10-Day Uganda Grand Safari: Gorillas, Chimps and the Big Five

Your driver-guide is waiting at Entebbe International Airport with an Amazing Gorilla Safaris signboard, and the drive to Bwindi covers around 520km, roughly 8–9 hours, out through Kampala’s Northern Bypass, a photo stop at the Equator crossing in Kayabwe, and lunch at Igongo Cultural Centre near Mbarara before the final stretch climbs into the Kigezi highlands. A scheduled light aircraft into Kihihi or Kisoro airstrip is available for anyone who’d rather cut that to ninety minutes in the air. Either way, you check into your lodge in time for an evening trekking briefing.

A 5:30am wake-up and early breakfast before heading to park headquarters for the 7:30am ranger briefing, which opens with a traditional song before groups of up to eight are assigned to specific habituated families based on fitness level and that morning’s tracker reports radioed in from the forest. The trek runs anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours each way through dense, often muddy rainforest, and once you find the family, a strict hour with them watching them feed and move as a group, before the walk back out and a certificate presentation at headquarters.

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With ten days to work with, this trip builds in a genuine buffer day rather than rushing straight to the next park. Options include a second gorilla trek with a different family for travellers who want it (booked and paid separately), a guided Batwa cultural walk with elders who lived inside Bwindi before it became a protected park, or simply resting at the lodge — a real choice rather than a filler day.

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North through the Ishasha sector, known for lions that climb into fig and euphorbia trees to escape the midday heat — your guide will slow down scanning the canopy through this stretch, since sightings are never guaranteed but common enough to be worth the detour. The road continues onto Queen Elizabeth’s main game-viewing circuit, arriving at your lodge by mid-afternoon.

A late-morning boat cruise along the Kazinga Channel, the waterway linking Lakes Edward and George, for the park’s famously dense hippo and Nile crocodile populations plus strong birdlife along the banks, followed by an afternoon game drive across the Kasenyi plains for elephant, buffalo, Uganda kob and, with luck, lion.

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The road to Kibale runs through tea plantations and past the crater lakes near Fort Portal, arriving with time to settle into your lodge before the next morning’s chimp tracking briefing.

An early start for the briefing at Kanyanchu visitor centre before tracking a habituated chimpanzee community through Kibale’s forest — generally gentler walking than the gorilla trek, since the terrain here is more forgiving. Afternoon at Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary’s community-run boardwalk, good for monkeys and birding.

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A long drive north, broken up by a stop at Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary — Uganda’s only place to see rhinos in the wild, tracked on foot with an armed ranger since these southern white rhinos, reintroduced after the species was hunted to local extinction here during the 1980s, still need close protection from poaching. From Ziwa it’s a further two to three hours to Murchison Falls, crossing the Nile at Karuma Bridge on the way in.

Morning game drive across Murchison’s northern sector, prime for lion, giraffe, elephant and buffalo on the open delta plains, then an afternoon boat cruise upriver to the base of the falls themselves, where the entire Victoria Nile forces through a gap barely seven metres wide before dropping 43 metres in a roar of spray — genuinely one of the most dramatic single sights on any East Africa itinerary.

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The drive south retraces the route through Kampala, roughly five to six hours depending on traffic through the capital, with a stop for lunch en route and drop-off timed against your departure flight.