$1500 EXTREME Gorilla Trek in Uganda

Hello Chikatzi, I'm Oscar and I'm Dan and today we are in Uganda. So there are only three countries in the world that have mountain gorillas and they're the biggest primates in the world and can weigh up to 250 kilograms. I'm the biggest animal lover ever and I could literally stare at animals playing or just going about the everyday life forever. And I'm almost the opposite, I'm kind of afraid of quite a few animals and Daniel wants to start an animal sanctuary in the future so I guess that's my life now. You can only see mountain gorillas in the Greater Virunga National Park which is in Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC with different names in each place or in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest slash National Park in Uganda and the permits cost respectively for a one-hour interaction with the gorillas $1,500, $600 and $500. And yes that's an insane amount of money so we wanted to try it out and see is it worth it? What do they do with your money and will you even get to see any gorillas? Okay we're crossing the border and there's people just like working here in between the border yeah just like chopping grass and stuff. UNHCR tent, I hope that man is napping. Here is the immigration office. Now we're in Uganda. We made it to our first stop in Uganda, Coffee Pot Cafe. Have a look at these menus. So here's the price list for wi-fi, 30 minutes skyping, facetime, streaming, video. So it's going to cost you a fortune if you want to be binging Netflix here. Starting out with some passion fruit juice, give us the review. Well it tastes like passion fruit. So we made it to Lake Mule'e and this is our place we're staying at for the night. Let's see where we will be sleeping. This is where we sleep. This is our luggage. This is a welcome amenity of loads of fruit with these really nice flowers that are freshly picked. And welcome to the bathroom which has a bidet actually and toilet. Over here right behind this thing this wall is a shower which actually looks pretty nice. Okay we're starting our dinner. Some watermelon juice. Yeah with an amazing view from my seat. And dinner is served bananas, sweet potato, rice, avocado and uh... We just found out that the starting altitude is 2400. Yeah because this morning we were walking up like this hill and we're getting so uh flustered. Or like what do you call it? So the trek will be taking place in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest which is not an intimidating name at all. So this right here is an elephant poop from the wild elephants in the park. So we're being divided into groups like this. So now we just drove for another 30 minutes to the starting point and this is where we'll be trekking from. It's gorgeous. This is where the Businga family lives apparently. Okay we are getting slowly closer to the impenetrable national park. Um apparently they also have elephants, chimpanzees. Yeah so many cool animals. So uh kind of hoping we see elephants as well. Here this must be the forest. So the jungle is getting quite dense now. So that was literally our most challenging hike ever terrain-wise but I mean the experience was definitely worth it. Seeing the gorillas up close was such a once-in-a-lifetime experience especially seeing them in their natural habitat. Although mountain gorillas actually can't live anywhere else. They like die if they go to a zoo. They have to be specifically in this geographic area which makes them so unique. If you have the money you can definitely do this especially I think if you want an easier hike do it in Rwanda. If you are quite, I mean I wouldn't say we're super fit but if you can manage like some a decent physical challenge save the money and do it in Uganda because I don't think it's worth the price difference really if you can manage doing the hike that we did. I mean it all comes down to if you want to pay the extra money to help conserve the gorillas which you pay a lot more for in Rwanda. What's cool is that we learned that because of this tourism the gorilla populations have grown immensely. Hundreds of new gorillas literally from the profit they make they put a ton of it toward conserving the gorillas toward tracking their behaviors to learn about them and it's just like such a good ecosystem I think and it feels good to support it as tourists definitely. What's good is that you're guaranteed to see the gorillas every single time because they have a team that goes out early in the morning and tracks them from where they were the day before. The day after our gorilla trek we came back to Rwanda and we did something that only cost us $100 which was quite similar but we actually found perhaps even better than the gorilla experience. It was at least more fun. Yeah, it was more engaging I guess. So we'll share that in our next video or in an upcoming video. So yeah thank you for joining us in our first ever travel vlog on this channel. We can't wait to share what our fun adventure was in Rwanda right after that. Hopefully we'll get even better at this or even better just better because yeah. So stay tuned for that. And until we see you all for the next video Bye!