CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
180 km one way from Kabale - plan on about 3 h 38 of riding. The stops in between: Lake Bunyonyi and Kisoro. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 2,200 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Water arrives beside the road and stays for 15 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go — slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did.
For about 97 km this is Uganda Kigezi Highlands Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it. Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast.
Kabale is a hill town at about nineteen hundred metres in the far south-west of Uganda, and the first thing you notice is how cool it is. After the heat of Kampala and the lowlands, evenings here call for a jumper. The surrounding countryside, known as Kigezi, is a tight patchwork of terraces, so steep and so carefully cultivated that early colonial visitors compared it to Switzerland, and the nickname has stuck. Potatoes, sorghum, beans and cabbages are grown on slopes that look too steep to stand on.
Read the complete Kabale write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kabale is where the day begins. Next is Lake Bunyonyi.
Bunyonyi means place of little birds, and the name is accurate: kingfishers, herons and cormorants work the water, and the hills around ring with birdsong in the early morning. The lake lies in the Kigezi highlands of south-western Uganda, close to the Rwandan border, at nearly two thousand metres, and it is one of the deepest lakes in Africa. Its shore is a tangle of narrow arms and bays, with some two dozen islands scattered across the surface, and green terraced hills drop right down to the water on every side.
Read the complete Lake Bunyonyi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lake Bunyonyi comes up about 13 km into the recorded legs. Next is Kisoro.
Kisoro sits in the far south-west corner of Uganda, in a pocket between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the first thing you notice is the row of volcanoes. Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabinyo stand on the skyline like a set of upturned bowls, their slopes green and their summits often hidden in cloud. They are part of the Virunga range, a chain of volcanoes that straddles three countries, and the town sits at the foot of them, on a high plateau where the air is cool and the land is cultivated to the last metre.
Read the complete Kisoro write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 83 km into the recorded legs you reach Kisoro. Next is Bwindi.
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest earns its name. It is a dense, ancient rainforest draped over steep ridges and deep ravines in south-western Uganda, rising from about a thousand metres to over two thousand, and it is one of the oldest and richest forests in Africa, a refuge that survived the ice ages when other forests shrank. Mist hangs in the valleys until mid-morning, and the sound is a constant chorus of birds, insects and distant water. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in the 1990s, and it holds a little under half of all the mountain gorillas left in the world.
Read the complete Bwindi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Bwindi closes the day.
Kabale → Lake Bunyonyi is 13 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Lake Bunyonyi → Kisoro is 70 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kisoro → Bwindi is 97 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.