The Uganda drive was amazing, the roads were much better than we expected even though the tarmac did eventually run out. Quick stop at the roadside for our packed lunch and we were in Kibale at around 4:30pm.

What an amazing place! Fabulous chilled welcome and an introduction before being shown to our room and were then left to settle in. We just sat around and gawped, it was so stunning. We were pleasantly surprised that there was light in the room and didn’t mind that it was quite low wattage as it gave a lovely ambience.

The rain was beautiful that probably sounds weird and freaky but coming from Scotland, we’re fair used to a good old drenching but the cold that comes with it means that we associate rain with being miserable. To experience rain in Africa is just something else altogether, especially when you know that the wet season is late and the people rely on it so much.

Our first ‘proper’ night in Uganda again started with us ‘sleeping’ with our eyes open, honestly, we were just beyond excited with the whole thing and, yes, slightly nervous about being in the middle of the forest the sort of darkness that is just totally black you can open your eyes and close your eyes and there’s no difference!!! – and then we heard a huge noise, crack, the sound of branches snapping, rustling leaves and something large moving around in the forest outside our tent. We rhymed off all the monkeys, chimps, apes etc that we could think of but couldn’t come up with anything that would make that much noise eventually proper sleep and sheer exhaustion took over and it was all forgotten.

It was only when we went down to breakfast the next morning that someone said ‘did you hear the elephant last night?’ that the penny dropped. We had no idea that Kibale Forest had elephants, which was probably just as well because if we had thought there was an elephant shuffling about outside our tent in the pitch black we might not even have got the few hours sleep that we did!

We headed off after breakfast for the chimpanzee tracking excellent location, literally 3 minutes lazy meandering down the path/driveway, had the ‘brief briefing’ which was rudely interrupted can you believe by two chimps swinging about in the tree outside the briefing room!! The easiest ‘tracking’ of the holiday! We headed off with our tracker to try and keep up with one of them as it made its way back in the forest but an hour of literally jogging through the trees later, we had lost them. We had come prepared for the chimpanzee tracking.

From kibale, we went to bwindi for our gorilla tracking, the experience was a life time and we enjoyed evry bit of it. Gorillas and chimps look a like and they are very close relatives of human beings according to their life style.

Our safari was a success and the option of self driving in Uganda was good, we castomised our itinerary and spent time to each and every destination according to our wish, we even decide to visit local communities both in Kibale and bwindi, of which I think it would be difficult if we chose to go with a package safari.