Quarterly newsletter for Gorilla Highlands lovers
See the ship bathing in the sunset light over my left shoulder? Not far from it lies the Cape Town International Convention Centre, where your ML Rwebandira took to the panel on Monday, 13 April 2026.
Oh yes, it worked! It felt pretty unbelievable: I knocked yet again on the door of South Africa, with only a one-way air ticket even, and they just let me in, without a question asked?! The previous two times I had to be stressing with the delightfully bureaucratic “application for a permission to apply” (that made me bus to Nairobi) or was requested to provide “proof of legal separation” from my wife (that made me give up laughingly). And now, a dramatically different story in a cosmopolitan city right at the edge of our continent!
That’s the injustice of this planet for you … In 2023 I was trying with my Ugandan passport, then with a Slovenian one in 2024 (in Rwanda that had no fully functional South African embassy), until that very European identity came to my rescue in September 2025 — because since then there’s no visa anymore for the citizens of Slovenia.
Feeling guilty for letting the organisers down twice before, I actually wondered if it was a smart idea to climb the iconic Lion’s Head the night before. You know, things could well happen up there, in the dark … But the mountain was calling me too loudly on that gorgeous Sunday.
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Across the hills south of Lion’s Head we are now heading to the amusingly named False Bay, more specifically to the fishing village called Kalk Bay. Here on the mountain slopes, a rich mix of Indigenous, creole, free Black and Filipino-Spanish settlers used to burn lime shells (lime is “kalk” in Afrikaans) to produce powder for painting colonial houses. Their great granddaughter Traci Kwaai began free diving in her 40s and, enamoured by the bounty of the Atlantic, soon founded The Fisher Child Projekt. It gives kids access to ocean education through snorkelling and diving, connecting them to their heritage.
Next, something completely different: the dry vastness of the Kalahari desert, 1,000 kilometres north and two decades in the past. A collapsing lodge in the middle of nowhere — including total absence of mobile phone networks, imagine the horror! — belongs to the Mier and Khomani San people. They honestly don’t know what to do about it, until they get in touch with Glynn O’Leary and his partners. Glynn’s Transfrontier Parks Destinations transforms !Xaus Lodge into a success story, promising unique encounters from tracking with the Bushmen to sighting the iconic black-maned lion of the Kalahari.
Still 3,000 kilometres further, on the other side of Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and Burundi, lies the lush Gorilla Highlands region. Once the absolute domain of the Batwa “Pygmies”, it is now their land of misery and disrespect. ML Rwebandira tries to bring some cultural and economic pride back to them through longstanding partnerships built on responsible tourism. That’s one segment of the work done by Gorilla Highlands Experts to connect the area shared by Uganda, Rwanda and DR Congo and build towards peace and prosperity. But you may already know those guys …
Harold Goodwin, the godfather of the responsible tourism idea (let him explain it to you on our podcast), had a sizeable panel in mind when he invited me to the African edition of the World Travel Market (WTM). We were to discuss the brand new “Tourism in the Wildlife Economy” white paper together. However, the dimensions of the podium eventually led to us being split into two. The “Conservation Experts” panel consisted of Kruger National Park’s Oscar Mthimkhulu, Tswehe Wildlife Reserve’s Isabel Wolf-Gillespie and Marine Dynamics’s Wilfred Chivell. The “Local Communities” panel was assigned to Traci, Glynn and me.
Expertly moderated by Dr Wiseman Ndlovu, the Deputy Director of Stellenbosch University‘s African Wildlife Economy Institute, we briefly shared our backgrounds and missions and then it was the audience’s turn. When it came to the question about training community members, I set aside the Batwa as my main topic, to tell them about Tom Karemire. In a 2025 newsletter you found the heart of the tale of how we upgraded a career nightwatchman into an island village hotelier. Here I added the next chapter that I only blogged about: how our doubts about the family’s attitude towards the homestay evaporated and how his tomb says “A Tourism Enthusiastic Person”.
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Who else to open the next section with but Zunia? She’s the general manager of Arcadia Lodges at Uganda’s Lake Bunyonyi but in her previous life she created a restaurant in the wider Cape Town area. When I asked her for advice on what to see and do in her homeland, this artistic soul — she studied graphic design — prepared a handwritten and colour-coded guide especially for me (you can enlarge it by clicking on the image above).
And her guidance didn’t stop there … While I saw myself as primarily a speaker who also happened to get access to everybody at WTM for three full days, Zunia was a highly organised one-day trade fair visitor. She came with the official app loaded on her phone, and a list of favourited exhibitors she needed to talk to. That was an eye-opener for me. I had walked the hall and looked for the stalls mentioning anything from Rwanda or Uganda, and they weren’t many at all. Zunia’s zone of interest was much wider, her research thorough, and the opportunities suddenly abounded.
Still, on Tuesday I felt that I was done with all the essential contact-making. The first photo in the collage proves that I wasn’t as unprepared as the preceding paragraph might make me look: I had 30 printed copies of our rate card ready to share, and you can see Dancan browsing through it. I certainly also had a load of Pocket Treasures in my bag; Cheryl amusingly turned out to be one of our booklet resellers in Entebbe!
Gosh, I wish I could tell you more about every person in the collage, but since we exist in an era of appallingly low attention spans and this already is a long-form dispatch, I have to be selective. I will just add that I got to know the Creative Travel gang only because they displayed the Kigali Convention Centre on the wall of their stall.
On Wednesday morning I had to play a trick on myself. Exhausted from the two days on the trade floor, I promised myself I would only push on until the siesta time. I had a plan of adding some Tanzanians and Kenyans to my contacts, since they often get inquiries related to Rwanda and Uganda. I — to nobody’s surprise — ended up talking with interesting people until the show closed at 4pm, and here I’m showing you some friendly East African faces … I was particularly excited to find a token Congolese, Joyce, who couldn’t believe we dare to bring visitors to the Wild East of her country.
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I was positively drained at the end of it all! Yet there was another coffee shop from Zunia’s guide I had to try: Vida e Caffè. Its tasty wrap and pistachio coffee boosted my energy just enough to hike back to Marina’s Airbnb about 30 minutes away, and take this photo in the evening light. Marina? Marina!!! She says some people find it weird that they share the house with her, but wasn’t that what Airbnb was supposed to be about before it got taken over by businessmen with countless properties?! Marina would invite me for walks, introduce me to her evening-drink buddies at Narona, and take me for the open mic at Casa Woodstock Bar. She’s a star there to the degree that staff member Henry from Zimbabwe (pictured with her) would humbly ask her to sing him a song for his birthday.
Only time will tell whether any of these personal and professional connections forged in beautiful Cape Town will bloom into anything concrete — in tourism as in life in general, seeds are planted years before the harvest. But I soldiered on. Walking up and down that exhibition hall and those city streets, rate cards or Pocket Treasures in hand, I wasn’t really representing myself after all. Behind me were the communities, the homestay hosts, the tour guides, and basically anyone whose hopes and livelihoods are woven into what we have been building for 25 years.
In the previous edition of the newsletter I invited you to join our anniversary celebrations as online guests. Let’s wind up with a tight, visually enriched edit of that event — 6 minutes only. I’m first showing you around Edirisa on Lake Bunyonyi, before we cut the cake with our youthful team and jump into 15 slides from the history of our mother organisation … Enjoyyy!
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