TerraFauna Journeys is building its luxury conservation trips around locally owned lodges, Indigenous leaders, and field scientists rather than hotel chains, routing the money to community organizations like Bwindi’s Ride 4 a Woman.
The gorilla trek at the center of TerraFauna Journeys’ Uganda itinerary climbs into Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a steep tangle of montane rainforest on Uganda’s southwestern shoulder that shelters more than half of the world’s surviving mountain gorillas, and it is led by a ranger named Denis Onyiko. When the day is over, the travelers come down not to a hotel with a foreign name over the door but to a guesthouse in Bwindi run by a women’s cooperative called Ride 4 a Woman, where the money they spent stays in the village they walked out of that morning. That arrangement, the lodge locally owned and the ranger and the cook and the seamstress named rather than nameless, is the thing TerraFauna, a conservation-travel company launching in 2026, was built to make ordinary. “We don’t just visit wild places. We partner with the people protecting them,” its founder, Ami Jones, told Forbes. “Travelers become collaborators in conservation.”
TerraFauna builds each itinerary with local conservationists, Indigenous leaders, and ecological researchers, folds in sustainably sourced meals and low-impact transport, and directs the revenue to community organizations rather than to the international operators who usually collect it; its first trips carry the earnest names of the genre, a Uganda gorilla safari it calls “Guardians of the Wild,” a rewilding route through the jaguar country of Argentina called “Roots of the Wild,” and a Costa Rica journey that follows biodiversity from the coast up into the canopy. The rearrangement is of the safari dollar’s usual path, which tends to leave the country almost as fast as it arrives.
How TerraFauna journeys routes travel money to local communities
Evelyne Habasa and her husband, Denis Rubalema, started Ride 4 a Woman in Bwindi in 2009 with a rack of rented bicycles and the proceeds steered toward the women of the area, and it has grown, in the years since, into something closer to a small local economy: a cooperative of some three hundred members, about sixty of them working on any given day and more than a hundred trained to sew and weave, that lends money, runs a craft workshop, pays school fees for local children, and keeps the guesthouse and restaurant where TerraFauna’s travelers sleep and eat.
A guest can take a cooking lesson, sit down to a basket-weaving session, or watch a Bakiga dance, and the room she books pays, by design, into all of it, the school fees and the loans and the solar panels and the clean water, which is the difference the company is selling against a night in a chain that sends its profit abroad.
What a Uganda gorilla permit costs and where it goes
The animals are the reason the trips works at all. Uganda holds more than half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, most of them in Bwindi, where the population has climbed to 459 from the 302 counted in 2005, the park’s figures show. Seeing them has been made, on purpose, expensive: last summer, the Uganda Wildlife Authority raised the price of a gorilla-trekking permit for a foreign visitor to 800 dollars, up from 700, with the money meant to cover park operations, law enforcement, and community projects. The steep fee is itself a conservation instrument, a way of turning a strictly rationed number of daily visitors into the sum that keeps the forest standing and the rangers paid, and a trip like TerraFauna’s stacks its lodging and guiding fees on top of that permit, aiming both at the same end.
The limits are real, and the company does not hide them: a handful of small-group trips a year moves a modest sum, the model works only where the local cooperative is well run, and TerraFauna has published neither its prices nor how many travelers it expects to carry. What it is selling, for now, is a structure and a claim about where the last dollar lands. “Our mission is to spark a global movement where travel becomes a force for ecological renewal,” Jones told Forbes. “This isn’t just a business. It’s a blueprint for how conservation and tourism can work together to create a better future.”
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