This is the ninth and final installment in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

Our next stop after Lake Mburo National Park was the Ssese Islands, a group of islands in Lake Victoria.¹ We didn’t have any activities planned for the islands; it was just an opportunity to relax along the shore near the end of our tour.

Continue reading An Island and a Swamp: Relaxing in the Ssese Islands and Boating around Mabamba Swamp Wetlands →

This is the eighth in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

After we left Kisoro, we headed for Lake Mburo National Park. Our path took us past scenic Lake Bunyoni, where we stopped to admire the view.

Continue reading Camping at Lake Mburo National Park (Or, Our Final African Game Drives) →

This is the sixth in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

After leaving behind the amazing views at the Top of the World, we drove to Queen Elizabeth National Park. On the way, we crossed back into the Southern Hemisphere and stopped to take an obligatory picture at one of the concrete monuments Uganda has erected along the Equator.¹

Continue reading That Time We Got Stuck in the Mud in Queen Elizabeth National Park →

This is the fourth in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

Although we had suspected that we overdosed on animals in Southern Africa, we were pleased to discover that, by the time we reached our first Ugandan national park, our sense of wonder regarding the animals had returned!  Our first stop was Murchison Falls National Park, where we spent one full day and enjoyed a morning game drive, an evening game drive, and a boat ride. Plenty of time for animal-viewing!  I’m not going to clutter up these animal photos with extra words, so here you go:

Continue reading Animal- and Waterfall-Spotting in Murchison Falls National Park →

This is the third in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

On the morning of the third day of our tour with MGCT, we left Jinga to head up to Murchison Falls National Park in northwestern Uganda. Along the way we stopped at the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary. Both black and white rhinoceroses are indigenous to Uganda, but a combination of poaching and loss of habitat made all rhinos extinct in the country by the early 1980’s. In 2005, Ziwa was established with the goal of rebuilding the rhino population in Uganda and eventually reintroducing them into the wild.¹

Continue reading Trekking Rhinos at Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary →

This is the second in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).

After breakfast, we left Sipi Falls and backtracked to Jinga, the second largest city in Uganda, situated along the banks of Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile River.¹

Our accommodation in Jinga, the Eden Rock Resort, was located near Bujagali Falls, about 10 kilometers from the center of town. Unfortunately, Bujagali Falls – which had been an impressive series of rapids popular for rafting – has been “drowned” by the rising waters from a recently built hydroelectric dam, transforming this stretch of the Nile into a lazy northward flow. Nonetheless, we were pretty excited, after months of traveling across Africa, to finally be staying along the banks of one its most iconic rivers.

Continue reading A visit to Jinga and the Source of the Nile →

This is the first in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).¹

Although I am a fiercely independent traveler, I am willing to accept group travel (albeit begrudgingly) when the practicalities of a given situation clearly point to its advantages (e.g., places that are so inhospitable that one has no business trying to visit them on their own, or locations that are so remote that it makes sense to share costs with others to reach them). Thus (as you may remember) we found ourselves on a three-week camping tour across Namibia, Botswana, and Victoria Falls.

Our interest in securing last minute permits for mountain gorilla trekking in Uganda during the high season, combined with the long distances and lack of public transportation between the other areas of Uganda that we wanted to visit, steered us again into the group travel fold. Seeking out potential tour options, we contacted a few operators, but the clear winner in terms of offerings/price/flexibility was MGCT – a Ugandan company that friends we had made in Tanzania had recently used for a tour and highly recommended to us.² After a weeklong series of emails with MGCT discussing possible itineraries, and my mother’s subsequent indefatigable efforts to arrange an international wire transfer, we booked a tour that had us joining with a group of three Italians for a 13-day adventure around Uganda.

The first day of our trip began early, with a 5:00 a.m. pickup from our guesthouse in Kampala. Our driver and guide Robert introduced himself and we met our Italian traveling companions – who had just arrived on an overnight flight and been picked up directly from the airport in Entebbe. After a quick breakfast, we were on our way driving east, trying to beat the infamous traffic that clogs Kampala’s roads for large portions of the day.