Mgahinga

Mgahinga is tiny, and everyone who works there will tell you so with a kind of proud shrug, as if the smallness is the whole point. It’s Uganda’s smallest national park, tucked into the far southwest corner where the country pinches between Rwanda and DR Congo, and most people who make it out there are actually headed somewhere else — gorilla trekking in Bwindi, usually. We were two of them. But Mgahinga pulled me in on its own terms within about an hour of arriving.

The golden monkey trek is the reason to detour here, and it’s a different kind of experience than gorilla trekking — faster, noisier, more chaotic. These monkeys don’t sit still for you. We followed a ranger through dense bamboo forest, sometimes crawling under low branches, chasing rustling sounds overhead while these small orange-gold primates leapt between stalks faster than I could track them with my eyes, let alone a camera. Lia got one decent photo out of maybe eighty attempts. It’s less contemplative than watching gorillas, more like trying to keep up with a group of hyperactive kids at a playground, and I mean that as a compliment.

The park is really the Ugandan slice of the Virunga volcanic range, three extinct cones — Muhabura, Gahinga, Sabinyo — that also stretch into Rwanda and Congo. You can hike any of them, and we did a half-day up Gahinga, which is the shortest, through bamboo that gradually thinned into moorland with these strange giant lobelias standing around like alien sculptures. The summit holds a small crater lake we didn’t have time to reach, which annoyed me for about a week afterward. Next time.

What I didn’t expect was how quiet the whole place felt. Bwindi, an hour or two away, has real infrastructure built up around gorilla tourism — lodges, jeeps, a steady flow of visitors. Mgahinga has almost none of that. We had the golden monkey trek essentially to ourselves aside from our small group, and the ranger station felt more like a family operation than a tourist machine. There’s also a Batwa cultural experience offered near the park entrance, led by former forest-dwelling communities who were resettled when the park was created — a heavier, more complicated visit than the wildlife trekking, and one I’d recommend approaching with some humility rather than as a checkbox activity.

When to go: June to September or December to February, during the drier seasons when the bamboo forest trails are less of a mudslide.