Uganda Gorilla Trekking (2 permits, 4 days)

We shall have your Uganda gorilla tour guide meet with you at your hotel (or any other place of stay) in Entebbe or Kampala at 7:00 AM to start the 4 days gorilla trekking safari. The guide will give a brief about the tour before setting off driving to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.  En route, there is a local community popular for making local drums and crafts and a fruit market. Stopover, admire and buy yourself souvenirs.  Proceed to the Equator line taken as one beautiful scenery in Africa - the pathway of the sun and take photographs.  Our lunch break is planned at a restaurant in Mbarara city and should be about 1 hour. After this, we continue, passing by mountains, tropical rainforest and bamboo forest during the 7 - hour journey. Your lodge/ camp for the night before the gorilla trek is located in the park of by the park boundary, convenient enough for you to reach the Bwindi park headquarters in a few minutes on the day you do your gorilla tracking. Dinner will be served there as well.

You shall be your first visit to the legendary mountain gorillas of Bwindi today. As the gorilla trek briefing usually commences at 8 am, please plan to have your breakfast from the camp/ lodge early in time. Most of the lodges/camps require short drives to reach the park headquarters, going for about 10 minutes. Your driver shall be available to take you to the offices. You will first be briefed about the ecology of the mountain gorillas and their conservation status in Uganda. Videos shall be played on large television screens a well, there is just lots of gorilla conservation information going to be shared here. A piece of traditional music and dance presentation is another pre-gorilla trekking experience to look out for. The park officers shall then allocate you to the gorilla tracking group/ gorilla family you are to visit. The gorilla tracking group you are allocated shall also depend on your request sometimes, your physical health condition among other considerations. From the park office, you will need to drive for about 20 minutes to reach most of the gorilla trek trailheads. A group or two don't require this driving but the walking is often longer. The gorillas you will track belong to one of 19 habituated gorilla family groups who can tolerate the presence of humans for a brief period every day. Your trek will be an exciting journey along forested slopes, entwined vines, bushes and bamboo before you eventually reach the gorilla’s habitat. En route, your guide will point out signs of previous gorilla activity, including dung, nests and chewed bamboo shoots. The time taken to track the gorillas can take as little as 2 hours to as much as 7 hours before one returns! Once the gorillas have been located, your group will be allowed a maximum of one hour with them. Coming face-to-face with a mountain gorilla is a truly humbling and emotional experience. This is a fantastic and privileged opportunity to get up close and personal with Uganda’s very own ‘Gorillas in the Mist'. Bwindi Impenetrable Forest boasts both mountain gorillas and chimpanzees - the only forest in Africa which can make this claim in fact. It also hosts five other species of primate, 113 species of mammal, over 200 butterflies and 360 birds.

After breakfast, you will go for the second gorilla trek but in another group returning in the afternoon. Time permitting, spend the afternoon on a community foot safari to explore the lifestyle of the people living and surrounding the park. Doing a second gorilla trek in Bwindi is very rewarding. Seeing a different gorilla family brings out lots of unique differences in gorillas that you wouldn't necessarily experience if you track the gorillas once. Our team will ensure that on your second gorilla trek you are allocated a different gorilla group to maximize the benefit of your Uganda gorilla tour. Please note that you will need a separate gorilla permit for every time of trekking the gorillas.

Early breakfast before embarking on our return to Kampala, driving down the grassed and terraced escarpments of southwestern Uganda while taking in the breathtaking sights of the hills of the region dubbed ‘the little Switzerland of Africa’. This area is a highly fertile, mountainous region with steep-sided hills covered from top to bottom in neatly terraced cultivated rows. Not to miss as we traverse Mbarara are the impressing longhorn Ankole cattle. A remarkable highlight of this journey is the Equator line and surely you will cross it as we have a brief stop here.