Uganda’s largest national park protects 1,500 square miles of moist savannah and forest bisected by the Nile, the world’s longest river, on its journey from Lake Victoria to Lake Albert. In addition to several viewpoints over the sensational Murchison Falls, this superb safari destination hosts four of the Big Five, and game drives can be supplemented by boat safaris and chimp tracking.
Discover Murchison Falls National Park
East Africa’s most spectacular waterfall, Murchison Falls is notable less for its height of around 140ft than for its sheer brutality, as the wide meandering Nile erupts through a narrow cleft in the Rift Valley escarpment to form a cacophonous plume of foaming white water.
Boat safaris to the base of Murchison Falls offer excellent game viewing. Crocodiles, hippos and waterbirds are abundant, and with luck you’ll see elephants, buffalos and other wildlife come to drink.
Elephant, buffalo, Jackson’s hartebeest, oribi, Uganda kob, patas monkey and large herds of the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe can be seen on game drives through the palm-studded grassland north of the Nile. Lions are often seen here too, and leopards are encountered from time to time.
Of the 550-plus bird species recorded in Murchison Falls, the undoubted star is the shoebill, a bulky denizen of papyrus swamps named for its outsized clog-like bill. Shoebills are sometimes seen distantly on game drives north of the Nile, but for a more certain close-up view, it’s worth joining a boat trip downstream to the papyrus-lined delta where the river flows into Lake Albert.
Situated within the greater Murchison Falls Conservation Area, the Kaniyo Pabidi sector of the vast Budongo Forest offers excellent chimpanzee tracking and forest birding from a trailhead alongside the main road to the park.
Although the park’s once prolific rhino population had been hunted out by the early 1980s, an introduced population of white rhino – Africa’s second bulkiest non-marine mammal – can be tracked on foot in Ziwa Sanctuary, a convenient overnight stop en route to or from Kampala.
