanda. The change is immediate: terraced hills to the ridgeline, roadside markets, bicycle taxis stacked with bananas, and the Virunga volcanoes standing ahead of you. Total driving time runs three to four hours including the crossing. In the afternoon we visit the Gorilla Guardians village near Kinigi, founded by a former warden of Volcanoes National Park who wanted paid work for people who had been poaching inside it. You get Intore dance and drumming, traditional medicine, archery and banana beer, and more usefully the conversation about what poaching paid and what replaced it. Check in near Kinigi, close to park headquarters. Worth noting for anyone comparing the two countries: Rwanda enforces a seven metre distance on its gorilla treks against Uganda’s ten. Timings shift a little with the season, and we adjust on the day rather than sticking to a schedule.

A gentler day after Bwindi. We start at Kinigi for the seven o’clock briefing and golden monkey tracking in the lower bamboo at the foot of Sabyinyo, a bright orange guenon found only in the Virunga region and nowhere else on earth. Two habituated troops are open to visitors, each around eighty to a hundred animals, and the walking is easy, usually under an hour on level ground. You get an hour with them and they never sit still. In the afternoon we drive east to the Twin Lakes at Burera and Ruhondo, two crater lakes where a local wooden boat works the shoreline with the volcanoes standing behind the water. Volcanoes National Park was gazetted in 1925 and is the oldest national park in Africa, protecting five of the eight Virunga volcanoes, with Karisimbi at 4,507 metres the highest of them. Take binoculars; there is more to see than the headline animals.

A last morning in the north, with the Musanze caves if you want them, a lava tube system running a couple of kilometres beneath the town, then the drive south to Kigali, two to two and a half hours through the terraced hills. We use the afternoon on the capital, and it deserves it. The Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi is the resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, and after two weeks in this region it gives you the context that everything else has been missing. Allow three hours. If your flight is late we can add Kimironko market for agaseke baskets and imigongo, or the Inema Arts Centre, founded by two self taught painter brothers and now the best known gallery in the region, where resident artists work on site. Drop off at Kigali International Airport. We keep the pace to suit the group rather than racing between sightings.