12 Day Uganda In Depth Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight and takes you the short distance to your hotel on the lakeshore, which is a considerably better first night than several hours in a vehicle after a long haul. Entebbe sits on a peninsula in Lake Victoria and moves at a slower pace than Kampala an hour up the road. If you land in the morning we can fill the afternoon usefully: the Entebbe Botanical Gardens, laid out in 1898 and good for black and white colobus, vervets and a surprising number of birds within a short walk, or the wildlife centre on the lakeshore, which takes in rescued animals and is better than the term zoo suggests. Otherwise, sleep. Our guide will run through the twelve days with you over dinner, go through the early starts and check your kit, particularly boots, gaiters and rain gear, because you will be trekking twice on this trip.

A short transfer to the airstrip and a scheduled flight north to Apoka, roughly two hours against ten to twelve by road. The country below changes as you go, cultivated green giving out into the semi arid rangeland of Karamoja. Kidepo covers about 1,442 square kilometres, was gazetted in 1962, and borders South Sudan to the northwest with Kenya five kilometres east. It holds 77 mammal species and around 476 birds. We take you out in the afternoon into the Narus Valley, which contains the park’s only permanent water and is where wildlife concentrates for most of the year. Buffalo herds and elephant use the swampy valley floor, giraffe and eland the drier slopes above, and it is worth scanning the rock outcrops for lion, which sometimes rest up on them. Dinner at Apoka, and a night sky with no town within a hundred kilometres to spoil it.

The Narus Valley at dawn, working the two twenty kilometre circuits where the water holds through the dry season and everything comes to drink. Kidepo carries species found nowhere else in Uganda: cheetah, bat eared fox and ostrich all occur here and in no other Ugandan park, and lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, zebra, hartebeest and greater kudu fill out the list. The Katurum track gives the widest views over the valley and is worth stopping on for a while. In the afternoon we drive north across the sandy bed of the Kidepo River into the drier valley beyond, where mammals thin out and the scenery takes over: an open plain framed east by the Morungole range and north by Jebel Lotuke rising to nearly 3,000 metres in South Sudan. Ostrich and secretary bird are regular out here, and the Kanagorok hot springs, thirty kilometres north of Apoka, make a good turning point before we head back.

A last morning game drive in the Narus Valley, then a community visit outside the park at one of the Karamojong manyattas at Kawalakol, Lorukul or Karenga. The Karamojong are semi nomadic pastoralists, culturally close to the Maasai of Kenya, and their homesteads are built as fortified stockades around the cattle that sit at the centre of everything. Guides from the community explain the layout of the stockade, the cattle raiding history and how life in Karamoja is changing. It is a candid conversation rather than a performance. If your legs want more, the Morungole range can be walked with a ranger, and the Ik people live high on those slopes. Late morning we take the flight back to Entebbe, roughly two hours over Karamoja and the Nile, arriving in the afternoon. Overnight in Entebbe or Kampala, with the long western circuit starting tomorrow and a proper night’s sleep advisable before it.

North out of Kampala through the Luwero triangle, and about two and a half hours up we stop at Ziwa, the only place in Uganda where wild rhino exist. They were poached out of the country entirely during the 1970s and 1980s and brought back through a breeding programme. Tracking is on foot with rangers, walking through the bush to find a group and watching from a safe distance, and meeting one at ground level rather than from a vehicle is a different thing altogether. Allow around two hours for the tracking. Then on north past Budongo Forest, one of the largest mahogany forests in East Africa, reaching Murchison in the late afternoon. The drive covers roughly 305 kilometres over five to six hours with the stop. We take you to the top of the falls, where the whole Victoria Nile is forced through a gorge barely seven metres wide before dropping 43 metres.

Across the river on the Paraa ferry at first light and onto the Buligi circuit, a peninsula about ten kilometres wide between the Victoria Nile flowing into Lake Albert and the Albert Nile flowing out of it. Open grassland studded with Borassus palms, and the strongest wildlife morning most visitors will have in Uganda. Elephant number well over a thousand across the park, Uganda kob run into five figures, and the lion population sits at roughly 150 to 200 animals across fifteen to twenty prides. Rothschild’s giraffe are what make this park distinctive, once close to extinction and now well over a thousand here. Back for lunch, then the afternoon launch cruise upstream from Paraa, about three hours there and back past hippo pods and very large crocodiles, ending a hundred metres from the base of the falls where the spray reaches you. The cruise has been running since the late 1950s.

Out early on the delta cruise, downstream from Paraa some twenty kilometres to where the Victoria Nile spreads into papyrus channels and enters Lake Albert. This is the best shoebill water in Uganda, and the bird stands motionless in the papyrus waiting for lungfish, often following hippo trails because the disturbed water makes fishing easier. Sightings are never guaranteed and the dry season improves the odds considerably, as receding water concentrates both fish and birds. Giraffe, elephant and buffalo line the banks along the way, with African skimmers and red throated bee-eater colonies nesting in the sandbanks. Back for a late breakfast, then south through Masindi, Hoima and Fort Portal, roughly six hours with lunch. Dry Nile woodland gives out into cultivated hills, then tea estates, and finally the crater lake belt around Fort Portal, dozens of steep sided craters holding deep green water. We reach the Kibale crater lake country in the evening, and tomorrow starts at a civilised hour rather than before dawn.

To the Kanyanchu visitor centre for the briefing, then into the forest with rangers who track by listening for pant hoots and finding the nests built the previous evening. The ranger carries a rifle, which is for warning off forest elephant rather than the primates. Roughly 1,500 chimpanzees live in Kibale, the largest population in Uganda, and the Kanyanchu community has been tracked since 1993, which is why the odds here beat any other chimp destination in the region. The ground is gently rolling rather than the steep ridges elsewhere, so this is brisk walking, and the trek runs around three hours with one hour with the community. Kibale holds thirteen primate species, the highest density in East Africa. In the afternoon, Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary next door, community managed with revenue funding local schools and healthcare, holding eight primate species and around 138 birds, the great blue turaco chief among them.

South out of the forest and down onto the plains, only two to three hours, the easiest transfer of the trip. The country opens as you drop and the Rwenzori range stands to the west when the cloud lifts. Queen Elizabeth covers roughly 1,978 square kilometres and was named after Queen Elizabeth II in 1954, holding around 95 mammal species and over 600 birds, the longest bird list of any protected area in Uganda. We check you in on the Mweya peninsula with the water below you, take lunch and rest through the heat, then head out for the Kazinga Channel boat cruise. The channel runs about 32 kilometres between Lake George and Lake Edward, and the two hour trip passes one of the densest hippo populations in Africa, crocodiles on the mud, elephant and buffalo drinking, and waterbirds along the banks in serious numbers. Afternoon departures beat morning ones for both animals and light.

Out at six for the Kasenyi plains, open grassland dotted with candelabra euphorbia and the best lion ground in this part of the park. Uganda kob graze here in large concentrations and the lions follow them, with elephant, buffalo, waterbuck and hyena filling out the morning. Lion tracking with the research team is available if you want to go further, using radio telemetry to reach animals off the standard tracks. Late morning we take the explosion crater drive into a field of steep sided volcanic craters with the widest views in the park back over Lake Edward, stopping at Katwe salt lake, worked by hand since long before the park existed. In the afternoon, Kyambura Gorge, a crack in the savannah a hundred metres deep filled with rainforest, holding a small isolated chimpanzee community where sightings are less certain than at Kibale, so treat it as a striking half day rather than a guarantee.

We drive out of the park the interesting way, through the remote Ishasha sector rather than around the outside. This is tree climbing lion country: lions here habitually drape themselves along the branches of large fig and acacia through the heat of the day, behaviour seen regularly in only a handful of places on earth, and the males carry dark manes. Nobody can promise you one, since it depends where the prides are that week, and our guides who work the sector say so plainly. We work the fig trees and the river circuits with a picnic lunch, then continue south into the hills, the country climbing and greening as you go. Topi are common here and scarce elsewhere in the park. Total driving time runs six to seven hours including the game drive. Bwindi in the late afternoon. Pack your daypack tonight rather than in the dark, and get your boots dry by the fire.

Breakfast early, then to the sector briefing station for half past seven. Rangers go through the rules and split everyone into groups of eight trekkers per gorilla family: minimum distance, which Uganda’s guidance sets at around ten metres, no flash, no eating in their presence, voices low. Trackers went out at first light and are already with the families. Then into the forest, a constant sequence of steep ridges and deep valleys with rangers cutting through the tangle ahead of you, and treks running from one to six hours. Bwindi shelters roughly 459 mountain gorillas, close to half the world population, across around twenty habituated families. When you reach them, one hour. Hire a porter. Back for lunch and a shower, then the road south to the border and on to Kigali, four to five hours including the crossing, against about ten back to Entebbe. This day suits an evening flight; if yours is earlier we will book you a final night in Kigali.