I grew up five kilometres from the forest.

I grew up in Nyarusiza, a village in Kisoro District, five kilometres from Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I founded this company. I plan every itinerary myself, and the money you pay comes to East Africa.

I work between two places now. The company is registered in Ontario with an office in Whitby, and the guides and vehicles in Uganda are ours rather than hired from whoever is free in the week you travel. That is deliberate. What goes wrong on a safari is almost never the animals. It is the joins, and the joins are where a company hands you to somebody it has never met.

Good operators welcome scrutiny. Operators who get defensive when you ask where the money goes, that is information.

So ask me the twelve questions I wrote for travellers, and ask every other company the same ones. I would rather you chose somebody else for good reasons than chose us for weak ones.

When you write to Bashem, you are writing to me, or to somebody I work with every day.