Rushaga, Buhoma, Ruhija or Nkuringo: choosing your Bwindi sector

Your gorilla permit names a sector, and that one word shapes more of the trip than any other choice: which lodge you sleep in, how long you spend in the car, and what the walk to the gorillas is like. Bwindi’s four trekking sectors sit around the edge of the forest, and they are hours apart by road, so you cannot sleep in one and trek from another. That is why we settle the sector first and build everything else around it.

Gorilla trekking in Uganda began at Buhoma in 1993, and it is still the park’s busiest gateway: the park headquarters, the largest cluster of lodges, and short walks for the afternoon after your trek, to the waterfall trail or through the community outside the gate. If your trip also takes in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Buhoma is the shortest hop from the Ishasha sector, home of the tree-climbing lions.

Ruhija sits on a ridge above 2,000 metres on the eastern side of the forest. Mornings are cold, lodges are fewer, and the atmosphere is quieter than Buhoma. It is the sector birders ask for: the trail down to Mubwindi Swamp is one of the best places in the country for Albertine Rift endemics. The catch is the terrain. A trek that drops off the ridge has to climb back up to it at the end.

Rushaga, in the south, has more habituated gorilla families than any other sector, which in practice means more permits. When dates are tight, it is the sector most likely to have space. It is also where the Gorilla Habituation Experience runs: around four hours with a family that is still being habituated, instead of the standard one. Lake Bunyonyi is close enough to rest at afterwards. Our Bwindi Gorilla Trekking Safari is built around Rushaga for these reasons.

Nkuringo’s lodges sit high on a ridge looking across to the Virunga volcanoes, and on a clear morning it is the best view in the park. The trek usually begins by descending into the valley, which means the hardest part of the day is the climb back up once you have seen the gorillas. Take a porter. Rushaga and Nkuringo are close enough by road that they share some logistics.

Mgahinga Gorilla National Park sits on the slopes of the Virungas just south of Bwindi. It has one habituated gorilla family, so permits are fewer, but it adds things Bwindi does not have: golden monkey tracking, volcano hikes, and the Batwa Trail, led by the Batwa community who once lived in these forests. Our Gorilla & Golden Monkey Trek goes here.

• Dates are tight: Rushaga, then Mgahinga.
• You are also going to Queen Elizabeth: Buhoma, or Rushaga on the longer loop through Ishasha, which is how our Primates & Big Game Safari runs.
• You want more than an hour: Rushaga, for the Habituation Experience.
• You are flying into Kigali: Rushaga, Nkuringo or Mgahinga, the sectors closest to the Rwandan border.
• You are a birder: Ruhija.
• Walking is a concern: tell us before we book. No sector is reliably easy, because the difficulty depends on where the family has moved that day, but some are gentler on the knees than others.