Updated
You have done the gorilla trek. You have had your hour with the mountain gorilla family. You are back at the lodge and you have seven more days before your flight. Uganda has more extraordinary wildlife and landscape than most travellers have time to see — here is exactly what to do with seven more days after your Bwindi trek.
Day 1-2: Queen Elizabeth National Park
Transfer from Bwindi to Queen Elizabeth National Park (approximately 2.5 to 3 hours by road). Queen Elizabeth is Uganda’s most diverse national park, with savanna, forest, wetlands, and the Kazinga Channel waterway. Day 1: morning game drive in the northern sector (Uganda kob, elephant, buffalo, lion). Afternoon Kazinga Channel boat cruise (extraordinary hippo and waterbird viewing). Day 2: morning drive to Ishasha sector in the south for tree-climbing lions — one of Uganda’s most unique wildlife spectacles. Lions here habitually rest in giant fig trees, providing viewing opportunities unlike any standard savanna lion encounter. Transfer from Ishasha toward Kibale Forest (approximately 2 hours).
Day 3-4: Kibale Forest and Chimpanzees
Arrive Kibale Forest National Park. Day 3: afternoon primate walk or orientation walk in the forest surroundings. Day 4: chimpanzee trekking at Kanyanchu (permit 200 USD). One hour with a habituated chimpanzee community — and the comparison with your gorilla encounter creates immediate reflection. Chimpanzees are our closest living relative in evolutionary terms, sharing 98.7% of our DNA. They are faster, noisier, more unpredictable, and more recognisably human in behaviour than gorillas. Many travellers find the chimpanzee encounter more cognitively challenging and the gorilla encounter more emotionally resonant — though both are extraordinary in their own right. Optional: add the Chimpanzee Habituation Experience (CHEX) for a full day with the chimp community (200 USD additional).
Day 5: Fort Portal and the Crater Lakes
Fort Portal is the gateway town for western Uganda’s Rwenzori foothills and is surrounded by a series of stunning volcanic crater lakes — green-water, perfectly circular volcanic depressions set in tea-plantation landscape. The crater lake circuit near Fort Portal (Lakes Nkuruba, Nyinambuga, and Kyaninga among others) is one of Uganda’s most scenic drives. Kyaninga Lodge above Lake Kyaninga offers one of Uganda’s most dramatic lodge settings for a lunch or overnight stop.
Day 6-7: Murchison Falls or Return via Kampala
Option A: If seven days allows the distance (Kibale to Murchison is approximately 4 hours north), spend Days 6-7 at Murchison Falls National Park — the Nile boat cruise, the falls themselves, and the northern game drives. Return to Entebbe from Murchison is approximately 4 hours. Option B: Return south toward Kampala via the scenic Kibale-Fort Portal-Kampala highway. Day 6: drive to Kampala with scenic stops. Day 7: Kampala craft markets (Gaddafi mosque, Owino Market area), departure from Entebbe. Seven days after a Bwindi gorilla trek gives you Queen Elizabeth, Kibale chimpanzees, the crater lakes, and a choice of Murchison Falls or Kampala exploration — Uganda’s full western circuit in one extended trip.
What Seven More Days in Uganda Looks Like
The Uganda extension itinerary — the additional week that gorilla trekking visitors add after completing the core safari — is most effectively structured around the destinations that the core itinerary’s time pressure prevented. Kidepo Valley National Park in the northeast, which requires either a domestic flight (1 hour from Entebbe) or a long drive from Kampala (8 hours), is the most frequently chosen extension for visitors who want a wildlife experience that is genuinely remote and that provides a landscape character completely different from the western Uganda forests and savannah. Kidepo’s semi-arid terrain, its Karamoja cattle-herding cultural context, and its lion population — one of the most accessible in Uganda — justify the additional travel time.
The alternative extension for visitors whose primary interest is primates rather than savannah wildlife is a Kibale Forest chimpanzee trekking addition — two nights at Kibale with a chimp track on day two and the Bigodi Wetland walk on day three, creating a primate comparison that enriches the gorilla trekking experience’s context. The Rwenzori Mountains extension — a guided hike up Uganda’s ‘Mountains of the Moon’ to the glacier zone above 4,000 metres — serves the small proportion of gorilla trekking visitors who are also experienced high-altitude hikers. Each of these extension options transforms a wildlife-focused safari into a more complex journey that leaves Uganda with a broader set of experiences than the core itinerary alone could produce.
The Uganda extension itinerary’s structure is most effectively designed by identifying the one primary experience from the core itinerary that the visitor wishes they had more of — more time with the gorillas, more days in the forest, a second primate species, a different landscape character — and building the extension around that specific wish rather than adding a geographically convenient destination that fills the time without responding to it. This focused extension design produces a more satisfying additional week than a scatter of new destinations, because it deepens the relationship with the specific elements of Uganda that the core itinerary established as most resonant.
