11-Day Chimps & Gorillas of Uganda

Overview

This expedition is designed for the traveller who seeks Uganda’s quintessential primate experiences—chimpanzees in Kibale, mountain gorillas in Bwindi—but refuses to stop there.

You will trek through Kibale’s ancient forest, following pant-hoots through emerald canopy. You will walk the boardwalks of Bigodi Wetland, a community-run sanctuary teeming with monkeys and birds. You will hike the crater lakes at Kibale’s edge, watching the sun set over water-filled volcanic calderas. You will kneel in the mist of Bwindi, seven metres from a silverback who regards you with eyes older than human memory.

And then—when the primate encounters are complete—you will continue south to Lake Mburo National Park, where zebras stripe the savannah, giraffes browse acacia woodland, and leopards haunt the rocky outcrops.

This is not merely a gorilla safari with add-ons. This is a complete Ugandan wildlife journey.

Please note: Gorilla permits are scarce during peak season. Booking 4-6 months in advance is essential.

Itinerary

Day 1: Entebbe • Lake Victoria • Journey Prelude

Entebbe, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria—Africa’s largest lake, source of the White Nile, birthplace of the great river’s 6,650-kilometre journey to the Mediterranean.

Your flight arrives. Your transfer awaits. Your lodge, positioned among bougainvillea and frangipani, offers rest after your journey.

No scheduled activities. This is your threshold. Tomorrow, the adventure begins.

Accommodation: 2 Friends Hotel / Papyrus Guest House / Boma Hotel (or similar)
Upgrade: Lake-view room at 2 Friends Hotel
Meals: None (pre-tour dinner available at own expense)
Included: Airport transfer

Day 2: Entebbe to Kibale • Forest Prelude

Morning: Group Assembly

Oli otya. Your tour leader greets you. Fellow travellers gather—from Melbourne, London, Berlin, Seattle—united by a shared hunger for Uganda’s wild heart.

The briefing is concise: vehicle protocols, trekking etiquette, wildlife safety, the days ahead.

Midday: The Journey West

You depart Entebbe, circumventing Kampala’s legendary traffic, then climbing toward Uganda’s western plateau. The landscape transforms: urban yields to rural, Kampala’s sprawl gives way to banana plantations and tea estates, and finally to the emerald hills of the Kibale corridor.

Afternoon: Kibale Arrival

You enter the orbit of Kibale National Park—Africa’s primate capital. Your lodge, Turaco Treetops, perches on the forest edge. Rooms are raised on stilts, overlooking the canopy. A resident troop of black-and-white colobus monkeys patrols the grounds, their capes streaming behind them as they leap.

Evening: Forest Prelude

Dinner under thatch. The forest exhales. A chimp pant-hoots in the distance—a preview of tomorrow.

Accommodation: Turaco Treetops (or similar)
Upgrade: Luxury cottage
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Driving Time: Approximately 6-7 hours (including Kampala traffic)
Included: Group briefing • Transfer

Day 3: Chimpanzee Trekking • Bigodi Wetland • Community Conservation

Morning: Kanyanchu Visitor Centre

06:30 breakfast. 07:15 transfer to Kanyanchu Visitor Centre. Your chimpanzee permit is verified. Your guide is a Uganda Wildlife Authority ranger with years of tracking experience.

The Trek:

Kibale’s terrain is moderate: well-maintained trails, gentle inclines, dense but navigable forest. Your ranger listens for pant-hoots, reads broken branches, follows the calls of trackers who located the chimpanzees at dawn.

Duration: 1 to 4 hours.

The Encounter:

You find them.

A chimpanzee community of 20+ individuals moves through the canopy and forest floor. Infants cling to mothers’ bellies. Juveniles wrestle in strangler figs. A dominant male displays, hair erect, charging through undergrowth.

You watch them feed, groom, communicate. Their faces are expressive, familiar, ancient. One pauses mid-groom and regards you with eyes that ask no questions.

One hour. It passes in what feels like minutes.

Midday: Café Kibale

Leaving the forest, you are welcome to enjoy coffee at Café Kibale—a wonderful social enterprise providing free hospitality training to young people from surrounding communities. Your coffee supports employment, education, empowerment.

Afternoon: Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary

A 10-minute drive delivers you to Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary, operated by the Kibale Association for Rural and Environmental Development—a community-owned and community-managed conservation success story.

Your guide is a community member. The boardwalk navigates papyrus swamp and secondary forest.

Species Encountered:

Grey-cheeked mangabey — elusive, their calls like rusty hinges
Vervet monkey — black-faced, acrobatic
Olive baboon — troops of 30-50
Black-and-white colobus — mantled, spectacular leapers
Red-tailed monkey — white nose, chestnut flank
Great blue turaco — psychedelic, crimson wing-patches
Yellow-billed barbet — vocal, colourful

Evening: Return to Turaco Treetops

Dinner. Forest sounds. The day’s sightings replay behind your eyes.

Accommodation: Turaco Treetops (or similar)
Upgrade: Luxury cottage
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Included: Chimpanzee trekking permit • Bigodi Wetland entry • Community guide

Day 4: Optional Second Chimp Trek • Crater Lakes Hike

Morning: Optional Chimpanzee Trek

For those who seek deeper immersion, a second chimpanzee trek is available.

Why a second trek?

Increased probability of observing different behaviours
Opportunity to visit a different chimpanzee community
More time in Kibale’s extraordinary forest
Photography—different light, different encounters

Due to limited permit availability, second treks should be prebooked at time of reservation.

Afternoon: Crater Lakes Hike

At 14:00, you embark on a two to three-hour guided hike around Kibale’s crater lakes—explosion calderas formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago.

The trail climbs through grassland and regenerating forest. At the summit:

Lake Nyinambuga below, perfectly circular, emerald-green, ringed by papyrus. The Rwenzori Mountains gleam on the western horizon, snow stubborn against the equatorial sun.

Birdlife:

African fish eagle — calling across the water
Pied kingfisher — hovering, plunging
Grey-crowned crane — Uganda’s national emblem

Evening: Forest Farewell

Your final night at Turaco Treetops. The colobus troop makes its evening circuit through the lodge grounds. A turaco glides between treetops, improbable in its plumage.

Accommodation: Turaco Treetops (or similar)
Upgrade: Luxury cottage
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Included: Crater Lakes guided hike
Optional: Second chimpanzee trek (prebooked)

Day 5: Kibale to Bwindi • The Road South

Morning: Departure

Breakfast with canopy views. You check out and begin the southward transfer toward Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

The Journey:

The road winds through Kamwenge and Rukungiri, through tea plantations and terraced hillsides, through market towns where vendors sell roasted plantains and sugarcane.

Midday: Picnic Lunch

Your guide selects a shaded site. Lunch is unpacked from the vehicle. Children wave from village doorsteps.

Afternoon: Bwindi Arrival

You enter the Kigezi Highlands—”Switzerland of Africa.” The air cools. The light filters green. You have arrived at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, UNESCO World Heritage Site, sanctuary for approximately half the world’s remaining mountain gorillas.

Your lodge, Haven Lodge Buhoma, sits on the forest edge. The impenetrable interior is a wall of emerald—silent, ancient, withholding its secrets until morning.

Accommodation: Haven Lodge Buhoma / Ride 4 a Woman (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Picnic Lunch, Dinner
Included: All transfers • Park approach briefing

Day 6: Leisure • Community • Cultural Immersion

Full Day: Optional Activities

Today is deliberately unscheduled—a pause before the pinnacle. Your body rests; your anticipation builds.

Option A: Batwa Cultural Experience (Recommended)

Duration: 3-4 hours
Cost: Approximately USD $60-80 (paid locally)

The Batwa are Bwindi’s indigenous forest people. For millennia, they lived inside this forest, hunting and gathering beneath the same canopy where you will trek tomorrow. Displaced when the park was gazetted in 1991, they now share their culture with visitors.

This is not performative tourism. This is cultural preservation through engagement.

You walk the forest with Batwa guides. They demonstrate:

Traditional hunting techniques — bow and arrow, trap-setting
Medicinal plants — treatments for malaria, stomach ailments, snakebite
Fire-making — friction methods unchanged for centuries
Sacred sites — caves and clearings of spiritual significance

You hear their songs. You learn their stories. You understand, deeply, what was lost—and what endures.

Option B: Ride 4 a Woman Community Experience

Duration: 2-3 hours
Cost: Included (donation-based)

Ride 4 a Woman is a community-based organisation supporting women through cycling tourism and craft cooperatives. Visit their project, meet the women, learn about their work.

Option C: Forest Walk

A gentle guided walk along Bwindi’s forest edge. No gorillas—but colobus monkeys, hornbills, and the immersive green silence of the jungle.

Option D: Rest

Haven Lodge’s veranda overlooks the forest. Hammocks. Books. The sounds of birds. Sometimes, the most profound preparation is stillness.

Accommodation: Haven Lodge Buhoma (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Picnic Lunch, Dinner
Included: Free day • Picnic lunch
Optional: Batwa experience (paid locally)

Day 7: Mountain Gorillas • The Hour • Bwindi Impenetrable

Dawn: Briefing & Departure

06:30 breakfast. 07:15 transfer to Uganda Wildlife Authority briefing point. Your gorilla permit is verified. You are assigned a family—perhaps Mubare, perhaps Habinyanja, perhaps Rushegura.

Your guide for today is a UWA ranger-tracker who has followed these gorillas for years. Your porter is a local man who knows these trails intimately.

The Trek:

Bwindi is called impenetrable for a reason. The terrain is strenuous: steep slopes, slick with mist, nettle thickets, fallen logs carpeted in moss.

Duration: 1 to 6 hours.

Your porter carries your daypack, offers a steadying hand on climbs, points out medicinal plants and elephant dung and the faint trail of gorilla passage.

The Hour:

The radio crackles. “Abanemukye.” They are near.

You step through a curtain of leaves.

A silverback watches you with eyes older than human memory. Around him, his family grazes, grooms, plays. Infants tumble through undergrowth. A mother cradles her newborn.

You kneel. Seven metres. It feels like no distance at all.

One hour. You photograph. You witness. You weep, perhaps. You do not want to leave.

Afternoon: Rest & Reflection

Return to Haven Lodge. Lunch. Your legs hum with exertion. Your mind remains in the forest.

Accommodation: Haven Lodge Buhoma (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Included: Gorilla trekking permit (USD $800) • UWA ranger
Recommended: Porter (USD $15-20, paid locally)

Day 8: Optional Second Gorilla Trek • Forest Rest

Full Day: Optional Second Gorilla Trek

For those who seek the deepest possible immersion, a second gorilla trek is available.

Why a second trek?

Different family, different dynamics, different silverback
Deeper understanding of gorilla behaviour
More time in Bwindi’s extraordinary forest
Photographic opportunities—different light, different encounters

Due to extremely limited permit availability, second treks must be prebooked at time of reservation.

Alternative: Forest Rest

For those who do not trek, today is yours.

Guided nature walk — Bwindi’s forest edge, birding focus
Community visit — Buhoma village, local schools, craft markets
Rest — veranda, hammock, journaling

Important Note:

On some departures, due to permit availability, Day 6 and Day 8 may be swapped. Your tour leader will brief you accordingly. The group may also be split across two trekking days to accommodate permit allocations.

Accommodation: Haven Lodge Buhoma (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Included: Free day
Optional: Second gorilla trek (prebooked)

Day 9: Bwindi to Lake Mburo • Forest to Savannah

Morning: Departure

Breakfast at Haven Lodge. You bid farewell to Bwindi’s mist, descending from the Kigezi Highlands toward the western Rift Valley.

Midday: Kabale Stop

You pause in Kabale, near the Rwandan border, for lunch. The town is clean, green, surrounded by terraced hillsides that earn this region its “Switzerland of Africa” epithet.

Afternoon: Lake Mburo Arrival

The landscape transforms: terraced hills yield to acacia savannah, acacia savannah to the wooded grasslands of Lake Mburo National Park.

Lake Mburo is anomalous among Uganda’s savannah parks—intimate, accessible, uncrowded. It is the only place in southern Uganda where you will see:

Zebra — Burchell’s, striped in their thousands
Impala — elegant acrobats, marked with the black “M”
Giraffe — reintroduced, thriving
Leopard — elusive but present
Eland — Africa’s largest antelope

Your lodge, Rwakobo Rock, is hewn from granite, perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the park. The views are panoramic. The swimming pool is carved into stone.

Accommodation: Rwakobo Rock (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Driving Time: Approximately 5-6 hours (including lunch stop)
Included: Park entry • Transfer

Day 10: Lake Mburo • Game Drive • Optional Walking Safari • Boat Cruise

Early Morning: Game Drive

05:30 departure. The savannah is cool, the light golden. Your guide navigates Lake Mburo’s network of game tracks, passing through:

Acacia woodland — giraffe browsing, impala alert
Wetland margins — buffalo emerging from papyrus
Grassy hillsides — zebra grazing in herds
Rocky outcrops — klipspringer poised on granite
Valley floors — eland, topi, waterbuck

Predator Search: Leopard is the prize. Lake Mburo holds a healthy but elusive population. Your guide reads tracks, scans fig tree branches, interprets the alarm calls of vervet monkeys.

Midday: Rest

Return to Rwakobo Rock. The pool overlooks the savannah. Lunch is served on the terrace.

Afternoon: Optional Activities

Option A: Walking Safari (Recommended)

Duration: 2-3 hours
Cost: Approximately USD $30-40 (paid locally)

Accompanied by an armed Uganda Wildlife Authority ranger, you walk the savannah at eye level. This is a different Africa—not observed from a vehicle, but inhabited.

Your destination: a salt lick where animals congregate for essential minerals. At this time of day, you may encounter hyenas returning to dens, hippos retreating to the lake, and the accumulated tracks of the night’s passage.

Option B: Boat Safari

Duration: 1-2 hours
Cost: Approximately USD $25-35 (paid locally)

Lake Mburo’s waters are rich with life. Your boat navigates the lake’s channels and inlets:

Hippo — pods of 20-30, surfacing with theatrical sighs
Crocodile — basking on sandbanks, prehistoric patience
Pelican — white and pink-backed, fishing cooperatively
African fish eagle — calling across the water
Shoebill stork — rare, but Lake Mburo offers occasional sightings

Option C: Both

Time permits both activities on this full day.

Evening: Final Safari Sunset

Your last evening in the wild. Dinner at Rwakobo Rock. The granite glows orange, then rose, then violet. Zebra bark in the darkness beyond the camp perimeter.

Accommodation: Rwakobo Rock (or similar)
Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Included: Morning game drive
Optional: Walking safari • Boat safari (paid locally)

Day 11: Mabamba Swamp • Shoebill Search • Entebbe • Farewell

Morning: Departure

06:00 breakfast. You depart Lake Mburo, driving east toward Entebbe. The journey is approximately 5-6 hours, depending on Kampala traffic.

Midday: Mabamba Swamp • Shoebill Encounter

Mabamba Bay Wetland System lies 40 kilometres from Entebbe—a vast papyrus swamp supporting over 190,000 birds.

Your destination: the shoebill stork.

Balaeniceps rex—”whale-headed king”—is among the most sought-after birds on earth. Its prehistoric appearance, its patient hunting technique, its sheer improbability, draws birders from every continent.

A local guide poles your canoe through narrow papyrus channels. Malachite kingfishers flash turquoise. African jacanas walk on lily pads. Purple swamphens crash through reeds.

And then:

The shoebill. Motionless. Yellow-eyed. Its massive bill, shaped like a Dutch clog, waits for lungfish to surface.

You photograph. You whisper. You do not want to leave.

Afternoon: Entebbe Arrival • Farewell

You arrive in Entebbe in the late afternoon. Your guide transfers you to Entebbe International Airport for your departure flight.

If time permits, your guide will take you for a farewell dinner (own expense) before your drop-off.

If you’d like more time — a post-tour extension, additional nights in Entebbe, or a beach add-on to the Ssese Islands — speak to your sales representative.

Meals: Breakfast, Picnic Lunch
Accommodation: End of Tour
Included: Mabamba Swamp boat safari • Shoebill search • Community guide • Airport transfer
Driving Time: Lake Mburo–Entebbe: 5-6 hours (including Mabamba stop)

Inclusions & Exclusions

One Mountain Gorilla Trekking Permit — Bwindi Impenetrable NP (USD $800)
One Chimpanzee Trekking Permit — Kibale National Park (USD $200-250)
All park entrance fees — Kibale NP, Bwindi NP, Lake Mburo NP
Community contributions: Bigodi Wetland (community-owned) • Café Kibale social enterprise
All park entrance fees and government taxes.
All accommodation for 10 nights in specified mid-range lodges
All meals as specified (10 breakfasts, 11 lunches, 10 dinners)
Private 4x4 safari vehicle with pop-up roof
Professional English-speaking tour leader — throughout
All airport transfers — Entebbe arrival and departure
Bottled drinking water throughout

International airfare
Uganda visa (USD $50 — online or arrival)
East Africa Tourist Visa (USD $100 — optional, covers Kenya/Rwanda if extending)
Travel and medical insurance.
Personal expenses (e.g., souvenirs, laundry, bar bills, phone calls).
Tips and gratuities — tour leader, driver, local guides, lodge staff
Optional activities:
- Second chimpanzee trek (USD $200-250, prebook)
- Second gorilla trek (USD $800, prebook)
- Batwa cultural experience (USD $60-80, paid locally)
- Lake Mburo walking safari (USD $30-40, paid locally)
- Lake Mburo boat safari (USD $25-35, paid locally)
Porter fees — gorilla trekking (USD $15-20, recommended, paid locally)
Meals and drinks not specified in the itinerary
Accommodation before or after the tour