Queen Elizabeth National Park: Uganda’s Everything Park

Most people come to Uganda for the gorillas and leave having discovered that the gorillas were only half of it. The other half is usually Queen Elizabeth National Park, the country’s most popular savannah reserve, and the place that turns a gorilla trip into a full safari. It sits in the west, in the shadow of the Rwenzori Mountains, and it packs an improbable variety of landscapes and wildlife into one park, which is exactly why almost every serious Uganda itinerary passes through it.

If Bwindi is the reason you come, Queen Elizabeth is the reason you stay longer.

A park of many parks

The first thing to understand about Queen Elizabeth is its sheer variety, because it is really several different environments stitched into one.

Open savannah rolls across much of it, dotted with the flat-topped acacias and the grazing herds you picture when you think of an African plain. But there is also wetland, and crater lakes left by ancient volcanic activity, and tracts of forest, and the vast Lake Edward and Lake George linked by a channel that becomes the park’s star attraction. The result is a park that feels like a tour of East Africa in miniature, and a species list that reflects it, with the count of birds alone running past six hundred, among the richest of any protected area on the continent.

The Kazinga Channel

If Queen Elizabeth has one unmissable experience, it is a boat trip along the Kazinga Channel, and it is the kind of thing that converts sceptics.

The channel connects the park’s two lakes, and because it holds water year-round, it draws an extraordinary concentration of wildlife to its banks. A boat cruise puts you at eye level with one of the highest densities of hippos in Africa, with buffalo and elephant coming down to drink, with crocodiles hauled out on the mud, and with a riot of birds working the shallows. It is unhurried, it is astonishingly productive, and it delivers close, easy sightings without a vehicle in sight. For photographers and for anyone tired of bouncing along tracks, it is the highlight of the park.

The tree-climbing lions of Ishasha

In the remote southern sector of the park, called Ishasha, is one of the park’s genuine curiosities, and one of only a couple of places on earth you can reliably look for it.

The lions here have taken to lounging in the branches of fig trees, draped along the limbs in a way lions are not supposed to be. Nobody is entirely sure why they do it, with theories ranging from escaping the heat and the flies to getting a better view, but the sight of a pride hanging in a tree is unforgettable and strange. They are wild animals and never guaranteed, but Ishasha is one of the best bets anywhere for tree-climbing lions, and it makes a natural stop on the way south toward the gorillas of Bwindi.

Kyambura Gorge and the chimps

Queen Elizabeth even has a primate story of its own, which few people expect from a savannah park.

Cutting through the park is the Kyambura Gorge, a lush, sunken forest that follows a river below the level of the plains, and it holds a habituated community of chimpanzees. Tracking them here is a different experience from the great chimp forests, more compact and dramatic, descending into a green gorge that feels like another world entirely below the savannah. It is not the guaranteed spectacle of Kibale, and the community is small, but it means a single park can offer you savannah game, a boat safari, and chimpanzee tracking in the space of a couple of days. If chimps are a priority, our chimpanzee and gorilla trekking guidance explains how the different forests compare.

The crater lakes and the salt

There is a quieter side to Queen Elizabeth that rewards travellers who slow down, and it is written into the land itself.

Scattered across the park and its edges are dozens of explosion craters, left by violent volcanic activity thousands of years ago, now filled with water or grass and forming some of the most striking scenery in Uganda. A drive along the crater route, with the green bowls falling away on either side and the Rwenzoris beyond, is one of the park’s great understated pleasures. At Katwe, one of these craters holds a salt lake that has been worked by hand for centuries, and a visit to the salt pans, where local people still extract salt exactly as their ancestors did, is a window into a way of life that has outlasted empires. It is the kind of detail that turns a wildlife park into a place with a human story.

Where it fits in a Uganda trip

Queen Elizabeth’s position is what makes it so useful, and it is no accident that itineraries flow through it.

It sits in western Uganda, on the natural route between the chimpanzees of Kibale to the north and the gorillas of Bwindi to the south, which means it slots into the classic Uganda circuit without any awkward backtracking. A few days here give a gorilla trip the savannah wildlife, the boat safari and the sheer variety that the forests alone cannot, and it is the piece that makes a Uganda safari feel complete rather than single-note. You can see how it links the country together across our Uganda journeys.

There is a scenic bonus too. The Rwenzori Mountains, the fabled Mountains of the Moon, rise to the park’s north, and on a clear day their snow-capped peaks form a backdrop that few savannah parks anywhere can match.

The other residents

Beyond the headline animals, Queen Elizabeth rewards travellers who pay attention to the smaller cast, and the variety is part of what makes it so absorbing.

Uganda kob, a handsome russet antelope that features on the national coat of arms, gather here in large numbers and provide much of the prey base for the lions, and their rutting grounds are a spectacle in themselves. Warthogs trot across the tracks with their tails up, families of banded mongoose bustle through the camps, and giant forest hogs, the largest wild pigs in the world, emerge from the thickets at the forest edges. Hyenas patrol at dusk, and the lucky few catch sight of a leopard in the gallery forest along the watercourses. It is a park that keeps handing you things you did not come for, and the drives are richer for it.

A morning and an afternoon

Part of what makes Queen Elizabeth so satisfying is how naturally its days shape themselves, alternating between land and water.

A classic day here begins with a morning game drive across the Kasenyi plains, prime lion country, when the cats are still active in the cool light, and the kob are skittish and alert. The heat of the middle of the day is for resting, or for the crater drive with its long views. Then the late afternoon belongs to the Kazinga Channel and the boat, drifting past the massed hippos and the elephants coming down to drink as the light softens and the birds come in to roost. Land in the morning, water in the afternoon, is the rhythm the park almost designs for you, and it means no two halves of a day feel the same.

Getting there and the Rwenzori backdrop

How you reach Queen Elizabeth is part of the experience, and the journey rewards travellers who take the scenic route.

Most people arrive overland as part of the western circuit, driving in from Kibale to the north or continuing south toward Bwindi, and the roads pass through some genuinely beautiful country, tea estates, crater fields and the great wall of the Rwenzori Mountains rising to the west. For those short on time, light aircraft link the park to Entebbe and the other western parks, turning a long drive into a short hop. However you come, the Rwenzoris are the constant, the fabled Mountains of the Moon, snow-capped on the equator, forming a backdrop to the plains that almost no other savannah park on earth can offer. On the clear mornings when the cloud lifts off the peaks, the sight of elephants on the plain with snow behind them is one of the defining images of Uganda.

The all-rounder

There is a particular kind of value in a park that does many things well rather than one thing perfectly, and Queen Elizabeth is the definition of it.

It will not give you the sheer big-cat density of the Maasai Mara or the endless herds of the Serengeti, and it does not pretend to. What it offers instead is range: savannah and wetland and forest and crater lakes, elephant and buffalo and hippo and lion, a world-class boat safari, tree-climbing lions, chimpanzees in a gorge, and more birds than you could hope to identify, all within a single park on the road to the gorillas. For a Uganda trip, that combination is close to perfect, which is precisely why the country’s most popular safari park earns its place on almost every itinerary.

If you are building a Uganda safari around the gorillas, this is the park that fills out the rest of it. Tell us how much savannah you want alongside your trek, and we will build Queen Elizabeth in properly.