Uganda Gorilla & White-Water Expedition

Day by day

1. Day 1Arrival in EntebbeArrival day · 1,135m

   You land at Entebbe International Airport on a peninsula sticking out into Lake Victoria, and the first thing you notice is that it is green, warm and unhurried. The Alexander Adventures team will be waiting past immigration, and the transfer to your hotel takes about fifteen minutes through Entebbe's fig trees and bougainvillea.

   There is nothing to do this afternoon except stop travelling. The hotel sits minutes from the lake shore, with gardens, a pool and the sort of veranda that ruins your intentions of unpacking properly. Marabou storks sit in the trees like disapproving undertakers. If your flight lands early enough, the botanical gardens are a ten minute walk and full of birds.

   At around five we gather for the welcome dinner with Joe and your Ugandan guide. This is where the group becomes a group: introductions, the shape of the next ten days, how the gorilla trek actually works, what the rafting involves and what it does not, kit checks, insurance and medical declarations, and every question anyone wants to ask. Then an early night, because tomorrow is a long day whichever way we travel.

2. Day 2Entebbe to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest1 hr flight or 8 to 9 hrs road · 1,160m to 2,600m · Equator crossing

   Today we cross the country to the southwest, and there are two ways of doing it. The internal flight takes around an hour to the airstrip nearest Bwindi and hands you back most of a day, with the added pleasure of seeing Uganda's lakes, craters and forest ridges from the air. The road transfer takes eight to nine hours in a private vehicle and is a genuinely good day out, not a chore.

   If we drive, the route runs southwest on the Masaka road through banana plantations and roadside markets selling everything from grilled maize to live chickens. There is the obligatory stop at the equator monument at Kayabwe, where somebody always insists on standing with one foot in each hemisphere, and a proper lunch stop en route. The last stretch climbs into the highlands and the landscape changes completely: tea estates, terraced hillsides worked to their summits, and then the forest itself, a dark unbroken canopy filling every valley.

   Either way you arrive in Bwindi in the late afternoon and settle into the eco-lodge as the mist starts to roll down off the ridges. Dinner, an early briefing on tomorrow's trek, and bed. The forest makes noises all night. That is normal.

3. Day 3Gorilla trekking in Bwindi2 to 8 hrs · 1 hour · Permit included · Campfire dinner

   Breakfast in the dark, then to the park headquarters for the ranger briefing at around eight. Groups are allocated to gorilla families, porters are hired (do take one, it is the best money you will spend all trip and it puts income straight into the villages around the park), and then you walk into the forest.

   Bwindi is not a gentle wood. It is 321 square kilometres of montane rainforest between roughly 1,160m and 2,600m, more than half of it above 2,000m, and the name is not marketing. The trails are steep, root laced, frequently muddy and occasionally require the rangers to cut a way through with machetes. Trekking time depends entirely on where the family has moved overnight: sometimes ninety minutes, sometimes most of the day. Expect anything from two to eight hours on your feet in total, and expect to be filthy.

   Then the trackers stop, packs go down, masks go on, and you walk the last few metres. A habituated family will carry on doing exactly what it was doing: a silverback dozing with one eye open, females feeding, juveniles falling out of trees for the sheer entertainment of it. The hour goes in about ten minutes. Back at the lodge there is hot water, cold beer and a campfire dinner where nobody talks about anything else all evening.

4. Day 4The Batwa, and a second day in the forest3 hrs · Second permit included · Waterfall hike · Evening at the lodge

   This morning belongs to the Batwa, the forest people who lived in and from Bwindi for millennia before it became a national park in 1991 and they were moved out of it. They will welcome the group with song and dance, and then tell their own story: how they hunted, which plants they used for what, how fire was made, where the sacred sites were, and what has happened to them since. It is warm, funny and occasionally uncomfortable, which is the honest version of a cultural visit and much better than the alternative. The money goes directly into the community.

   In the afternoon you choose. A second gorilla permit is included, so you can go back into the forest to a different family, which is a genuinely different experience: different terrain, different personalities, and you already know what you are doing. Or you can take a guided forest hike instead, following the trails to the waterfalls through a canopy holding more than 350 bird species, ten primate species and 220 species of tree, with a guide who can name most of them.

   By late afternoon everyone converges on the lodge terrace. There are massages available from local therapists, there are sundowners, and there is the forest going dark below you while the hornbills make their last runs across the valley.

5. Day 5Queen Elizabeth National Park and the Kazinga Channel5 to 6 hrs · Afternoon game drive · Kazinga Channel cruise

   After breakfast we leave the forest and drive north to Queen Elizabeth National Park, five to six hours through rolling hill country, terraced smallholdings and villages where the whole road turns out to watch you go by. The landscape opens out as you drop, forest giving way to scrub and then to savannah, with crater lakes off to the side and the Rwenzori Mountains beginning to show themselves in the west.

   Queen Elizabeth covers 1,978 square kilometres between Lake Edward and Lake George, holds 95 mammal species and more than 600 bird species, and is Uganda's most visited park for good reason. We check into the lodge, take a short breather, and head out on an afternoon game drive across open plains dotted with candelabra euphorbia. Elephant, buffalo, Uganda kob, warthog and waterbuck are all but certain; lion are common and often visible as the day cools.

   In the early evening we board a boat on the Kazinga Channel, the 32 kilometre natural waterway linking the two lakes. This is the trip's most reliable wildlife hour. Hippos in their hundreds, Nile crocodiles hauled out on the banks, buffalo standing in the shallows, elephants coming down to drink, and a wall of birds: African fish eagles, pied and malachite kingfishers, pelicans, skimmers and storks. The light goes gold, then orange, and then you go and have dinner.

6. Day 6Dawn on the Kasenyi plains, then east to Jinja5:00 start · Flight or full day road · Evening on the Nile

   Coffee at five and out in the dark. The Kasenyi plains, the open grassland running down towards Lake George, are Queen Elizabeth's best game viewing and they are best at first light. This is the park's prime lion territory, hunting over an enormous resident population of Uganda kob, and dawn is when it happens. Elephant move across the grass in silhouette, buffalo shake off the night, the light comes up pink and then hard white, and the whole thing is over by seven.

   Breakfast back at the lodge, and then east. Jinja is the other side of the country, so again there are two options: an internal flight, quick and comfortable with fine views of the lakes and the Nile, or a full day road transfer that becomes part of the adventure. If we drive, we stop for markets, for viewpoints, for the equator again if the route takes us that way, and for lunch, and we arrive in the late afternoon.

   Jinja sits where the White Nile leaves Lake Victoria and begins its 6,650 kilometre run to the Mediterranean. It is a low-slung colonial-era town gone slightly to seed in a very likeable way, and it has been East Africa's adventure capital for thirty years. We settle into the riverside camp and spend the evening on the bank, watching the river go by and pretending we are not thinking about tomorrow.

7. Day 7White-water rafting on the White Nile4 to 5 hrs · Grade 3 to 5 · Safety kayakers · Riverside BBQ

   The White Nile below Jinja is one of the two or three best one day whitewater trips on the planet, and the reason is simple: the volume of water is enormous, it is warm, the rapids are big and clean, and the pools between them are deep, wide and forgiving. You will spend the day being thrown around by water that would be genuinely dangerous somewhere with rocks in it, and here is mostly just enormous fun.

   After a briefing and a practice flip in flat water, we run roughly 15 kilometres of river over four to five hours. The rapids come in sets: long, roaring grade 4 and 5 wave trains with names the guides deliver with obvious relish, separated by calm stretches where you can float, swim, and watch fish eagles and cormorants working the banks. Every trip runs with a full safety raft and safety kayakers alongside, and the river crews here are among the most experienced and best qualified in the world.

   Crucially, this is not all or nothing. Every big rapid has a line: the guides will run the full grade 5 route with anyone who wants it, take a softer line through the same rapid for anyone who does not, and portage anybody who would rather walk round. There is also the option of a gentler float trip or a tandem kayak with a guide. Nobody is pushed and nobody is judged.

   Lunch is a riverside barbecue on the bank, and the celebratory drinks afterwards are, by long tradition, taken while everybody watches the photographer's footage of the moment their raft went over.

8. Day 8The Nile on your own terms, or the chimpanzee sanctuarySecond raft day included · Six ways to spend it · Farewell dinner

   Today is yours to build, and the second rafting day is already included if you want it. Going back on the river with a day's experience behind you is a completely different proposition: you know what a wave train does, you have already fallen in, and you spend far more of the day paddling and far less of it worrying.

   If once was enough, Jinja has no shortage of alternatives. Tandem kayaking with a guide on the calmer stretches gets you closer to the water and the birdlife. Riverboarding, also called hydrospeed, involves lying on a board with fins and taking on the rapids at eye level, and is the most adrenal thing available here by some margin. On land there is quad biking through villages and along the riverbank tracks, and horse riding through the countryside at a considerably gentler pace.

   Or you can change register entirely and visit a chimpanzee sanctuary, where rescued and orphaned chimpanzees live in a large area of protected forest. It is an easy, moving few hours: you watch a feed, you hear about the trade that puts them there in the first place, and you leave with a reasonably clear view of what conservation actually costs.

   In the evening we gather on the riverbank for the farewell dinner, with lanterns, good food and the sound of the Nile going past. This is the one where somebody makes a speech.

9. Day 9Back to Entebbe3 to 4 hrs or 1 hr · Markets or gardens · Lakeside sundowners

   The last full day, and again there is a choice about how to spend it. The drive back to Entebbe is around three to four hours by road, or you can take a short internal flight and be there before lunch. The road option means one more pass through the countryside, with photo stops, roadside markets and the crossing of the Nile at Jinja for the last time.

   Entebbe is a good place to end. The craft markets are the best in the country for wood carving, bark cloth, beadwork and printed fabric, and the prices are reasonable if the haggling is good natured. If shopping is not your idea of a final day, the Entebbe Botanical Gardens run down to the shore of Lake Victoria and are worth a couple of hours on their own: enormous fig and mahogany trees, black and white colobus monkeys in the canopy, and around 200 bird species including some spectacular kingfishers and turacos.

   In the evening we take a table at a lakeside restaurant and watch the sun go down over Lake Victoria with a cold drink, which after nine days of pre-dawn starts, forest mud and cold river water feels entirely earned.

10. Day 10Departure, or onwardsDeparture day · 10 min transfer · Extensions available

    A slow breakfast, a last look at the lake, and then the short transfer to Entebbe International Airport, timed around the group's flights. Your leader will see everybody through check in, which at Entebbe is worth having: the security screening happens twice and the queues are unpredictable.

    For anyone not ready to go home, this is a good place to be standing. Zanzibar is a short hop for white sand, coral reefs and the alleyways of Stone Town. Kenya is next door for the Maasai Mara and the Big Five, and if your timing is right, the migration. Or you can stay in Uganda and go quiet at Lake Bunyonyi in the southwest, a deep, island-dotted lake at 1,960m surrounded by terraced hills, with no bilharzia, no crocodiles and no hippos, which makes it one of the few lakes in East Africa you can actually swim in. Canoes, birds, hammocks, and absolutely nothing to do.

    Whatever you choose, you leave with mud that will not come off your boots, a phone full of photographs that do not do the gorillas justice, and the particular satisfaction of having done a country properly rather than skimming it.