Highlights of Uganda: anniversary itinerary

Start your day with an early breakfast before being collected from your guesthouse and taken to the airport for your light aircraft flight to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Once you’ve landed at Kihihi Airstrip, you’ll be picked up and privately driven to your lodge in Buhoma Village, on the northern side of Bwindi. After lunch, take some time to explore at your own pace. You might join a guided forest walk to learn about the forest’s rich ecosystem.

Wake up early today for a day of gorilla trekking. After breakfast and a briefing, you’ll head deep into the jungle, beginning at the gorillas’ last known location. Once you’ve had a sighting, you can spend up to an hour with the gorillas, taking photos and observing these massive, endangered animals.

In the morning, visit Ride 4 a Woman, a group founded to support local women with employment and microfinance by teaching new skills such as sewing and tailoring, basket weaving, and public speaking. You’ll learn more about life in Buhoma and spend time with some of the women. Enjoy a lunch of Ugandan dishes at Bwindi Bar this afternoon, a local restaurant dedicated to employing local people.

Depart Bwindi for your private transfer to Queen Elizabeth National Park, a two-hour drive that offers ample opportunities for game viewing. You’ll be staying in the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park, a secluded area dominated by candelabra trees that are known as the preferred resting place for the park’s renowned tree-climbing lion.

Your private driver-guide will take you on a game drive to your next lodge in the northern sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park. On arrival, settle in and enjoy a leisurely lunch before heading back out into the park to seek out wildlife and explore the open savannah plains on a game drive. The Kasenyi Plains is home to lion, elephant, topi, buffalo, and Ugandan kob (a subspecies of antelope), as well as an exceptional variety of bird species.

This morning, you’ll have a unique opportunity to act as a researcher for the day as you join a lion-tracking experience with rangers of Queen Elizabeth National Park. During the drive, your guides and researchers will explain the complicated behaviors and strict social structures of the prides that live here, as well as the human-animal conflictions around the park. After lunch, head back to the park for a boat safari on the Kazinga Channel. You can observe the many animals that gather to drink from the channel, including buffalo, hippo, and crocodiles, as well as pelicans, fish eagles, and pied kingfishers.

After a hearty breakfast, you’ll depart the park for your next stop outside Kibale Forest Reserve. The route will take you past small villages and pretty farmland scenery, and on a clear day, you can enjoy views of the Rwenzori Mountains to your left, also known as the Mountains of the Moon. Arriving at the lodge, you’ll have time to enjoy lunch and explore. Trails nearby take in views overlooking a forest-fringed crater lake, making it a good place for an afternoon walk.

After an early breakfast, head to the Kibale National Park to spend a morning with a troop of chimpanzees. The family group you’ll be tracking are still in the habituation process and can be a bit shy, but you’ll have up to four hours with these agile primates.

With your driver-guide, head from the western forests of Kibale to the River Nile and Lake Victoria of Uganda’s eastern side, where you’ll stop at the town of Jinja, the source of the Nile. The drive is more than seven hours but offers views of Uganda’s rural life, villages, plantations, and rolling green hills. You’ll arrive at your lodge this afternoon.

Wildwaters Lodge offers a wide selection of activities. Today, you might consider white-water rafting on the Nile rapids.

Your day is yours to do as you please. You might board a cruise to the source of the Nile or take a trip into the town of Jinja itself.

After your final breakfast in Uganda, you’ll be driven back to Entebbe International Airport to check in for your international flights home.