Travel deep dive
Queen Elizabeth National Park: Kazinga, Ishasha and the Rift
Queen Elizabeth National Park fills the floor of the western Rift Valley between Lake Edward and Lake George, in the shadow of the Rwenzori Mountains, and it is the savanna counterweight to Uganda's forest gorillas — open plains, a wildlife-crowded water channel, crater lakes and a southern sector known across Africa for lions that climb trees. It sits directly on the road between the Bwindi gorillas and the Kibale chimpanzees, which is why almost every longer Uganda itinerary passes through it.
Updated 2026-08-19
The Kazinga Channel
The park's signature outing is the boat cruise along the Kazinga Channel, the natural water link between Lakes Edward and George, whose banks hold one of the densest concentrations of hippo and Nile crocodile anywhere on the continent. From the water the game comes to you: buffalo and elephant drink at the edge, and the shoreline is a near-continuous parade of pelicans, storks, kingfishers and fish eagles that makes the channel one of East Africa's outstanding stretches for waterbirds.
Cruises run in small groups at set times of day, with the late afternoon light the favourite for photography, and the trip works as the gentle, low-effort highlight of a stay — no walking, guaranteed animals, and a broad cross-section of the park's life in a couple of hours on the water.
Big Game and the Ishasha Lions
The main Mweya and Kasenyi plains deliver classic savanna game driving — elephant, buffalo, Uganda kob in their thousands, warthog, and the leopard and hyena that follow them — across grassland studded with the volcanic crater lakes that give the northern park its distinctive pocked landscape. Kasenyi's kob breeding grounds are the park's reliable engine for lion sightings, since the cats follow the herds.
The park's real fame, though, sits in the remote southern Ishasha sector, where lions have taken up the unusual habit of draping themselves along the branches of large fig trees through the heat of the day. No one is quite certain why — shade, breeze and escape from biting flies are the usual explanations — and it is a habit rather than a certainty, so it rewards patience and an early start, but a lioness stretched along a bough is one of the definitive images of Ugandan safari.
Kyambura Gorge and the Crater Lakes
Cutting through the northeastern edge of the park, the Kyambura Gorge is a sudden green slash of rainforest sunk below the savanna, home to a small habituated community of chimpanzees that can be tracked on a half-day permit — a chance to pair Uganda's primates with plains game inside a single park without the long transfer that separate parks demand. Sightings are less assured than in the big forests because the group is small and the terrain steep, which is part of the adventure.
Above the gorge, the Mweya peninsula's explosion craters and the salt-crusted volcanic lakes around Katwe add a strange, beautiful geology to the park — the Katwe crater has been mined for salt by hand for centuries, and the crater-lake drive north of Mweya is a quiet, scenic complement to the game plains for anyone with a spare morning.
Where It Sits and How to Combine It
Queen Elizabeth's great practical advantage is its position: it lies on the natural route between Bwindi's gorillas to the south and Kibale's chimpanzees to the north, so a night or two here slots into almost any western circuit without a detour. Most visitors base themselves around Mweya or Kasenyi for the channel and the northern plains, adding a night in the far south if Ishasha's lions are a priority, since that sector is a long drive from the main gates.
The park is reached on a long but scenic drive from Kampala, or by scheduled light-aircraft flights to the local airstrips for those trading road time for cost. A classic pairing is two or three nights here bracketed by the Rwenzori foothills and Kibale, turning the western Rift into a single unbroken run of forest, mountain and plains.