We are a ground operator. Everything you book with us is delivered by our own staff in our own vehicles, under a Uganda Tourism Board licence held in our own name. We do not sell Kenya, we do not sell Tanzania, and we have turned down more business than we have taken because of it.
Pearl Trails was started by a Kibale guide and a Kampala bookkeeper who were tired of watching commission leave the country.
In 2009 the choice for a visitor was a foreign agency with a local subcontractor, or nothing. We thought there was room for a Ugandan company that answered its own telephone.
Ronald Kaggwa had been guiding in Kibale for six years and Grace Akello had spent four keeping the books for a lodge group that never paid its drivers on time. They bought a fifteen-year-old Land Cruiser between them, borrowed a second from Grace's brother for the busy weeks, and ran their first season on eleven bookings, nine of which came from a single birding forum.
The company has grown by roughly one vehicle every two years since, which is deliberate. A sixth Land Cruiser only arrives when the fifth is busy enough to justify a full-time driver-guide on salary rather than on call.
What has not changed is where the money goes. Permits are bought at the counter and passed on at cost. Porters are hired from the community association at Bwindi rather than from whoever is standing at the gate. Lodges are paid on thirty days, in full, which is the reason the good ones hold rooms for us in September.
We publish driving distances because we got tired of apologising for other people's brochures. A day described as a scenic transfer is a seven-hour day, and a guest who knows that at booking is a guest who enjoys it.
Everything we sell happens inside one country, and there are only so many roads. After seventeen seasons we know which culvert washes out in April, which warden allocates the short families first, and which lodge kitchen will still cook at ten at night when a trek runs long.
Nine full-time staff, four of them driver-guides. Nobody on this page is a stock photograph and nobody is subcontracted.
Ronald Kaggwa
Founder & lead guide
Twenty-three years guiding, UWA-certified for birds and mammals, and the reason the vehicle stops for a bee-eater. Runs the Bwindi and Kibale departures himself.
Grace Akello
Founder & operations
Holds the permit calendar, the lodge contracts and the accounts. If your dates are impossible she will be the one to say so, usually within the hour.
Sarah Nabirye
Primates & forest
Eleven years on the Kanyanchu trails and a research assistant on the Kibale monkey project before that. Leads the chimpanzee habituation days.
Moses Tumusiime
Rwenzori & high routes
Bakonzo, born at Ibanda, and on the Central Circuit since 2012. Forty-one summits of Margherita and a very low tolerance for the wrong boots.
Ask any operator for these four documents. A serious one will send them before you have finished the sentence.
Tourism is the reason the gorilla population has doubled since the 1980s. It is worth knowing exactly how that works, and what we add on top.
Eight hundred dollars goes to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, funding ranger salaries, veterinary teams and the anti-poaching patrols that walk Bwindi every day of the year.
Twenty per cent of park entry revenue is returned by law to the parishes bordering the park, and ten dollars of every gorilla permit goes to a dedicated community fund.
We add twenty-five dollars per guest per trip to the Bwindi parish fund, and we publish the annual total in our accounts. Last season it came to eleven thousand dollars.
Porters, trackers, canoe paddlers at Mabamba and the Batwa guides are paid the association rate or better, in cash, on the day, whatever the party size.
The years that changed how the company works.
One borrowed Land Cruiser, a desk in a shared office on Bombo Road, and a first season built almost entirely on birding referrals.
A second-hand extended Land Cruiser bought outright rather than financed, and the decision to put driver-guides on salary rather than on daily hire.
Out of the shared desk and into a house in Kamwokya with a yard big enough to service and load the vehicles ourselves.
Fourteen months without a guest. We kept all nine staff on part pay, serviced everything twice, and came back with every guide still here.
A formal partnership with Rwenzori Mountaineering Services and a dedicated high-altitude guide, after five years of running the circuit occasionally.
Around four hundred and twenty guests a season, roughly a third of them returning or referred, and still one country.
Who is driving, what the vehicle is, whether the permit is bought, what happens if the trek is six hours. Every one of those has an answer and you should have it before you pay a deposit.