Kibale National Park
— — a forest the chimpanzees pass through before you do.
Not only on a wall.
“A seven-hundred-and-ninety-five-square-kilometre rainforest on the broad ridge between Fort Portal and Queen Elizabeth National Park, home to one of Africa's highest densities of primates. Thirteen species live in the canopy, including red colobus, L'Hoest's monkey, and roughly fifteen hundred chimpanzees. The trees are tall and very old, and the light reaches the floor in slow vertical shafts.
Kibale National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kibale National Park lies in western Uganda, in Kabarole and Kamwenge districts, about a thirty-kilometre drive south of Fort Portal. The park covers seven hundred and ninety-five square kilometres of moist evergreen and semi-deciduous forest along a ridge of the western Rift Valley. Elevation runs from roughly eleven hundred metres in the south to fifteen hundred and ninety metres on the northern Fort Portal plateau. The park connects southward to Queen Elizabeth National Park through the Kibale-Sebitoli wildlife corridor.
The forest holds thirteen primate species — among the highest concentrations on the continent — including the Uganda red colobus, L'Hoest's monkey, black-and-white colobus, grey-cheeked mangabey, and a community of roughly fifteen hundred chimpanzees that the Uganda Wildlife Authority has habituated for tracking. Outside the dawn chorus the canopy is quiet enough that an approaching troop can be heard several minutes before it is seen. Forest elephants and bushbuck move below, mostly unseen, mostly known by track.
Permits for chimpanzee tracking are sold by the Uganda Wildlife Authority at the Kanyanchu visitor centre and must be booked in advance; a small habituation experience runs longer and starts before dawn. The drive from Entebbe takes about five hours via Mubende. The dry seasons, roughly December through February and June through August, give the best forest walking; the wet months bring leeches but also the richest birdsong and a full swamp walk at the Bigodi community wetland.