Vanilla farm visit in Kibale including Ndali Vanilla, is one of the best community activities one can ever come across. The scent is rich and intense, and the flavour is deep, long lasting and absolutely true.
Walks will take you around crater rims, past alcohol brewing in oil drums, through banana plantations, vanilla plantations, coffee terraces, plots of cassava, groundnuts, sorghum and millet.
Ndali Estate is a 1,000 acre mixed tropical farm, amid the explosion of craters on the Ndali volcanic field in Western Uganda.
The farm specializes in exquisite quality fair-trade vanilla extract and fair-trade organic vanilla powder. There are also vanilla pods which are grown on Ndali, in addition to buying from other fair-trade farmers.
While on a vanilla farm visit in Kibale, you will also learn that Ndali vanilla is cured, milled and extracted on the farm and then exported in bulk to major industries. The cream of the crop is packaged in small batches under the Ndali vanilla brand, for retail.
Ndali Estate is owned privately by the Price/Sturdy families, with a history in Uganda through their English grandfather, Major Trevor Price, since the 1920s. Travelling down from Cairo in a Model T Ford, Major Price’s aim was to grow tea, at the time, a scarcely developed crop in Uganda. He planted a string of tea shambas north and south of Fort Portal and in the early 1960s he bought Ndali from the Kingdom of Toro. However, the soil proved too alkaline for tea and the estate was left to grow wild.
More on Vanilla Farm Visit in Kibale
On your visit to Ndali vanilla farm, you will be able to know how the vanilla is taken care of, right from planting, weeding, up to how it is harvested and processed.
On your visit to the vanilla farm you will encounter heaps of Ndali’s kisubi bananas which are peeled, fermented and distilled by the river into a banana gin – ‘Ndali waragi’ or ‘war gin’. This is drunk traditionally on the battle field.
On a vanilla farm visit in Kibale, visitors find out that Ndali Vanilla has an intensity of flavour that really stands out from other vanillas. The powder is an ingenious new way to extract all the flavour quickly and easily. Spice your tour with a visit at Ndali vanilla garden to experience a farm life and see the real vanilla garden, and also provide you with a chance to meet and interact with the real native Batooro and Bakiga locals as you see them busy in their farm yards.
Kibale National Park harbors over 350 plant species, 71 mammal species, 13 primates and 372 bird species of the 1,042 total birds. Kibale Forest has one of the highest diversity and concentration of primates in Africa. It is home to a large number of endangered chimpanzees, as well as the endangered red colobus monkey and the rare and vulnerable L’Hoest’s monkey. In Rwanda, Nyungwe National Park is a reciprocal of Kibale, home to Chimpanzee in Rwanda and many other primates.