Chimpanzee trekking is the primate encounter most travellers add to a Murchison Falls trip when a full gorilla trip isn’t in the budget or the schedule, and it deserves to be judged on its own terms rather than as a consolation prize. Uganda’s two main chimp destinations – Kibale Forest National Park and, closer to Murchison itself, Budongo Forest Reserve – put you face to face with our closest living relatives for a fraction of a gorilla permit’s cost, with a real chance of watching genuinely complex social behaviour: tool use, hunting, territorial calling, and the kind of expressive faces that make the kinship obvious within the first few minutes. Chimpanzees share around 98 percent of their DNA with humans, and it shows in ways that are hard to anticipate until you’ve watched it firsthand – the way a mother handles an infant, the politics of a rank dispute, the sheer physical expressiveness of a face that can look startlingly familiar mid-yawn or mid-argument.
Kibale Forest National Park
Kibale is Uganda’s premier chimpanzee destination and one of the most reliable places in Africa to see them, with an estimated 1,500 chimpanzees in the park and around 120 individuals across several habituated communities available for trekking. It sits in the country’s southwest, roughly a four to five hour drive from Murchison or easily combined with Queen Elizabeth National Park immediately to its south, and the forest itself – tall, humid, mid-altitude rainforest rather than Bwindi’s tangled montane forest – makes for noticeably easier walking than gorilla trekking. Sightings here run above 90% on a good day, helped by trackers who follow the same communities daily and generally know roughly where to start looking.
Budongo Forest Reserve
Budongo sits just south of Murchison Falls National Park itself, close enough that chimp trekking here works as a genuine add-on to your Murchison days rather than a separate destination. It’s East Africa’s largest natural mahogany forest and holds one of the longest-running chimpanzee research projects on the continent at the Budongo Conservation Field Station, which means the habituated community here – the Kaniyo Pabidi group – is exceptionally well known to its guides. It’s a quieter, less-visited alternative to Kibale, generally with fewer other trekking groups on the trail, and the proximity to Murchison makes it the natural choice if you don’t want to build a whole separate leg of your trip around chimps.
What a trek involves
Chimp trekking starts with a briefing at the park headquarters, typically at 7 or 8am, where rangers group you with trackers who head out ahead to locate the community using the previous evening’s nest sites and the calls that carry through the forest at dawn. The walk itself is generally gentler than gorilla trekking – Kibale and Budongo’s trails are better maintained and the terrain less severe than Bwindi’s slopes – though chimps move fast and forage over a wide territory, so a trek can still run from under an hour to three or four hours depending on where the community has ranged. Standard treks allow one hour with the chimps once found, with a similar minimum-distance rule to gorilla trekking, generally around seven to eight metres, to protect against disease transmission in both directions.
Habituation experience
Kibale also offers a chimpanzee habituation experience, a longer and more immersive alternative to the standard one-hour trek. Instead of a fixed hour, you join researchers and trackers for most of a day – often from before dawn, when the chimps wake in their nests, through the morning’s activity – watching a community that is still in the process of being habituated to human observation rather than one that’s fully settled. It’s a smaller group experience, generally capped at four people rather than the larger standard trekking groups, and it gives a genuinely different, slower, more observational view of chimp behaviour than the standard hour does.
Permits and pricing in 2026
A standard Kibale chimpanzee trekking permit costs USD 250 per person for foreign non-residents as of 2026, issued by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, with a discounted low-season rate of USD 200 in April, May and November matching the same quiet-season pattern as gorilla permits (source). Budongo’s permits are typically priced somewhat lower than Kibale’s and are booked separately through UWA’s Budongo office rather than through the Kibale headquarters, which is one of the practical reasons we handle this booking for guests rather than leaving it to be arranged on arrival. Either way, chimp permits are a fraction of a gorilla permit’s cost, which is exactly why so many travellers building a first Uganda itinerary add chimp trekking as their primate encounter before deciding whether gorilla trekking is worth the bigger spend on a return trip.
What to pack
The kit list is close to identical to gorilla trekking: sturdy closed shoes with real grip, long trousers and sleeves against nettles and biting insects, a light rain layer even in dry season, and enough water and snacks for a trek that could run several hours if the community has moved far overnight. Kibale and Budongo’s trails are generally less physically demanding than Bwindi’s, so the fitness bar is lower, but the forest floor can still be muddy and slippery after rain, and decent footwear matters just as much here as anywhere else on this list. A pair of binoculars is worth the extra weight here more than on a gorilla trek, since chimps spend a meaningful share of their time up in the canopy rather than at ground level, and a closer look at what’s happening thirty feet overhead often adds real detail to an otherwise distant sighting.
Guides, group size and the wider Kibale ecosystem
Trekking groups are capped at six visitors per habituated community in Kibale, smaller than gorilla trekking’s eight-person groups, which keeps the pace and noise level down enough that the chimps largely ignore the visitors once the group settles. Kibale’s guides are drawn heavily from the long-running research community around the park – several have spent years on the Kibale Chimpanzee Project studying these exact communities – and tend to offer a level of individual-recognition detail (which chimp is which, current rank disputes, recent births) that goes well beyond a standard wildlife briefing. Worth knowing too: Kibale isn’t only about chimps. The forest also holds eleven other primate species, more than almost anywhere else in East Africa, including large troops of red colobus and grey-cheeked mangabey that are often seen on the walk in regardless of how the chimp search itself goes, plus over 350 recorded bird species for anyone travelling with half an eye on birding.
Best time to go
Chimp trekking runs year-round, and unlike gorilla trekking the chimps’ wider daily range means weather has less effect on whether you’ll find them – they’re simply easier to follow on a clear, dry morning than after heavy overnight rain has washed out scent trails and softened the ground the trackers are reading. The two dry seasons, December to February and June to September, are the most popular and busiest booking windows; April, May and November bring the discounted permit rate along with quieter trails, at the cost of a wetter, muddier walk.
What you’ll actually see
Chimpanzees are considerably noisier and more visibly social than gorillas, and that’s a large part of what makes trekking them so rewarding. A community’s territorial calling – the rising, echoing pant-hoot that spreads from one individual through the whole group and can carry over a kilometre through the forest – is often the first sign trackers use to relocate a community in the morning, and hearing it build around you before you’ve even reached the group is one of the more startling moments of a Kibale or Budongo trek. Once found, chimps display a far wider range of visible behaviour in a given hour than gorillas typically do: grooming, play-wrestling between juveniles, occasional tool use such as stripping a stick to fish for termites, and the sharp, fast-moving social hierarchy plays that make clear this is a genuinely different kind of primate encounter from the calmer, more static gorilla hour.
Photography and behaviour to watch for
Chimps move considerably faster and less predictably than gorillas, both on the ground and up in the canopy, which makes them a harder photographic subject – a faster shutter speed and a willingness to miss a few shots is part of the deal. The forest interior at Kibale and Budongo is often darker than Bwindi’s more open slopes, so raising your ISO or shooting wide open helps more here than it does for gorilla trekking. Flash is prohibited during the encounter for the same disease-transmission and disturbance reasons as gorilla trekking. Beyond photography, it’s worth simply watching the group dynamics rather than only the nearest individual – a lot of what makes chimp trekking memorable happens at the edges of the group, in interactions between two or three individuals rather than in whatever the closest chimp to you is doing at any given moment.
Booking timeline and what we handle
Chimp permits are considerably easier to secure on short notice than gorilla permits – Kibale in particular issues a larger daily allocation across its several habituated communities – but the popular dry-season months still benefit from booking a few months ahead, and Budongo’s smaller, separately-managed allocation can sell out faster than its lower profile suggests. Once you confirm your dates, we secure the permits directly with UWA, match them to a Budongo add-on or a full Kibale itinerary depending on how your route is shaped, arrange the driver-guide and vehicle, and brief you on what to expect on trek morning. You pay one consolidated amount and the permit paperwork, park fees and logistics are handled in the background.
Combining it with Murchison Falls
Budongo’s proximity to Murchison Falls National Park – it borders the park’s southern boundary – makes it the easiest primate add-on to build into an existing Murchison itinerary, often as a half-day stop on the drive in or out rather than a separate overnight. Kibale takes more planning, since it sits several hours further southwest and is usually paired with Queen Elizabeth National Park rather than tacked onto Murchison directly, but it’s a natural link in a longer circuit if you’re also heading toward Bwindi for gorillas. We build both versions regularly and can lay out exactly how the drive times and lodge choices work for whichever combination fits your dates.
Chimp trekking versus gorilla trekking
The comparison comes up constantly when we’re planning a first Uganda trip, and there’s no single right answer – it depends on budget, time and what you actually want from the encounter. Chimp permits cost roughly a third of a gorilla permit, the trekking is physically easier, and the behaviour on display is more visibly active and social. Gorilla trekking costs more and asks more of your legs, but the encounter with a silverback at close range carries a weight and a rarity that chimp trekking, for all its charms, doesn’t quite match – there are simply far more chimpanzees left in the wild than mountain gorillas, and the sense of witnessing something genuinely endangered is more acute with gorillas. Plenty of travellers do both on the same trip, using Budongo’s proximity to Murchison to add chimps without much extra routing, then continuing south for gorillas separately; others treat chimp trekking as the standalone primate encounter for a first Uganda trip and save gorillas for a dedicated return visit.
Keep exploring
Read more about the park these treks connect to in our guide to Murchison Falls National Park, see our page on gorilla trekking if you’re weighing the two against each other, browse our Murchison Falls safaris – several already combine Budongo with the main park – see where to stay, or look through our Uganda destinations, including our Kibale Forest National Park guide. When you’re ready to plan, use the form below and a planner who has travelled these routes will reply within 24 hours with a tailored day-by-day itinerary and a clear, itemised quote.