When I first started solo traveling a decade ago, I never put goalposts or labels on my lifestyle. I just wanted to go to Thailand, and eventually I wanted to go to Belize. And at some point after that, I wanted a Euro summer in Croatia, Greece, Italy, and the South of France.
By 2019, I fell in love with solo traveling enough to leave everything behind to do it. At the time, I was a bartender in New York with no real future plans or serious ambitions. I knew I didn’t want to bartend forever, so, as scary a decision as it was, I quit my job and walked away from everything: my apartment, my job, my home of New York City, my life as I knew it. I traveled for six months straight with nothing but the bag on my back, an attempt to “get it out of my system,” and by the end of that trip, in total, I had been to 50 countries over my then three-years of solo traveling.
Over the years to come, I didn’t exactly get it out of my system as I had intended — but I became even more hooked. I’d road trip Madagascar, visit my great-grandmother’s town in southern Italy, and visit all seven world wonders. The country count continued ticking upward, and by the end of 2025, visiting 100 countries was right around the corner.
Feeling like it’s the wedding of solo travels, I knew I had to go big, as I always had done in the past. So I reached out to the people who supported me the most: my Instagram followers, a loving community of over 70,000 at the time. I asked, “Where should I go for the big 100?” with options including Ethiopia, a solo honeymoon in Fiji, a cultural venture to Cuba, or a gorilla trek in Rwanda. The answer was overwhelmingly Rwanda.
So, I got right to work on planning. Sure, I owed it to myself to have an epic celebration in country 100, but I also really owed it to my audience and wanted you all to feel like you’re a part of something just as special — because truly, you are. I wouldn’t have this life without you, and there are no words to describe how awesome it feels to be so supported by something I once believed was crazy.
So, if you’re looking for a trip of a lifetime in Uganda and Rwanda, let me be the first to tell you it’s absolutely one worth planning. I went with G Adventures, and here’s exactly how it went.
Pre-trip travel jitters … and a thousand things that went wrong
If you’ve ever looked at a travel influencer’s curated feed and gotten FOMO, let me lift the curtain on how much goes into creating those picture-perfect moments. What started off as smooth planning and sailing, and all of my ducks in a row, went awry quickly. We got back on track eventually, but just about everything that could’ve gone wrong did.
I am as type B as it gets when it comes to planning, often not even knowing where I’m sleeping the next night when I’m in another country. So, planning anything in advance is serious effort on my part, and country 100 planning began in December 2025 for a trip that wasn’t supposed to happen until May 2026.
I polled my audience in December, and when the overwhelming vote was to make Rwanda the big 100, I officially started researching how to make it happen. In January 2026, I went to IMM, an annual travel conference in New York City, and met with a lovely representative from G Adventures. I sat down at her table and showed her the results of the poll. “My audience wants me to go to Rwanda, and I want to go with G Adventures,” I said with my whole chest. She was game, and we continued the conversation after the conference.
I got in touch with the communications and social media teams at G Adventures, and I was so excited to have a company support me for such an epic adventure. We agreed on a departure date of May 23, booked it, and got to work on planning.
I strategically planned all of my early 2026 travels around this trip. At the time of IMM, I had visited 92 countries. The G Adventures trip began in Uganda before heading to Rwanda, meaning Uganda would have to be country 99, and to make good with my audience, Rwanda would be 100. This meant I had to visit 6 countries to get to 98 before the trip, so I country-hopped through the Middle East, spending time in Muscat, eating my way through Lebanon, and extending a layover in Qatar. I eventually headed over to the Balkans, where a long weekend in Montenegro would bring me to 98 countries. That travel jaunt lasted me until March, and with Uganda and Rwanda being planned for May, I officially was forbidden from traveling anywhere new until the G Adventures trip.
Come May, I had a castle-fueled road trip through Italy which would end in Milan on May 22, the day I would board my flight to Uganda. However, in mid-May, while in Italy, I got news of an ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Living in a serious level of denial. I thought, “Oh, that sucks!” and just assumed the trip was still happening. But by May 19, only three short days prior to traveling, the outbreak had gotten so bad that the U.S. had officially put a ban on anyone who had entered Uganda from coming back without transferring through Washington D.C. airport for additional screening. Basically, the situation was getting ugly fast, and raised many questions for me. Sure, I was concerned about my safety, but I was moreso concerned with the ethics of promoting a destination that was in crisis, just for the sake of saying I visited 100 countries. Is now really the right time?
From a spa in Italy, I called G Adventures to hash it out. We agreed to put the trip on ice, a heartbreaking choice but one that was absolutely right at the time. G Adventures was so supportive that they actually offered to reroute my trip to a new destination at the eleventh hour. and we seriously considered a pivot to Uzbekistan. But at the end of the day, I wanted the gorilla trek trip I had dreamed of with my audience, so we simply decided to wait.
Finally getting there
We rescheduled the trip to July, and while it wasn’t strategic, I realized I would be heading into my 100th country, Rwanda, on my birthday. This definitely felt like then best case scenario in terms of rescheduling. The situation, in terms of the U.S. and its travel restrictions coming back from Uganda, hadn’t changed much, but ebola itself in the country seemed to have settled. So, come July, only about a week before the trip was planned, G Adventures and I jumped on a call and agreed, as long as I felt safe — which I very much did — that I should still go.
So I did.
G Adventures makes pre-travel seamless with their “Good to go” checklist. Travel insurance? Check. Flights booked with information loaded in the G Adventures system? Check. They also have an app, which I highly recommend downloading before your trip with them, that gives you a full day-by-day breakdown of what you’ll be doing, estimated travel times, and anything and everything that’s included. Plus, there’s a chat section so you can connect with fellow travelers prior to the trip.
I left New York on July 12 via Brussels Airlines and landed in Entebbe, Uganda late at night on July 13. I woke up early for breakfast and a woman approached me in the dining area of the hotel.
“Are you here for the G Adventures trip?” she asked.
“Yes! I’m Kaitlyn,” I said. “Are you with my group?”
She told me we were the group. Everyone else dropped out because of fears over ebola. I immediately liked her, thinking she must’ve had similar guts to me if she still chose to travel despite the warnings. What was interesting was, aside from some pre-screening at the airport in Uganda (think early Covid days of filling out a form saying you have no symptoms, and a quick douse of hand sanitizer), no one in the country seemed particularly concerned with ebola. I asked someone if they felt it had affected tourism, and they said it absolutely did, but that there were only 20 cases in Uganda since May, with the situation being quite stable. Like Lebanon, it reminded me how heavily fear-mongered the news can lean when oftentimes, the situation on the ground is much less pressing.
Our trip began with one of the longest travel days of the entire bout, roughly six hours in the car. We stopped at a gas station and I got a vegetable samosa simply for the thrill of trying something. It was full of bright green veggies and a pretty solid gas station bite. We finally arrived to our accommodation in Fort Portal, a spacious lodge with a hiking trail onsite and a cozy lounge with a fireplace. My newfound friend and I decided to trek to look for wildlife, and when we didn’t have much luck, we headed to the lounge where I got a glass of wine and she got a beer.
The owner of the property came by and insisted we tried banana schnapps, something that hardly took the twist of an arm, before we headed to dinner and had a pumpkin soup that lives in the books as the best I’ve ever had. Yes, really. It was just so comforting after a long day of travel and a nice settle-in meal for what was bound to be an epic adventure.
The meat of the trip
The majority of my G Adventures trip would be in Uganda, where all of the real fun was had. The highlight was visiting 100 countries, but Uganda, country 99, stole my heart in ways I didn’t expect, and quickly wound up in the ranks as one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited.
We did so many fun things. On our first proper day, we headed to the Bigodi Community to meet and hang with locals. Highlights included grinding my own coffee while singing a very catchy tune that would become a soundtrack for the rest of the trip (“Poundiiiiing, pounding, POUNDING!” If only you could hear the melody), and meeting a designated “banana man” who made banana gin so potent that I couldn’t help but support and buy a bottle — 10 bucks well spent. Then there was also a tree with large hanging jackfruit, where a woman macheted a piece right off and cut it fresh for us to try. While eating freshly cut Ugandan jackfruit, a small group of pigs came up and started eating the scraps around us. It was in this moment I took a minute to pause and reflect, being thankful for trusting my gut and still going on the trip.
The next day, the wildlife adventures began at Kibale National Park for a chimpanzee trek. G Adventures makes it very clear in the itinerary that chimpanzee viewings are not guaranteed, but our designated trekkers told us we would absolutely see them. They proved themselves to be correct when only 30 minutes of hiking through a dense forest I heard what can best be described as piercing screaming. We followed the sound and there they were — chimpanzees just chilling, and screaming, in the jungle. They had no fear of humans and walked right past us, and when they saw a small black and white colobus monkey, I learned chimps kill monkeys and eat them, because I saw this happen with my very eyes. The alpha male showed off his prized killing by waving and flinging it around, something that sounds gnarly to witness but was an absolute pinch-me moment highlight from the trip. I texted my friend afterward and told her what happened, and she said, “Nature is metal.”
While gorillas are the main event of the trip — and don’t worry, we’ll get there — I was reminded that unplanned and overlooked-on-paper experiences are just as worthy. A game drive through Queen Elizabeth National Park was something I admittedly wasn’t particularly excited about, which sounds about as spoiled as it gets. I’ve done game drives in Kenya’s Lake Nakuru and saw plenty of elephants in Botswana’s Chobe National Park, and had, at some point. felt that once you’ve done a game drive once, you don’t really need to do it again. Uganda proved me wrong. The game drive was split into two segments — first, a night drive, where we saw lions, and had an absolutely majestic experience with two giant elephants, a memory that is stamped in my head rent-free.
The next day, we headed out early to see more animals and I saw my very first leopard, which officially marked me having seen the Big 5. It was an absolutely magical part of the trip.
Gorilla trekking — the main event
We reached our lodge in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, where our CEO, Chief Experience Officer, told us sometimes gorillas can be spotted from the lodge itself. Luck wouldn’t have it that we’d see them there, but luck certainly found us in various other forms.
We arrived to the lodge on July 18. and while driving there, we stopped at a grocery store. They had a pink cake in a display case, and with my birthday being two days away, my travel buddy and I felt it was only right to buy it. She was really the one who pushed me in a loving way — I thought, “Who is going to eat this giant cake?” and she insisted I had to get it for my birthday. So, I asked the woman behind the counter to write “Happy Birthday No Man Nomad,” and while waiting for her to pipe the icing, I bought candles, birthday hats, and a purple birthday sash.
When we pulled up to the lodge, a group of local women started singing and dancing for us, and the power of their voices sent a chill down my spine. The employees then brought out my cake and they sang me happy birthday, teaching me that in Uganda, you slowly lower the knife to cut the cake as they count to my new age. I’m a cancer, so I’m as emotional as they come, and you better believe I cried a lot of happy tears that day. Gorillas, despite being the highlight, weren’t even on my mind. I was satiated in so many other ways.
But of course, gorillas were still happening. On July 19, my last day as a 35-year old, I woke up at 5 a.m. to get ready for the big bucket list tick: gorilla trekking! I painted sparkly green eyeshadow, chugged a coffee, and tried to mentally prepare myself as best as I could.
There was a 15-minute briefing before we got separated into groups of eight, the maximum allowed per gorilla family. I ended up assigned to the Nshongi family, and I loved that the gorillas were given names. We were told the treks can take upward of nine hours, so I brought a lunch with me provided by my hotel.
Earlier that morning, gorilla trekkers went out into the lush forest to find each gorilla family, providing somewhat of a GPS location on where they are, with the strong caveat that they’re mobile animals and can move. Despite this information, we had no idea how long our trek would be. I decided to hire a porter to help me carry my bags, assuming it would take hours and be strenuous.
So, you can imagine my surprise when our trek began, and exactly seven minutes in, my porter said, “Look!” Look at what? I assumed some type of cool animal or bug, but as I looked in the direction she pointed at and saw trees ruffling, I could see a giant black furry body amidst them. “A gorilla?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.
And just like that, we had already found the family. We were all completely shocked at the lack of effort it took. My two liters of water sat untouched, my banana for lunch still totally ripe in my bag. I put on my green tutu, since you have to wear green, khaki, and other neutral colors for the trek, but also since I simply needed to wear a tutu for this. big moment, and when I turned the corner, I saw a giant gorilla just staring at me.
There are really no words to put into how incredible it is to see gorillas in their natural habitat. Immediately, I understood the hype. I understood why everyone who has gone gorilla trekking says it’s a top-tier travel moment for them. It had the same effect on me.
We spent one hour with the gorillas, just witnessing them, taking plenty of photos, but attempting to live off-screen with them, too. None were aggressive, not even the giant silverback, and a baby gorilla tried to play tough guy and pound its chest, which was the highlight of my viewing. My dog, Bowie, died last July, and that morning, I spoke to him. I said, “Hey buddy, can you send me a sign today? I really miss you.” I think grief can make it difficult to celebrate big moments without some type of guilt, knowing that no matter how cool life may be, just isn’t the. same when someone you love has left you. But Bowie, as always, delivered. This time, in the form of a gorilla finding the one sun spot, laying on his back, and sprawling his legs, the same way Bowie did every morning while I drank my coffee. It brought me to tears.
After the trek, our guide confirmed he had never experienced a gorilla sighting that quickly. Another lucky venture in a trip that was filled with shining moments.
Entering my 100th country, Rwanda
Can you believe all of that happened and I hadn’t even entered country 100 yet?The day after gorilla trekking, it was time for another early wakeup call — this time, to finally address the real point of the trip — entering my 100th country. Because of the rescheduled trip, this would happen on my 36th birthday, so I grabbed that grocery store purple sash and marked it as the first time I’d go through immigration wearing such a thing. With the East African visa already in my passport, immigration was smooth, and when I heard that stamp get inked into my passport, it wound up being another tearful moment for me. On paper, it’s very cool to say I’ve been to 100 countries, but capturing the moment in real time, knowing with all of the trials and tribulations both life and this roller coaster of a career has thrown at me, I felt incredibly proud to be in Rwanda that day.
Our first stop in Rwanda was the Genocide Memorial, a brutally painful reminder of identity erasure. The genocide of the Tutsis was 100 days long and wiped out one million people, with extreme sexual violence and horrific slaughtering of children. This would be another tearful moment of the trip, but the only sad one I had. And though it’s a painful visit, it’s a mandatory one.
The mood would lighten at the Nyamirambo Women’s Center, a G for Good moment where we visited a nonprofit that supports women being incorporated into the work place after situations of gender-based violence. We ate a hearty vegetarian lunch of stewed beans, a peanut and spinach dish, and homemade chili sauce. It was my favorite meal of the trip — yes, even beating my gas station samosa.
At the women’s center, visitors have the option to purchase clothes, including custom-made ones. I didn’t have time for the three-day waiting period of a custom set being made, but I did score an awesome top that looks like the Queen of Hearts.
Later that day, I headed to a rooftop restaurant for a proper 36-year old birthday lunch of chicken nuggets and fries. I was feeding my inner child literally. and figuratively, and the heart wants what it wants after all.
Overall and bottom line
There were curveballs along the way, but everything about this trip delivered. On the content side of things, sure, there was planning involved, because a job is a job. But on the travel side of things, G Adventures made it seamless from start to finish. I wasn’t particularly “special” in the offer to reschedule my trip, as this was something they offered al travelers because of the situation. It was my first trip with G Adventures and I can confidently say it was the first of many. I’ve traveled with a handful of tour companies and can confirm they’re not all created equally. But the access to local life, including many homemade meals, a truly adventurous itinerary that still left space for breathing room to explore on our own, and a seamless trek for both gorillas and chimpanzees made my 100th country trip one for the books.
If gorilla trekking is on your radar, I highly recommend booking the exact trip I took. You’ll see gorillas, but you’ll also be bound for one of the most epic experiences of your life — whether it’s your first country or your hundredth.
DISCLAIMER: I might make a small commission from some of the links throughout this article, but the price is the same for you. This helps keep my business running so I can continue to provide free travel tips!
DISCLAIMER II: G Adventures sponsored my Uganda and Rwanda trip.
