6 Day Uganda Gorillas And Queen Elizabeth Safari

Our driver guide meets you at Kigali International Airport and we head northwest through the Rwandan hills, terraced to the ridgeline and busy with markets and bicycle taxis. The Virunga volcanoes stand off to your right for much of the drive, and we can pull in at a viewpoint over Sabyinyo, Gahinga and Muhabura before the border. We cross at Cyanika for the southern sectors, with our guide handling the vehicle paperwork and walking you through immigration both sides. Then the road climbs into Kigezi, steeper and greener, past Lake Mutanda with the volcanoes reflected in it on a still afternoon. Total driving time runs four to five hours including the crossing. Bwindi covers about 331 square kilometres between 1,160 and 2,607 metres and has been continuously forested for something like 25,000 years. Check in on the forest edge, dinner, and pack your daypack tonight rather than in the dark tomorrow. Our guide will check your boots and make sure you have gaiters and gloves, because Bwindi’s undergrowth earns its name.

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 sitting with the families. Then into the forest, which is harder walking than the Virungas, a constant sequence of steep ridges and deep valleys with rangers cutting through the tangle ahead of you. Treks run from one to six hours depending on overnight movement. Bwindi shelters roughly 459 mountain gorillas, close to half the world population, across around twenty habituated families, more than anywhere on earth. When you reach them, one hour. Hire a porter. In the afternoon, the Batwa cultural walk if your legs allow, or the lodge if they do not.

A short transfer today, only two to three hours north out of the forest and down onto the plains, which is a welcome change of pace after yesterday. The country opens as you drop, and by early afternoon you are in Ishasha, the remote southern sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park. This is tree climbing lion country. 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 worldwide, and the males carry dark manes. Nobody can promise you one, since it depends where the prides are that week, and our guides who work the sector say so plainly rather than overselling it. We spend the afternoon working the fig trees and the river circuits. Topi are common here and scarce elsewhere in the park, along with elephant, buffalo and good general plains game. Overnight in Ishasha.

A morning game drive in Ishasha before we move, giving the fig trees a second chance if yesterday came up short, then north through the park to the Mweya peninsula with game viewing along the way. Queen Elizabeth covers roughly 1,978 square kilometres and was named after Queen Elizabeth II in 1954, holding around 95 mammal species and over 600 birds, the longest bird list of any protected area in Uganda. Lunch at your lodge above the water, then the afternoon on the Kazinga Channel, which runs about 32 kilometres between Lake George and Lake Edward. The two hour cruise passes one of the densest hippo populations in Africa, Nile crocodiles on the mud, elephant and buffalo coming down to drink and waterbirds packed along the shoreline. It is the single most popular activity in the park and nobody should skip it. Afternoon departures beat morning ones, because more large mammals come to water as the heat builds and the light from the boat is considerably better for photography.

Out at six for the Kasenyi plains, open grassland dotted with candelabra euphorbia and the best lion ground in the park. Huge concentrations of Uganda kob graze here and the lions follow them, with elephant, buffalo, waterbuck, warthog and hyena filling out the morning. If you would like to go further, lion tracking with the research team uses radio telemetry and takes you off the standard tracks where ordinary game drives cannot go. In the afternoon, Kyambura Gorge, a sudden crack in the savannah a hundred metres deep and filled with rainforest the surrounding grassland gives no hint of, holding a small habituated chimpanzee community. Be realistic: the group is isolated and sightings are less certain than at Kibale, so treat it as a striking half day in country you will not see anywhere else, with chimps as the possible reward. Kalinzu Forest just outside the park is the alternative and often gives better odds, and we will tell you which we would book for your dates.

One last morning, and the most underrated few hours in the park. The explosion crater drive climbs from the Kazinga plains into a field of steep sided volcanic craters, some holding lakes, some dry and grazed by buffalo and elephant, with the widest views in the park back over Lake Edward and towards the Rwenzori range. Flamingos gather on some of the crater lakes when conditions suit. We stop at Katwe salt lake, worked by hand for salt since long before the park existed, where villagers still harvest from pans while standing in brine, and a community guide explains the trade that ran from here across the region for centuries. Then to Kasese or Mweya for the flight to Entebbe, around ninety minutes against seven to eight hours by road. Connect straight to your international departure, or overnight in Entebbe on the lakeshore if your flight is the following day. Either way the trip finishes with wildlife rather than a windscreen.