uganda & kenya: gorillas, riding and laikipia rhino

Both are good, and they make very different mornings.

Buhoma is one of Bwindi's four trekking sectors, sharing the forest's habituated families among the day's trekkers, with no more than eight visitors going to any one family. We allow two to seven hours for a trek there, thick forest on steep ground, and one hour once the animals are reached.

Mgahinga has a single habituated family, the Nyakagezi group, and the Wildlife Authority issues about eight permits a day for the whole park, so the forest is quiet and the permit is the first thing to secure. The walking is through bamboo and over open volcanic slopes beneath three volcanoes, and it starts higher.

Nothing is promised at either park, but we put the success rate at better than 95 per cent, because trackers find each family at dawn from the nests it left.

No. The lodge's horse riding is for all ages and levels, and its horses are gentle, well trained and very used to carrying novice riders, so a first ride is a normal thing to book.

Experienced riders are looked after too, with longer rides down into the valleys beyond, English saddles as standard and trail saddles available if you prefer them.

Two limits are firm. There is a weight limit of 90 kilograms, about 14 stone, and the riding fly camp asks that you are balanced in the saddle and confident on a fit horse at all paces over rough ground, so that one is for competent riders.

Camel riding sits on the same list of activities and asks nothing of you at all. Let us know who is riding and what each of them can do, and the horses can be matched before you arrive.

Buhoma is either a full day's drive from Entebbe or a short flight with a slow finish.

The scheduled service is an 11-seat Cessna Grand Caravan to Kihihi airstrip, a little over an hour when it flies direct and longer if it calls somewhere first, then 90 to 120 minutes on dirt roads to the forest edge.

Luggage on that aircraft is 15 kilograms a person in soft bags, hand luggage included, and Kenya's safari airlines use the same figure. Mgahinga lies south of Bwindi and is reached by road.

The crossing to Kenya is flown into Nairobi, which is what the single night on Blixen's old coffee land is for, and Lewa is then a short hop by light aircraft, or a private charter, typically a Cessna Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12. Timetables shift, so we confirm each leg when we plan your dates.

Probably one rather than two.

A single tourist visa, the East African one, covers Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda for 90 days and as many crossings between them as you like, and the British Foreign Office sets it out the same way.

Two conditions decide whether it suits you. It must be issued by whichever of the three you land in first, which on this route is Uganda, so that is where the application goes. It also expires the moment you travel outside those three countries, which this route never does.

Kenya has separately moved most arrivals onto an online travel authorisation, applied for in advance and recommended at least a fortnight ahead, and how that sits alongside the joint visa is not yet set out, so we confirm it for your dates when we book.

Nationality changes the answer and the rules move at short notice, so we send you what applies to your passports.

Time it by the forests.

The trekking is firmest in the two dry windows, which makes January, February, July, August and September the months we rate highest everywhere on this route, in both gorilla parks and on Lewa alike. They also give the clearest views of the Virunga volcanoes from Mgahinga and dry, open riding country on the conservancy.

June and December suit the Ugandan forests well and sit in between in Kenya, and October is an in-between month almost everywhere here.

March and November are rated challenging in both gorilla parks, and November in Laikipia as well, so those two want weighing up carefully.

April and May bring the long rains, and nowhere on this route escapes them.

The wetter months still have their case: permits are easier at short notice, lodge rates fall, the forests are at their greenest and soft cloud light flatters dark gorilla fur.

Dependable, and no, not only from a vehicle.

Lewa and neighbouring Borana are run as a single rhino range, merged into 93,000 acres of continuous rangeland, and it holds more than 280 rhino, 14 per cent of every rhino in Kenya.

Four nights on ground stocked like that is why they turn up on most drives, although the animals are wild and nobody can promise one, and that count covers the whole landscape rather than the block you drive each morning.

What this route adds is the number of ways to be out in it:

• Guided walks
• Rides out among the plains game
• A camel trek
• A drive after dark

None of them are permitted in a national park. The number of vehicles at a sighting is capped, so you may wait your turn instead of joining a crowd.