Thursday 26 April 2012

Entebbe to Murchison

We arrive late into Entebbe airport so we wanted somewhere close by to stay, that would also come and pick us up from the airport.  We are going to tired, and probably nervous about the whole arriving in Africa thing - although we've done it before it is still a bit of a culture shock when getting off the plane.

Luckily there are plenty places in Entebbe to stay, and one in particular ticked all our boxes - the Entebbe Zoo!
Well it's not a zoo anymore, but is actually the Ugandan Wildlife Education Centre, which has a good reputation for education and wildlife conservation.  They also house and rehabilitate injured or orphaned animals - so from our point of view this seemed like an ideal place to spend our first night.  http://www.uwec.ug/  $50 for a night in a banda and an airport pickup.  Breakfast extra, but can be taken in their restuarant.



We get our hire car delivered here to us the next morning and we drive north to Kampala - hopefully finding a supermarket on route as we don't really fancy the Kampala traffic.

After Kampala we head further north to the Ziwa rhino sanctuary.  http://www.rhinofund.org/index.htm  Here we plan to camp for a couple of nights - 25,000 Ugandan shillings pppn, plus a park fee of 20,000 UGs.  So about £10 a night pp.  Here are the only wild rhino in Uganda, having recently been re-introduced. You can go on tracking trips (about £20 pp).



After Ziwa it should be a nice short drive to Murchison Falls National Park.  I think by this stage the tarmac will have run out and we'll be onto the murram :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murram#Laterite_and_murram_roads



Hopefully the grader will have been along just before we get there.

Murchison Falls is where the river Nile forces it's way through a narrow gorge, but there is much more to the park than just the river.  To the north is savannah like grassland, and to the south is more forest like.  Here we have booked into the Red Chili rest camp  http://redchillihideaway.com/paraa.htm I'm a bit worried that this might be an overlander kind of place, but it is very close to the park gate so getting into the park in the early morning should be nice and easy.

The guidebooks and Ugandan Wildlife Authority website say that the park is good for spotting lions, so maybe that will make up for only spotting one in Nam/Bots a few years ago.  And that was a really poor spot as the lion in question was lying under a bush, 200m away, fast asleep.  Although we did get a very good view of his knackers....

No comments:

Post a Comment