Bwindi Impenetrable forest

Bwindi Impenetrable national park is a Unesco World Heritage Site and it is the best place in Uganda to track mountain gorillas. The park protects around 40% of the world’s mountain gorilla population and has several habituated groups. The forest is also a bird-watcher’s paradise with 350 species recorded, including many Albertine Rift endemics.

Uganda is one of only three countries in the world (the others being Rwanda and the DRC) where the iconic mountain gorilla can be reliably tracked on foot, an experience I’d have no hesitation as commending as the most thrilling wildlife encounter Africa has to offer. And of the 13 habituated gorilla groups in Uganda, all but one is resident in Bwindi, spread between four trailheads: Buhoma, Ruhija, Nkuringo and Rushaga.

Yet, while the opportunity to stare into the liquid brown eyes of a giant silverback is what brings most tourists to Bwindi, it would be massively reductive to treat this magnificent forest, which sprawls over steep hills nudging the Congolese border, as merely a ‘gorilla reserve’. Bwindi is an excellent place to see localized forest mammals – indeed it is the only place where I’ve seem the bizarre yellow-backed duiker and the one place in Uganda where you regularly encounter the handsome L’Hoests’s monkey. The birdlife is also stunning, with a checklist of 350 species that includes a full 23 Albertine Rift endemics. Indeed, the forest trails around Buhoma, the most established of the park’s four trailheads, and the best equipped when it comes to upmarket lodges, ranks among my favourite birding spots anywhere, reliably offering sightings of rarities such as bar-tailed trogon, black bee-eater and a profusion of forest greenbuls, finches and warblers. Elsewhere, for adventurous and fit walkers, the remote Mubwindi Swamp – for which the park is named – is home to herds of forest elephant and the beautiful African green broadbill, an Albertine Rift endemic only otherwise recorded in an inaccessible part of the DRC.

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