Kanungu District in southwestern Uganda holds two of the country’s best known wildlife areas, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth, and almost nothing else that is set up for visitors. The district’s own tourism inventory lists a handful of other sites, most of them marked as potential rather than working. This page covers three of them plainly, including one that should not be on any itinerary at all.
Ngoto Swamp Tours and the Kirima Chimpanzee Habituation Plan
Ngoto sits in Kirima sub county, on the northern side of the district, and it is the site with the clearest future. The wildlife authority has held events there, the Diocese of Kinkizi has put its weight behind a tourism hub at Ngoto, and the plan being pushed is chimpanzee habituation on community and church land outside Bwindi, with a lodge attached.
What exists on the ground today is a swamp, a community, and a proposal. Chimpanzees do move through the forest patches in this part of Kanungu and the Bwindi population is genuinely distinct, which is why the habituation idea has traction. Habituation takes years of daily contact before a group tolerates visitors, so nobody should read the announcements as an activity you can book.
If someone offers you chimpanzee tracking at Ngoto, ask what is actually habituated and who issues the permit. Our chimpanzee tracking guide sets out where tracking is running under a proper permit system in Uganda, which for now is elsewhere.
The Kanungu Hydroelectric Station on the Ishasha River
The station most often called the Ishasha scheme, and formally the Kanungu station, is a run of river hydroelectric plant rated at about six and a half megawatts. It sits in Kanyantorogo sub county, roughly thirty four kilometres by road from Kanungu town, built and still run by a Sri Lankan owned company.
Its weir sits only about five hundred metres below the Bwindi park boundary. Water runs from there through a penstock of a little over a kilometre to twin turbines downstream, working a head of roughly ninety metres. A small continuous flow is released between the weir and the tailrace so river fish are not stranded, which explains a stretch of river that looks low.
Be clear about what this is: a working industrial installation on private lease, with no visitor centre, no tour and no reason to expect access. You will drive past it on the Kanyantorogo road and that is the whole of the experience. It belongs on this page because the district’s attraction lists carry it, not because anybody should plan a trip around it.
The Kanungu Church Fire at Nyabugoto: Why It Is Not a Tour
In the March of the year two thousand, several hundred members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in a fire inside a church building at Nyabugoto, near Kanungu town. The building had been boarded shut. In the days that followed, investigators found mass graves at other properties connected to the movement, at Buhunga, at a farm near Rugazi and elsewhere, where the dead had been killed by other means.
The movement had grown through the nineteen nineties around Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere, on the strength of claimed visions and a prophesied end of the world. When the prophesied date passed and nothing happened, members are believed to have begun asking for their property back. What was first reported as a mass suicide was later investigated as mass killing.
Almost nothing about it is settled. The official death toll of over nine hundred is disputed by the anthropologist Richard Vokes, whose study of the movement argues that some of the bodies found in pits belong to an earlier malaria epidemic and were never part of this event. The commission of inquiry never met. No one has been prosecuted. Kibweteere was never found.
There is nothing at the site. The land is a tea plantation now, roughly fifty acres of it, and there is no marked grave, no monument and no interpretation. Ugandan reporting on the anniversaries makes the same point each time: the dead are unnamed and the ground is unmarked, and local leaders have repeatedly asked the government to build a proper national memorial there. That has not happened.
Our position is that this should not be sold as an attraction, and we will not write it as one. A memorial site invites visitors; this is a working farm where hundreds of unidentified people died and were buried without ceremony, among neighbours and relatives who still live in the district. Turning up to look at a tea field, with a camera, adds nothing to anyone’s grasp of what happened and takes something from the people who live there. The name it is commonly given, after the man accused rather than the people who died, is itself part of the problem.
If the history is what you want, read it. Vokes’s book on the movement is the serious account, and Ugandan newspaper archives carry the investigative reporting. If you want to visit a place in Uganda where mass killing is memorialised properly, with survivors, records and a purpose, our memorial tours guide covers Barlonyo, the Luwero mausoleums and the Mengo cells. Should Kanungu ever build the memorial its leaders are asking for, that changes, and it should be visited then.
What Else the District Lists for Future Trips
Kanungu’s tourism inventory names several more sites with no published detail behind them. We have not been able to verify what is at any of them, and we are not going to describe places we cannot confirm.
Our tea tour guide covers how factory visits work in Uganda if Kayonza is the part of this list you want to act on.
Kanungu Safari Routes Beside Bwindi and Ishasha
Nearly everyone who reaches this district comes for gorillas or for the tree climbing lions, and these sites sit between those two. Buhoma, the northern gorilla trailhead, is in Kanungu. So is Kihihi, the airstrip town, and so is the Ishasha gate.
That geography is the honest case for any of these stops: they are things to look at on a driving day you are already spending in the district, not reasons to come. The Bwindi guide covers the gorilla sectors and the Queen Elizabeth guide covers Ishasha.
Getting Around Kanungu District on a Southwest Trip
Kanungu town is the district centre. Roads run north to Kihihi and Ishasha, east toward Rukungiri, and south into the Bwindi sectors. Most are murram and several are steep.
Visiting Kanungu’s Undeveloped Sites on a Tour
None of the sites on this page has a gate, a guide roster or a tariff. That changes how you should behave at all of them.
Ask permission locally before walking onto land. Almost everything here is farmed, owned or church held. Take a guide from the nearest village rather than finding your own way, agree what you are paying before you set off, and accept being turned away without arguing.
Ask before photographing people, and do not photograph homes, graves or places of worship at all unless someone with standing there says yes. In a district carrying the history Kanungu carries, a camera is not a neutral object.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I visit the Kanungu massacre site? There is nothing to visit. The land is a tea plantation, there is no marked grave, no monument and no interpretation, and no one is there to explain anything. We do not recommend going and no reputable operator should be selling it.
Is chimpanzee tracking available at Ngoto swamp? Not at present. Habituation has been proposed and promoted, but no habituated group and no permit system exists there yet. Anyone selling it today is selling a plan.
Can I tour the hydroelectric station on the Ishasha River? No. It is a privately operated industrial site with no visitor provision. You can see it from the public road and that is all.
What does it cost to visit these sites? Nothing is published because none of them has a tariff. Where a local guide walks you somewhere, agree a fee with them in advance, in Ugandan shillings, and expect it to be small. Do not pay anyone who approaches your vehicle claiming to control access.
Is Kanungu worth building a day into? Only as part of a Bwindi or Ishasha trip. As a standalone destination the district does not yet have the infrastructure, and the honest advice is to spend the day on gorillas, on the Ishasha plains or on a tea estate instead.
When is the best time to travel these roads? The drier stretches, roughly June to August and December to February. Kanungu’s murram roads and steep gradients are a different proposition in the long rains.
Ugandan operators run gorilla and Ishasha itineraries that pass through all of this country, and one enquiry through this site reaches the ones who actually drive these roads. They quote you direct: we take no booking, handle no payment, and charge you nothing.