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Kigezi
The south-western corner of Uganda: terraced hills, a deep cold lake with twenty-nine islands, and the forest where the gorillas are. It is where this company is from, and it is the reason it exists.
Kigezi has been called the Switzerland of Africa for about a century, which tells you more about the people who named it than about the place. What is true is that it looks like nowhere else in Uganda: steep hills terraced to the summit, cultivated so intensively that the land reads as a pattern, and at the centre of it Lake Bunyonyi.
Lake Bunyonyi
Bunyonyi means "place of many little birds". It is one of the deepest lakes in Africa, sitting at around 1,960 metres, and it has twenty-nine islands, each with a story attached — some of them cheerful, some of them not.
It is also, unusually for a large lake in this part of the world, widely considered safe to swim in: there are no crocodiles and no hippos, and bilharzia is not established. People do swim in it. We would still say ask locally on the day rather than take a sentence on a website as a guarantee.
Why this matters for your trip
Most Uganda safaris are run out of Kampala or Entebbe, six to eight hours away. The operator drives down, meets you, and drives back. That works, and plenty of good companies do it.
Being based here is different in ways that are small individually and add up:
- Sector choice is a real conversation. Ruhija is about ninety minutes from the lake; Rushaga and Nkuringo two to three hours. We know which transfer is bearable after a long flight and which is not.
- The roads are known rather than looked up. Which stretch is being worked on, what the rains do to the Ishasha road, where the fuel actually is.
- Lodges answer. The relationships are local and personal, which matters most when something has gone wrong at nine at night.
- Bunyonyi is where the trip should end, not where it should be skipped.Two days by the lake after the forest is the difference between a holiday and a schedule.
And the other reason
The children's home and the primary school that this company funds are here, on the lake. Not as a visit — they are not on any itinerary and never will be — but as the reason the company was started at all.