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gorilla trekking Uganda reward milestone personal story is one of Africa’s most extraordinary wildlife experiences, connecting travellers with mountain gorillas in their natural forest habitat. Three years before I went to Uganda, I made a deal with myself. I was starting something difficult — a business, which I had no previous experience of starting — and I needed a form of external motivation that was specific and meaningful enough to carry weight during the difficult parts. I promised myself gorilla trekking in Uganda when the business reached a particular milestone. This is the story of keeping that promise, and what it turned out to be about.
I Promised Myself Gorilla Trekking as a Reward: Here Is the Story
Why Gorilla Trekking as a Reward
The reward needed to have specific qualities. It needed to be concrete enough that I could visualise it during difficult months. It needed to be significant enough — in cost, in effort, in distance from my ordinary life — that reaching the milestone and taking the trip would be genuinely meaningful rather than merely pleasant. And it needed to be something I had genuinely wanted for a long time rather than something I was inventing as a motivational device. Gorilla trekking met all three criteria. I had wanted to see mountain gorillas since reading about them a decade earlier. The permit cost ($800 USD per person) was significant relative to the discretionary spending I was allowing myself during the lean years of early business building. And the idea of standing in Bwindi Forest was concrete enough and specific enough to hold in my mind during the months when concrete specificity was scarce.
The Three Years
The business reached the milestone in year two and a half, which was earlier than I had allowed myself to expect. I had set the milestone conservatively, not knowing whether I would reach it at all. When I crossed it, the promise was technically redeemable. I did not take the trip for another six months, partly from caution (the milestone felt fragile) and partly from a quality of delayed gratification that I had developed during the difficult years. By the time I booked the trip I had been looking forward to it for long enough that the anticipation was itself a significant part of the total experience.
Booking and Planning
I booked through a licensed Uganda Tourism Board operator six months in advance — the right lead time for a dry-season trip. The permit was $800 USD per person. I chose Buhoma sector because my research suggested it was the best sector for a first visit, with the most consistent guide quality and the most accessible terrain. I booked a lodge that had good reviews specifically from solo travellers, since I was going alone. I arranged a charter flight from Entebbe to Kihihi airstrip because three years of promising myself this trip had established it, in my mind, as something worth doing properly.
Arriving
The charter flight landed at Kihihi in the late morning. The drive to the lodge was an hour through highland scenery that was completely unlike anything I had seen before. I arrived at the lodge, checked in, sat on the veranda, and understood that the three years of difficult months had produced this — this specific afternoon, in this specific place, in Uganda, with gorilla trekking the following morning. The sense of deserving, which is an uncomfortable feeling in ordinary life, was present and uncomplicated. I had worked for this. I was here. Both of these things were simply true.
The Trek
The trek to the Mubare group was two hours. I had hired a porter — a young man named Stephen who carried my pack and maintained a cheerful, informative commentary on the forest around us. The Mubare group was the first habituated gorilla family in Uganda, habituated in 1991. The silverback we observed had been born into this family and had watched many thousands of visitors come and go over his life. He had the settled quality of an animal that has seen enough of humans to find us unremarkable. This was, from my perspective, an honour I had not anticipated feeling. To be deemed unremarkable by a creature of this age and this presence felt like a form of acceptance.
What the Promise Turned Out to Be About
I had framed the promise as a reward — something to receive in exchange for effort. What I understood when I was there was that it was also a statement about what I valued. You promise yourself the things that reflect who you want to be and what you consider worth wanting. The business milestone mattered because it represented competence and persistence. The gorillas mattered because they represented something I could not produce through competence and persistence alone — the specific quality of experience that is available only by going to where it exists, which is in a forest in Uganda, in the presence of animals that have been alive in that forest since before the concept of ambition existed.
I have set a new promise. I will not say what for. But the reward is already decided, and it involves another permit, another flight, and another morning in Bwindi Forest. The permit still costs $800. Some things are worth promising yourself.
