Mountain gorilla trekking in the world's most biodiverse forest — half of the world's remaining mountain gorillas live in this impenetrable jungle on the Congo border
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (321 sq km, southwestern Uganda at the DRC border in the Albertine Rift Valley — declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994) is the most biodiverse forest in Africa: over 1,000 plant species, 350 bird species (including 23 Albertine Rift endemics — the Albertine Rift being the branch of the Great East African Rift between Uganda, DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi, the most biodiverse freshwater and montane ecosystem on the continent), and 120 mammal species. But Bwindi's global significance is defined by a single statistic: approximately 459 of the world's remainin…
Bwindi's human history predates its conservation status by at least 40,000 years — the Batwa pygmies (the Twa — hunter-gatherers who lived in the Bwindi forest and the surrounding highlands for thousands of years before the expansion of Bantu-speaking agricultural peoples from West Africa into the Great Lakes region) inhabited the forest until they were evicted without compensation when Bwindi was designated a National Park in 1991. The Batwa's displacement (they lost all legal access to the forest they had inhabited for millennia without the land title that would have entitled them to resett…