I was in Kampala for four days of client meetings. The meetings finished a day early. My return flight was not changeable without a significant fee. I had twenty-four hours and nothing scheduled. My hotel concierge, with the specific confidence of someone who has given this advice before and watched it change people, suggested gorilla trekking in Uganda at Bwindi. I thought he was joking. He was not. This is what happened in those twenty-four hours.
The Logistics of Spontaneous Gorilla Trekking
Here is what I did not know before that afternoon: you can, in certain circumstances, arrange gorilla trekking in Uganda at relatively short notice. Permits occasionally become available due to cancellations. My hotel concierge made three calls. An operator he worked with had a single permit available for the following morning — a cancellation from a group that had reduced in size. The permit is $800 USD per person. I had my corporate card. I said yes before I had fully processed what I was agreeing to.
The logistics that followed were genuinely impressive. A charter flight from Entebbe booked for 6am, a lodge near Buhoma sector holding a room, a transfer driver confirmed. By 9pm I had a packed overnight bag, an alarm set for 4am, and a feeling I could not immediately categorise — somewhere between excitement and the mild vertigo of having made a significant decision very quickly.
The Flight Over the Rift Valley
I had not slept well. The charter flight was a small aircraft — six seats, a pilot who looked younger than my youngest direct report, and a flight path that took us over the Rift Valley at altitude. I had a window seat on the right side of the aircraft and I watched Uganda unfold below me for an hour. The escarpment, the forest, the green. I have flown extensively for work — I have sat in hundreds of aircraft windows looking at hundreds of landscapes. I have never pressed my face to a window the way I did on that flight.
There is a specific kind of beauty that produces a physical response — the kind that makes you inhale quickly and hold it. The Rift Valley from a small aircraft at dawn is that kind of beauty. I arrived at the lodge already altered in some way I could not account for by jet lag or coffee deprivation.
The Briefing and the Walk
The pre-trek briefing was at 8am. I was the only solo traveller in a group of six — the others were two couples who had planned this trip for months. I had planned it for eleven hours. This felt, briefly, like a category error. Then the briefing started and the category error dissolved. Whatever the road to Bwindi, the destination is the same for everyone.
We walked for three hours. I was wearing the walking boots I had packed for Kampala meetings — a decision that proved, on the forest terrain, to be adequate but barely. The guide was named Innocent and he had been leading treks for eleven years. He spoke about the gorilla family we were assigned to — the Mubare group, the oldest habituated family in Uganda, habituated since 1991 — with the kind of knowledge that accumulates over years of close observation.
The Mubare Group
We found the Mubare group on a slope, feeding in the mid-morning light. The silverback was sitting against a tree, eating from a plant I did not recognise. He was the largest living animal I had ever been in the proximity of. Not in zoos — in a wild forest, eight metres away, with no barrier between us except the mutual understanding that neither of us was a threat to the other.
I am a person whose professional life consists entirely of managing human beings and the problems they create. I have developed, over fifteen years in corporate environments, a very finely calibrated sense of human intention and human agenda. Every interaction has a subtext. Every meeting has an objective. Every relationship has a structure of mutual interest that shapes how it operates. The silverback had none of this. He was simply there, eating leaves, in complete indifference to my presence, my title, my quarterly targets, or my return flight the following morning.
What Twenty-Four Hours in the Forest Gives a Business Traveller
I have spent fifteen years accumulating the professional skills that make me useful to my organisation. I have spent approximately no time since then in environments that remind me those skills are tools rather than identities. The forest did this efficiently and without sentimentality. In the presence of the Mubare group I was not a director or a client manager or a competent person navigating a professional environment. I was a mammal in a forest, watching other mammals in the same forest, and the experience was significant in proportion to how rarely I am reduced to my mammalian basics.
I flew back to Entebbe the following morning. I attended my return meetings in London two days later. I have not missed a deadline or failed a client since. What changed is harder to quantify: a recalibration of what constitutes a genuine problem versus what constitutes a manageable inconvenience. The Mubare silverback has become, in my internal taxonomy, the reference point for “actually significant.” Very few of my professional problems have reached that bar since I saw him.
On Spontaneous Decisions
The concierge who suggested the trip retired the following year. I went back to thank him before he did. The permit is $800 and occasionally available on short notice for those willing to reorganise their plans around it. If you find yourself in Kampala with an extra day, I know what to do with it.
