The silverback

We ascend on steep and muddy roads, rising into the twilight mist of the lush volcanic jungle, the truck undulating up the terraced mountainside. Above us hangs Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. That's where the gorillas are.

This densely populated area jeopardises the very existence of the gorillas. One of their greatest threats is destruction of their forest habitat through subsistence farming, like the tiers of green beans and cabbage we see from village to rural village. Bwindi is one of the parks that have been established as a preserve for the apes – there are only 700 or so left – and where the farmlands end we enter.

Nine gorilla families have been habituated to humans. Eight of us are tracking the Busingye family, led by four guides. The lead guide briefs us on a few things. Don't eat in front of them; they'll want some, and will come take it. Move gently. What to do in case they charge. Charge? What I will do is shit my pants. These are big, strong, wild animals. But charging is a bluff, just to say, "back off." Correct protocol is to fall on the ground as though you're injured. Like fainting. Sounds instinctive enough.

The hike begins at 2500 metres. Olympic distance runners train at this altitude. After a long march on a narrow trail fording puddles of mud over stones awkwardly spattered across the muck, we begin the climb up the mountainside. The forest is dense, but the guides cut through the foliage with these razor hand sickles that slice through branches like linguine.

Down a steep ravine we descend. At my habitual sea level I'm reasonably fit but in this thinner atmosphere I struggle to keep the pace. Up the other side of the hill through tangled wet vines I plant my walking stick into the slick humus, dragging myself up the vertical face with burning lungs, slipping on the clay and begging the guide to let me take a break. The porter in front of me hears and reaches down. He grabs my hand in an arm wrestle grip and hauls me up into the green cloud. He doesn't let me go, and we keep going up, up, up. It's like the strong hand of God. I am so grateful.

I look up. We've all stopped. Everyone is tightly assembled in a small clearing. "The gorillas are there," the lead guide indicates to one side with a nod. "Leave everything here but your cameras."

The apes are eating and resting, so they are dispersed across the hillside. We inch around a muddy ridge and encounter a female nestled in the bushes, watching us timidly through a window of leaves. She seems a bit apprehensive as we whisper to each other and excitedly snap shot after shot of the docile, gentle creature. She quietly abides us, but seems as if she'd rather we move on, and after a time we do – the guide tells us that the family's alpha male, the big silverback, is nearby.

Ducking through grasping branches we come across the head male lounging on his back, scratching his arse. It's not exactly the image of the powerful giant ape of David Attenborough fame. One of the guides gets too close trying to clear the view for our cameras, invading the space of the silverback, and he rolls up onto all fours and charges forward a few knuckle-steps. He rears upright with teeth bared like stalactites in a blood red cave, throws apart titanic black arms, and roars with a devastating ferocity that flattens trees and curdles mud. Each of us goes utterly to water, collapsing like our spines have been plucked out our heads and cowering like subdued monkeys. When the blast passes over us and we meekly emerge from the shielding of our arms, the silverback has returned to scratching himself. The four guides remain unmoved through the event. "Don't worry," one of them says blithely. "Just take pictures."

Just take pictures. Sure. Every one of us missed the money shot.

Looking for lions

The top of the Land Cruiser pops up and the six of us peer out like meerkats at the bok on the grassy savannah. This is the best place to look for lions. They prey on the herds of bok here.

These tough old safari Land Cruisers are exceptional vehicles, purpose-built for the African terrain. Six of us in the back of this diesel engine on wheels have been bounced across potholes on the pink scar of red clay roads that rive the jungle green, hauled up into the volcanic mountains where the soil changes colour to a richly fertile muddy chocolate as black as the skin of the farmers who work it, and ratcheted back down into the expanses of sallow grassland. Some stretches on the road have been eight hours long. It's not a trip for those prone to car sickness, particularly with the diesel fumes in the cabin. So it's nice to periscope ourselves out the top of the vehicle and breathe the fresh air.

"Oh, look at this!" we shout and point and chatter like monkeys when we abruptly uncover a large, curved-horned waterbuck behind a clump of brush barely three metres away. We spook the shy creature with our excited cries and it bolts, leaving us holding cameras half-cocked and looking like stunned children left out of the game.

We blow a great shot. "We are such humans!" Magda laments comically, and we concur to shut up. It's our first lesson of the day.

The truck joins a small convoy of three other vehicles and we leapfrog between sighting wild boar and elephants. But the real quarry today is the lions. By nature furtive creatures, they're not easy to spot. Six heads pan and sweep, watching for indications like scattering bok, but we come up with nothing. The drivers work together, from time to time stopping and conferring in Lugandan, then spreading out in a net to scour the archipelago of dense green thickets dotting the savannah. Suddenly the vehicles congregate. One of the guides has spotted a pride lying in the long grass with a freshly killed water buffalo. Found them!

We surround and close in around a particular bush like cats on a kill, clustering in a tight group, jockeying for vantage, but we can't get any closer than about 200 metres – it isn't permitted to go off-road in the national park (rangers will impose a US$100 fine, a significant penalty on Ugandan wages).

There are eight vehicles, now, with people peering out roofs through binoculars or standing on top with telephoto lenses.

"There! There's one!"

"Where?"

Inadequate descriptions of coordinates follow, referencing bushes and trees... no, not that bush... the sort of triangular-shaped one... in line with that tree... to the right of the tall one.... And then there is the swish of a tail. There's a head, with the outline of the ears. A lion gets up and prowls around the bush and we fire off some shots, straining over the distance.

One tiny lion in the expansive landscape. It's as good as the humans today are going to get.

The chimpanzees of Kibale Forest

Harriet blazes a trail through the forest, and we follow as close as we can. "Let me know if I'm walking too fast," our guide says, "and I'll slow down." But we have it easy. The morning group had to chase the chimpanzees, who were feeding and on the move, at near full pelt. Inge, who competes in triathlons, later said that after several hours she didn't think she could make it.

But the apes tired themselves out, too, and this afternoon they are resting. I was ready for a bit of a run, but as we move from an open patch to a copse of trees we are suddenly and unexpectedly upon one barely three metres away. It seems to me that we are too close, but the ape lolls in the grass on his back and regards us with complete nonchalance. He seems so gentle that I want to touch him. Magda echoes my thoughts: "I want to touch him," she says. Of course, the moment any of us encroached on his personal space we would see just how much a wild animal he is. A chimpanzee is four times as powerful as an adult human, and has fearsome teeth – as is evident when the great ape yawns.

We move on and find the alpha male grooming his first lieutenant. Grooming between males forms bonds which are vital for maintaining troupe hierarchy, as one male alone can not maintain dominance without key backers. The two trade positions, groom some more. Then they lay down and doze in the quiet forest.

The peace is sharply broken when out of sight in the trees a chimp gripes and, with an unsettling volume, the two in front of us scream and hoot in response. Apparently, one of their senior males was complaining that another was giving him grief, and the two bosses were saying, "leave him alone! If we have to get up there's going to be trouble!" A little while later a junior chimp makes a similar sound and the apes below do nothing. Chimpanzees social politics.

Neighbouring chimp communities are often hostile to one another. Chimpanzees are the only animal apart from humans to declare war on a neighbour and take over territory. The researchers in Kibale have watched it happen. It is brutal. If they trap a male from another group they will beat him with sticks to kill him. When his body is inert, a nominated member from the community will act as doctor, listening for a heartbeat. If he indicates the victim is still alive, they continue beating him. Harriet says she has seen the alpha male finish off the wounded by cracking his ribs and jumping on him so that the bones pierce the organs. Chimpanzees are ruthless.

They are naturally fearful of people, but this group is habituated to humans. In fact, they are habituated specifically to black people in khaki greens (the researchers) and to white people (the tourists). They remain wary of local villagers. In fact, there could be something of a symbiotic relationship here. These chimps may consider us recruits to dissuade attacks from competitors. Neighbouring chimpanzee communities appear to wonder, "who are these strange upright chimpanzee mercenaries?"

The Ugandan village people

"Howareyou? Howareyou?"

The children chant whenever the Land Cruiser full of mzungu bounces past them. They scream and run joyfully to the roadside, waving. "Helloooo!" It has become a game for us to spot them and wave back. No one ever tires of it.

People are everywhere. Everywhere. There is never a stretch of road, no matter how rural, that isn't flanked by a trail of villagers or by bicycles laden broad with bundles of sticks for firewood. The adults stare at us, all of them, not in impertinence but passive novelty.

We pass markets with chickens stacked in cages and meat hanging unrefrigerated in the open air. It is freshly slaughtered, and tomorrow there will be a new kill. Women in brightly patterned layers sit before enormous bunches of green bananas for making matoke, a starchy savoury mash, or carry away broad bowls of sweet yellow bananas on their heads.

On the Sunday we see village women in their best dresses and beautiful jewellery going to church. These are farmers and the rural poor, but they are not pitiful. Nor are they out of touch with the modern world; just as I slip into a stereotyped perception, someone pulls out a mobile phone. Even in these remote villages are signs on huts selling airtime with Ugandan telcos.

Tour groups

It's a gamble with tour groups. You can end up stuck for days on end with whingers who complain that the food is better at home and the hotels are dirty, or endless orators missing their mobile phones who have to keep their heads aloft with jabbering mouths lest they collapse from the vacuum therein.

Of course, you don't have to do a tour. Uganda can be travelled independently, but it takes time, patience and pluck. Once you get out of Kampala, finding guides requires research or local knowledge, and accommodation in villages can be an eye-opening experience in poverty and sanitation. So for most travellers, including the independent-minded Solonaut, a tour group is wise. The Association of Ugandan Tour Operators credits umpteen dozen, and after researching opinions and comparing costs I settled on Gorilla Tours.

The upside of tour groups, of course, is the best part of travel: meeting people and, even more, befriending them. I've been lucky with my tour groups around the world, and lucky again in Uganda. I've hooked up with four Dutch and a Pole (my second time of this unlikely combination; and what is with all the Dutchmen everywhere? We repeatedly run into them; it's become a standing joke). They're good spirits. We have a lot of laughs.

Kampala by boda-boda

The real way to see Kampala is from the back of a boda-boda. I came intending to do just this, and was lucky to find Walter's Boda-boda Tours rather than gambling with any random rider off the street. Walter runs a professional local outfit with about fifteen trained staff, providing passengers with helmets and safe riders who "obey the road rules" (there are road rules?)

One of Walter's senior riders, Michael, collects me at my hotel. He will in time reveal himself to be highly knowledgeable. Aboard his motorcycle we first climb Kololo Hill to where the embassies and the homes of ambassadors and dignitaries are located. Everywhere in Kampala there are people and traffic, except here. The only locals seen walking the paved roads among the manicured lawns are gardeners, walkers of dogs, and dogs. "This is how the wealthy live in Kampala," he says. "To live in those houses you would have to pay three thousand US dollars a month!" I respond instinctively with "wow" and then immediately realise that's the average rent in Sydney.

We descend the hill into the slum of Kamocha. Rolling dirt hummocks plough through corrugated iron shacks, and women cook on charcoal fire pits between puddles of fetid water. This is where all the people are. Hundreds of them. But this is just a fifth of the slum's population, Michael tells me, as everyone is at work in the city. "Come here during the morning commute," he says. "People fill the road. You can hardly get through." There is much poverty in Africa. Life is a struggle, and not only for the poor.

Up another hill to the peaceful gardens of the only Bah'àí temple in Africa (where I begin to suspect indoctrination when we linger too long under a lengthy explanation of the Bah'àí faith), past the once-great Makerere University, and down Col. Muammar Gaddafi Road to the 360-degree views from the minaret of the Gaddafi Mosque. The place was funded by the Libyan dictator after the grand mosque project of his friend Idi Amin was abandoned half complete for twenty years following his overthrow. Amin himself overthrew Milton Obote, the man with whom he had orchestrated the overthrow of King Mutesa. It seems there was a lot of this going on.

Idi Amin tortured and executed Obote supporters in a concrete bunker on the grounds of the King's palace. Obote used it as well. Nearly a hundred people at a time would be crammed into each of five square rooms without sanitation, many suffocating, all dying in the electrified moat that penned them in. Thirty-five thousand of them. It's a bare and rather unremarkable place but for a few things: the haunting muddy handprints on the walls from people tortured in the water with shocks; an attestation on a wall that a subsequent visitor would never forget that her husband was killed here; and a message in charcoal from a victim: "Obote you have killed me but what about my children?"

Downtown Kampala

I amble among the throng of people over the undulating urban terrain of cracked concrete and muddy bricks, intending half-heartedly to find a certain tourist sight and not really caring if I find it. I am here to be in it, to experience the city life as the locals live it.

Kampala has the same population as the whole of Australia. Ugandans are very friendly, polite people who will often greet you in the street. "Hello", and always "how are you?" and sometimes "how is your family?" All of them look at me – mzungu can't help but stand out – in curiosity and mild surprise but without staring. I feel quite safe. The hundreds of boda-boda riders chatting in groups parked at the roadside regularly ask me if I need a ride. Boda-bodas are pillion-passenger motorcycle taxis, so named because they emerged to ferry travellers across the sometime long distances between no-man's-land between border checkpoints – border to border. They are notoriously dangerous. By one account there averages five fatalities in Kampala a day.

It's just shy of 30 degrees today and the constant smell of vehicle exhaust is briefly dispersed by heaven-sent bursts of cool, humid air. I turn off the congested main road at a major intersection and down an even more congested side road towards Old Kampala. I'm not far from Nasser Road, where you can get any kind of forgery that you want: university certificates, passports, you name it. But all my documents are in order. I'm heading to the Old Taxi Park, the "organised chaos" of the blue-and-white private minibuses (called taxis) which are the heart of the Kampala transport system. No part of Kampala can be called inauthentic, but this is truly the local experience.

Past the cluttered shops of mobile phones and shoes with people sat on stoops the crowd grows ever more dense. We pass the poor who sit and beg silently with open hands. Rolling footpaths give way to broken tracks like trench ramparts and, as the cramped shops yield to dusty market stalls selling cloth and second-hand clothes from the banks that pen in the crowds, I finally enter the taxi park. The ubiquitous taxis press between full-sized buses discharging cross-country passengers and their luggage into the morass of people as boda-bodas squeeze into any vacant crevice. This section of road is less like a thoroughfare than a choked evacuation. The street ingests and constricts and engorges the lot, passing the vehicles and people in an urbanological peristalsis until it expels them at the other end to rejoin the circulation of the city.

At last I reach the mouth of the street at the top of a hill. Kampala is all hills. The road curls around the Ugandan Muslim Supreme Council Headquarters, a mosque-like structure from what I can discern outside the barbed-wire-crowned walls. I sit on the grass embankment to rest a bit, pulling from my pack a bottle of water and a fig to munch. The only others who sit on these banks are the poor and the beggars. The steady stream of staring locals must all surely be thinking: "What the hell is mzungu doing HERE?" After a short while a few young men walk past with a look less curious and more menacing than the others and I think, right, time to move on.

It is easy to accomplish an instant getaway. I look up, wave to one of the boda-boda drivers in the constant stream who all watch me with Pavlovian interest, briefly negotiate a 4,000 Ugandan shilling trip to the city centre (A$1.65; mzungu fare, probably double what it should be but I don't quibble over it), and in seconds I'm hurtling off into the chaos.

Kampala

"Mzungu!"

I am mzungu . White man. They call to me in friendly tones and smile, and I wave back. As far as I can see, across all the bobbing black heads, I am the only mzungu in Kampala.

People are walking everywhere on the variously intact and broken footpaths that line the mud-rendered traffic-packed asphalt, yet the hotel staff thought it was strange that I wanted to walk into town.

"Bad idea", one of them said. She was likely concerned that I would be pickpocketed rather than mugged. Kampala isn't Nairobi. Violent crime is rare. I have read. So, blissfully confident in this, I sauntered past the "No guns" signs in the foyer and marched out the hotel gate, bidding adieu to the guards checking with mirrors under cars for bombs.

I pass by the Electoral Council of Uganda, a minor fortress with police in fatigues wielding shotguns posted outside long, whitewashed, razor-wired walls. The whitewash is wonderfully glazed with informational paintings and bold instructions on the democratic process: "Participate in elections by organising democratic rallies"; "You must be registered to vote." I approach one of the gun-toting officers and, extending my journalism credentials, ask him if I can shoot the building. (Okay, I said "photograph the building".) He tells me to go inside to ask permission, but the guards want me to leave my backpack at the gate until they can verify that I am who I say I am, and not someone simply wanting to get into the Electoral Commission of Uganda with a backpack full of C4. I'm not too keen on leaving it unattended as it actually contains expensive camera equipment, so I decline and move on.

As it turns out, I don't shoot Kampala at all. Though everything is in a constant state of deterioration, incompletion and perpetual repair, the city is utilised and occupied, and I want to capture its dirty, bustling life. But Kampala's sole mzungu flashing around his fancy Canon is not a good look.

Why it is a bad idea to visit East Africa

Today I begin my malaria tablets.

I'm already shot up full of hepatitis and typhoid vaccines. Now I've come across warning that there's been a flare-up of meningococcal meningitis in the south Omo Valley of Ethiopia, my main destination where I will be shooting the southern tribes. I don't intend to French kiss them so meningitis is manageable. But the World Health Organisation also reported a recent outbreak of yellow fever, the mosquito-borne haemorrhagic disease, in the same area. They're on the ground containing it right now. Local mosquitoes French kissing me are considerably harder to avoid, so I got vaccinated two weeks ago. I had to if I wanted to come home. Australia won't let me back into the country without immunisation.

In fact, they don't even want me to go. The Australian government's "smart traveller" website says of Uganda: "Reconsider your need to travel to areas bordering the Democratic Republic of the Congo." The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda, where I will be tracking the mountain gorillas, sits right on the border. The late Dian Fossey was based here. And murdered here.

From there I cross by road into Rwanda about 100km from Goma, the provincial capital seized from Congolese government forces last year by M23, the allegedly Rwanda-backed Tutsi rebels. Tutsi and Hutu militia have persisted since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. There was further fighting near Goma in July.

"Reconsider your need to travel" is the Australian government's second-highest security advice. The highest is what it says of Ethiopia: "Do Not Travel." Not actually for all of Ethiopia, but the border areas with Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya... well, all the border areas. Harar, one of my first stops, is only about 120km in a straight line from the Somali border. Actually, it's the border of Somaliland, an unrecognised breakaway state which is reasonably stable. Aksum, on the other hand, is about 50km by road from the Eritrean border. The war with Eritrea formally ended 13 years ago and the border has been permanently closed since, though there have been skirmishes as recently as 2010. This is the region where five western tourists were killed and two kidnapped by gunmen last year. This is my destination in the north.

But not to worry. Yes, I'm a westerner travelling solo, but I will hire guides.

They carry rifles.