Uganda · Rwanda · Congo
seven metres, one hour, no glass between you
With the gorillas as our reason
Eight people are allowed to visit a gorilla family each day, for one hour. Everything else about your trip is shaped by that single sentence.
We are a Ugandan company, based in Kampala, with our own vehicles and guides in Bwindi and Kisoro and a partner office in Musanze. Since 2012 we have planned journeys around one fixed point — the permit — and built the rest of the week outwards from it, so that no traveller flies eight thousand miles and then discovers their lodge is three hours from the trailhead.
Nothing we sell is pre-packaged. If a fixed departure elsewhere suits you better and costs less, we will tell you so.
The hour itself
A silverback dozing on his back with one leg in the air. A female stripping bark with the concentration of someone doing a crossword. A four-year-old falling out of the same small tree three times because it keeps trying to.
You are not read as a threat, and after ten minutes you stop feeling like a visitor. Most people forget to take a photograph until the hour is half gone. The rules — seven metres, no flash, no trekking with a cold — exist because gorillas share almost all of our DNA, and our illnesses.
Four forests
Bwindi holds around half of them, across four trekking sectors that are hours apart by road and offer genuinely different walks. The Virunga massif holds the rest, shared between Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, Uganda's Mgahinga and Congo's Virunga. One more forest, Kahuzi-Biega, is the only place on earth to trek eastern lowland gorillas.
Choosing between them is the first real decision of your trip, and it sets the permit price, the flights and how far you drive.
The permit
There are more mountain gorillas alive now than at any point since records began, and permit revenue is the reason. It pays ranger salaries, funds anti-poaching patrols, and a share is returned to the villages around the parks — which is why porters, guides and lodge staff are the animals' most effective protection.
Every operator pays the parks the same price. What varies is everything built around it.
Bwindi and Mgahinga. Eight permits per family per day.
Volcanoes National Park. Twelve habituated families.
Virunga and Kahuzi-Biega, subject to access.
Prices last checked 31 August 2026 with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, Rwanda Development Board and Virunga National Park.
Our journeys
Six of them below, including the fly-in options that turn a nine-hour drive into a seventy-five minute flight. Each is a starting point, rebuilt around the permits that exist on your dates.
Bwindi, Uganda — from Kigali
In from Kigali, two nights on the forest edge, one hour with a habituated family. The most efficient way to see mountain gorillas without paying Rwanda's permit.
3 daysfrom US$1,690 pp
Volcanoes NP, Rwanda
Land at Kigali, sleep in Musanze, trek at seven the next morning. Nothing else in Africa gets you to a gorilla this quickly.
3 daysfrom US$2,450 pp
Bwindi, Uganda — by air
The drive from Entebbe to Bwindi takes nine hours. The flight takes seventy-five minutes. This is the trip that makes a Uganda gorilla trek work on a short schedule.
3 daysfrom US$2,750 pp
Bwindi & Mgahinga, Uganda
Gorillas in Bwindi, then golden monkeys in the bamboo of Mgahinga — an endangered primate found only in the Virungas, and the best value hour in Uganda.
4 daysfrom US$1,980 pp
Bwindi & Queen Elizabeth — by air
Gorillas in the morning, hippo on the Kazinga Channel two days later, and not one long transfer between them.
5 daysfrom US$4,250 pp
Across Uganda
The Nile forced through a seven-metre gorge, chimpanzees in Kibale, lions in fig trees, and gorillas to finish. Ten days is the length Uganda actually deserves.
10 daysfrom US$4,380 pp
Know the animal
Almost everything people think they know about gorillas comes from King Kong. The reality is stranger and much better.
The two species and four subspecies, what a silverback actually is, what they eat, how families work, the nine-step charge display, how many are left and where. Around 4,900 words, written against the current research.
Mountain gorillas went from roughly 254 animals in 1981 to over a thousand today — the only great ape whose numbers are rising. What worked, and what still threatens them.
One of our guides wrote down what actually happens between the moment you leave your bag with the porters and the moment the ranger says ten more minutes.
Half the world's mountain gorillas live within a day's drive of our office.
Let us plan it
Send rough dates. We check live permit availability before we reply, so the first thing you get back is useful rather than promotional.
We never quote a date we cannot secure, and no money is taken for a trek we have not confirmed.
Rushaga, Ruhija, Buhoma and Nkuringo are different walks. We match you to one, and say so if Nkuringo is too much.
Permit, vehicle, lodging, park fees and our margin, listed separately. You can see what to cut.
Enquire
Tell us roughly when you would like to travel and how you like to travel.
A trip specialist replies within one working day. No deposit is needed to have a conversation.