Gorilla Permit Booking Procedures
Rwanda, Congo, Uganda are all homes of mountain gorillas – a rare travel and tourism attraction picking up the attention of many travelers lately. Watching and visiting gorillas has become big business and large foreign exchange earner as explained in this story adventure and very different from mass tourism. Hutu rebels of Rwanda let to the Bwindi massacre in 1999, gorilla tourism dropped and the resultant funding dropped from the mountain gorilla conservationists. There was an uphill struggle to reorganize it, but people now travel again travel for gorilla safaris to both the Congo, Rwanda and to Bwindi national park. Generally, the experience of gorilla trekking is a remarkable and strenuous adventure, considering visitors have to hike on foot through thick vegetation, given the nature of the forests and terrain.
Visitors trek gorillas through Bamboo and hardwoods couple with thick undergrowth to prevent entry to this “place of darkness.” Protection from human ingress has been assured in the past, but encroachment by settlements is always a modern hazard. Fortunately, many of the Ugandans gain appreciably from tourist visits, while the 2nd major population of mountain gorillas live over the DRC border which is just a few km away. The Virunga National Park is 25km away.
Bwindi impenetrable national park was established in 1991, (following a 1932 designation as Crown forest reserves) a remarkable biodiverse region within 3 nations became the major focus of mountain gorilla and forest conservation. With the heritage of Leakey and Fossey, these, “Gorillas in the Mist,” have been taken to everybody’s hearts. 120 mammal species, 220 butterflies, 27 frogs, and 350 birds, chameleons and others also flock together within the trees (163 species), other flowering plants (1000 spp) and ferns (104spp.) Because of the extreme isolation, many of these species are endemics. The fish are hardly studied yet. Colobus monkeys, chimpanzee, elephant, giant forest frogs, hornbills and turacos can be seen near the gorilla groups that are habituated to human “interference,” near Nkuringo and Buhoma.
If you want to visit the mountain gorilla in Uganda, it all begins with application for a gorilla permit. A permit can be acquired from either booking through a tour operator or the Uganda Wildlife Authority. This control ensures the gentle giants aren’t over-visited, or exposed to any human infections. The Uganda Wildlife Authority gains great revenue from the operation, so you could be lucky to avoid the rainy season, avoid car-sickness and get a comfortable lodge or tent. You will be dissuading locals from using the species for bushmeat or frightening them away to use the forest land. The visit will be brief, uncomfortable and quite costly, but some have paid a higher price.