Explore Kapkwai Forest exploration Center — Mount Elgon National Park

Explore Kapkwai Forest exploration Center – Mount Elgon national Park

Explore Kapkwai Forst exploration Center – This Forest Exploration Center is 13 kilometers from Sipi town and doubles as an educational center for schools and the trailhead for climbers using the Sipi trail to the caldera. Three circuits of between 3-7 kilometers run through the surrounding regenerating forest, where visitors can visit the caves, waterfalls, escarpments and viewpoints as well as bird watching and primates.

Bird species here are: Hartlaub’s Turaco, Eastern Bronze-napped Pigeon, Lemon Dove, Dusky-Turtle, Africa Hill Babbler, Alpine Chat, Black-throated Wattle-eye, Mountain Yellow Warbler, Thick-billed Honey guide and Grey Cuckoo-Shrike. Interested in a tour to explore Kapkwai Exploration Centre, simply get in touch with Great Adventure Safaris Uganda through email, whatsapp or a phone call and we help you plan your tour accordingly

Kapkwai is hailed as the mightiest of Mount Elgon’s Caves with its diversity and grandeur unrivalled, Kapkwai cave will make for you an experience that you will never forget. Cool, damp air welcomes you as you enter the narrow, low-ceilinged passageway and there is a significant drop in temperature as you go further into the cave.

As your eyes adjust to the dim interior, you follow the guide through the manmade tunnel toward one of Mt Elgon’s largest caves; a gaping hole in the mountain, littered with tiny sparkling crystals, yet so mysterious.

Located in a shadow of Mount Elgon bush, Kapkwai cave looks a mouth of impenetrable blackness, as you step forward, you will watch your shadow dissolve into the surrounding darkness. It is dank and the only sound is the dripping water and bat sounds.

Inside the cavern, strange noise fills up the place but darkness was eternity, it was like an invisible force, crushing your body, squeezing the life out of you. Although according to Uganda Wildlife Authority, the cave was meant for the traditional ceremony of Female Genital Mutilation, a local folklore has it that people trying to escape the marauding tax collectors in the 1960s and 1970s initially used this natural formation to hide.

The caves were also a sacred site used by Sabiny and Bugisu elders for prayers and to offer sacrifices during cultural ceremonies. But during the Stone Age period, these were people’s houses and a cave would offer shelter for a family but later in the 1980s through the 1990s, thieves/robbers after robbing, they would also come and hide here in these Caves.

The cave is a hollow place in the ground specifically a natural space large enough for a human to enter and that Caves form naturally by weathering of rock and often extend deep underground. Like Kapkwai Cave, most of the caves at Mount Elgon are deeper, their openings are wide and a rock shelter is endogen and big enough to house a family or even more.

Mt Elgon has many cases that are good for tourists, just to know where the early man lived in Bugisu and Sebei and to know that even today people still go there for worship and they keep their goats there. The first early hominid ever found in Africa, the Taung child in 1924, was also thought for many years to come from a cave, where it had been deposited after being predated on by an eagle. “Caves have an archaeological and importance and they are one of the most common archaeological features at Mt Elgon.