I booked gorilla trekking in Uganda six months after a relationship ended in which I had spent three years being told, in various ways, that I was not quite enough. Not dramatic enough, not social enough, not ambitious enough in the right directions. I had absorbed this more than I realised. The solo trip to Uganda was not specifically designed to address it. It addressed it anyway.
Travelling Alone as Evidence
There is something specific that solo travel does that group travel does not: it requires you to be sufficient. You navigate the airport alone. You find your transfer alone. You manage your luggage and your anxiety and your jet lag and your arrival in an unfamiliar country alone. Every logistical challenge that would normally be distributed across two people falls entirely on you, and you meet it, and this is evidence that you are capable of more than the previous three years had suggested.
I want to be precise about this because I think it is more than just confidence-building. It is corrective experience — the kind of direct, concrete evidence about your own capabilities that overrides the absorbed narrative about your limitations. I booked my flights, organised my visa ($50 paid at Entebbe immigration), secured my gorilla trekking permit ($800 USD through a licensed Uganda Tourism Board operator), and arrived in Uganda having done all of this by myself. By the time I reached the lodge at Buhoma sector, I had already begun to revise my self-assessment.
The Lodge at Buhoma
I arrived in the early afternoon. The lodge was on the forest edge — the actual boundary between the community land and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park visible from my room. I sat on the veranda and watched the forest for two hours. I ordered food when I was hungry. I went to bed when I was tired. I made every decision about my time without reference to anyone else’s preferences or comfort. This is the ordinary texture of solo travel and it is, for someone coming out of a relationship in which their preferences had been chronically secondary, not ordinary at all.
The Trek
I was in a group of seven at the briefing point — solo travellers and small groups from different operators. The guide covered the rules and the Rushegura family’s recent location. We walked for two and a half hours. The terrain at Buhoma is varied and manageable; I had hired a porter who carried my pack and provided a steadying hand on the steep sections. The porter’s name was Ambrose. He was twenty-three years old and had been working as a porter at Bwindi since he was eighteen. We talked, between the quieter stretches of trail, about what he found remarkable about the tourists he accompanied and what they found remarkable about the forest. The conversation was easy and equal and specific.
The Rushegura family was feeding in a section of forest with good light when we found them. The silverback was visible from where we positioned ourselves — not dramatically close, not performing, just present and enormous and indifferent to our presence in the specific way that habituated gorillas are indifferent. His family moved around him in the patterns of a social group that knows its own structure well. Two juveniles played in the undergrowth near where we crouched. One of them came very close to me — within two metres — and sat down and looked at me.
What the Juvenile Gorilla Saw
I have thought about this moment more than seems proportionate. The juvenile was perhaps two years old. It looked at me with the specific, uncomplicated directness of a very young animal examining something unfamiliar. No assessment of whether I was impressive enough. No evaluation of my social utility. No interest in what I had achieved or failed to achieve. Just — me. Present. Existing. Apparently acceptable as something to look at in a forest on a Tuesday morning.
I know I am projecting a significance onto a young gorilla’s glance that the gorilla did not intend. I know this is what humans do — we find meaning in the things that are present when we are ready to receive meaning. But the readiness was real, and the gorilla was real, and the specific quality of being looked at without assessment was something I needed and received in that moment regardless of whether the giver knew they were giving it.
The Evening After
I ate dinner alone that evening and it was one of the best meals I had had in years. Not because the food was exceptional — it was good, simple lodge food — but because I was eating it in Uganda, having just spent an hour with a gorilla family, having organised the entire enterprise myself, having needed no one’s approval to do any of it. I was, that evening, sufficient. Not in the absence of other people, but independently of whether anyone was measuring.
I have carried that evening with me since. Not as a memory of joy exactly — more as a fixed point. When the absorbed narrative about my limitations reasserts itself, which it still occasionally does, I return to that dinner and that gorilla and that forest and I am reminded that the assessment was wrong.
Gorilla trekking in Uganda costs $800 for the permit. If you need to go somewhere alone and prove something to yourself about what you are capable of, Bwindi is an excellent place to do it.
