Kampala
We camped in the grounds of a lodge on the outskirts of Uganda's capital city, Kampala, for 2 nights during our trip. There were a number of different optional tours available out of Kampala, but I decided instead just to head into the city to explore it on my own. I had a great day looking around the craft market, drinking passion fruit juice in a roof-top cafe, eating cheap samosas in a Hare Krishna restaurant, wandering aimlessly through the city and attempting to cross roads without getting wiped out by a motorbike taxi...
Downtown Kampala
The bus park - organised chaos. Or maybe just chaos.
Marabou Storks fill the skies and sky-line above Kampala
The independence monument
The main reason that I had decided to book myself on to an organised group tour was so that I could be sure of getting a permit to trek in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. The forest is home to some incredible creatures and to protect both them and their habitat, visitors to the forest are strictly limited. By booking a tour, I was guaranteed a permit.
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest
At the entrance to the forest, we met the team of rangers that would be accompanying us on our trek. They were a well-armed bunch, carrying a range of impressive weapons for protecting the animals, protecting us and hacking through the impenetrable forest to make it, well, penetrable.
We set off on a small path through the beautiful lush vegetation. A small team of trackers had left a couple of hours before us, to locate the animals and then radio their whereabouts to our rangers. We had been told that we could be trekking for many hours before we reached the animals, so it came as quite a surprise when after just under an hour we heard from the trackers to say they had located the animals and they were very close.
Following this news, we left the path and headed deep into the undergrowth; ducking under branches, squeezing through small spaces made by the rangers' machetes and scrambling down steep leafy banks.
After about half an hour, the rangers told us to look up into a tree above our heads, where we saw a dark shadow accompanied by a crunching noise...and there began one of the most amazing hours of my trip so far - coming face to face with a family of wild mountain gorillas.
Mountain Gorillas are highly endangered, with less than 900 individuals alive in the world today. The whole population lives in two forest areas -half within the Virunga Mountains,, which sits between DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), Uganda and Rwanda and half in Bwindi. There are no mountain gorillas living in captivity. The biggest threats to the gorillas are loss of habitat through deforestation and - like so many of the continent's beautiful animals - poaching.
Bwindi has five family groups living within it. All the groups have been 'habituated' to humans, meaning that through repeated, neutral contact with humans, the gorillas have become used to the presence of humans and behave normally when they are around. This gives visitors an incredible opportunity to observe them close up. Very close up!
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