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solo gorilla trekking Uganda after divorce is one of Africa’s most extraordinary wildlife experiences, connecting travellers with mountain gorillas in their natural forest habitat. The divorce was finalised in March. By April I had done the necessary administrative grief — the untangling of shared accounts, the redistribution of shared furniture, the awkward renegotiation of shared friendships. In May I booked solo gorilla trekking in Uganda for September. My solicitor thought it was impulsive. My mother thought it was brave. I thought it was the only thing I could think of that was sufficiently far from my previous life to let me work out what my next one was going to look like.
After the Divorce I Booked Gorilla Trekking Alone: What Happened Next
Why Solo Travel After a Relationship Ends
I had not travelled alone in eleven years. The relationship had been good in many ways and one of them was that we travelled well together. After it ended, the prospect of doing things we had done together — restaurants, films, places — was at best complicated. Solo travel to somewhere we had never been and had no shared history with was one of the few things I could do that was genuinely mine rather than a modified version of something we had shared.
Uganda was right for this purpose. I had no associations with it, no memories connected to it, no version of it in my mind that my ex-partner appeared in. It was completely new territory in the most literal possible sense.
The Logistics of Going Alone
Solo gorilla trekking in Uganda is straightforward. The gorilla permit ($800 USD per person) is the same price for solo travellers as for groups — there is no single supplement on the permit itself. You book through a licensed Uganda Tourism Board operator who handles the permit, accommodation, and transfers. You are assigned to a trekking group of up to eight at the briefing point — some from the same operator, some from different bookings. Solo travellers are common at Bwindi and the social context of the trek is easy and low-pressure.
The main solo cost premium is in vehicle hire — if you are not using public transport or shared transfers, a vehicle hired privately costs the same for one person as for four. I used a shared transfer from Kisoro airstrip to the Rushaga area, which was organised by my operator. The per-person cost was reasonable and I shared it with two other travellers I had never met, who turned out to be excellent company for one evening at the lodge.
Arriving at the Lodge Alone
This was the moment I had been most apprehensive about — arriving alone at a lodge in a country I had never been to, with an entirely open evening ahead of me and no one to fill it with. What actually happened was that the lodge was quietly full of other solo travellers and small groups, the staff were welcoming in the specific warm way that Ugandan hospitality operates, and I ate dinner alone with a view of the forest edge without feeling the loneliness I had expected.
Eating alone is harder in familiar places than unfamiliar ones. At home, eating alone in a restaurant carries the weight of social visibility — who else is here, who might see me, what does this say about my circumstances. At a lodge in Bwindi, solo eating is unremarkable. Most of the travellers there had arrived without partners. The context freed me from the self-consciousness that eating alone had started to produce at home.
The Trek and the Family
My trek to the Bweza group was four hours. I was in a group of six — a couple from Germany, a solo woman from Australia, two friends from the US, and me. We did not know each other well enough for conversation to be an obligation, which was ideal. We walked. The forest was extraordinary in the specific way that forests which have never been cleared are extraordinary — older, denser, more layered than anything I had seen in Europe or North America.
The Bweza group was in a dense section of forest when we found them. The encounter was quieter than I had expected — less of the dramatic tableau I had imagined and more of a gentle immersion in the daily life of a gorilla family going about its morning. A mother sitting with her infant. Two adolescents moving through the undergrowth. The silverback resting against a tree with the specific settled quality of a creature who has nowhere to be and no concern about it.
What Being Alone in the Forest Gave Me
The solitude of the experience — even in a group of six, even with a guide and a ranger — had a specific quality. There was no one to perform the experience for. No one to show I was having a good time. No shared glance with a partner to confirm that yes, this was as remarkable as it felt. I was just there, in it, with my own response to it, and the response was entirely mine. After eleven years of shared experience, the quality of having something that belonged entirely to me was more significant than I had anticipated.
I came back from Uganda with a better sense of who I was when I was not being half of something. That knowledge is not nothing. It was, in fact, one of the more useful things I acquired that year, and it cost $800 and a long-haul flight.
