Travel
Beneath the Virunga and Rwenzori mountains in Uganda’s southwestern corner, villagers live side by side with wildlife. Though famous for exciting encounters with mountain gorillas, this rugged, tropical region also offers serene viewing at the water’s edge — and plenty more besides.
ByEmma Gregg
Photographs ByJonathan Gregson
Published December 6, 2023
• 20 min read
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Pelicans preen and glide. Jacana birds, precise as ballerinas, point their improbably elongated toes. Pied kingfishers flit in and out of their lakeside nest holes, saddle-billed storks patrol the grassy banks and skimmers speed across the silver-blue water, scooping up beakfuls mid-flight. Everywhere I look, there are birds in abundance. The safari boat is the perfect platform from which to watch: open-sided, smooth and near-silent.
Southwest Uganda’s Kazinga Channel is south of the Equator, but only just. On the journey here, I passed from one hemisphere to the other, pausing at zero degrees to take photos and hear the cheerful patter of a roadside opportunist with a pair of painted funnels, one on either side of the line. With practised sleight of hand, he poured water into each. Down it swirled, clockwise in the north, anticlockwise in the south. “It’s the Coriolis effect!” he declared.
Now, as I putter along the channel, it’s my mind that’s spinning. Like a theme park stocked with flocks of animatronics, it’s all too perfect to be true. But on this squiggle of fresh water, roughly 22 miles long and 2,500ft wide, there’s no trickery: it’s a naturally magical spot. “Often, we’ll spot 60 or 70 species of bird on a single excursion,” says Yasin Mubiru, my softly spoken skipper for the afternoon, who lives locally and knows the channel’s natural history inside out.
Many of the birds are so unfazed by our approach that there’s barely any need to reach for my binoculars, and the Kazinga Channel is so calm, you could count the ripples. Though officially a river, its flow is almost imperceptible. Lying within the Albertine Rift, the 750-mile arc of lakes and mountains that separates Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the channel connects two natural basins at a near-identical altitude — Lake Rutanzige (also known by its colonial name, Lake Edward) and Lake Katunguru (also called Lake George). Together, they provide year-round water for the forest-scattered grasslands that surround them: the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area (QECA), Uganda’s most biodiverse protected zone.
The channel bisects this area’s core: the 764sq-mile Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP). Bird-wise, it’s booming. Though smaller than East Africa’s blockbuster safari destinations — Kenya’s Maasai Mara or Tanzania’s Serengeti — QENP harbours considerably more avian species: over 600, in fact, a number that, according to BirdLife International, no protected area in Africa can beat. A relaxed and accessible wildlife haven, it also has low-cost entry fees, friendly guides and an excellent mix of places to stay, ranging from bare-bones accommodation to eco-luxury lodges. If you’re fairly new to safari and have a budding interest in birdwatching, it’s the ideal choice.
A short cruise on the Kazinga Channel is a great way to dip a toe in the water, so to speak. For birdwatching, it’s far less challenging than Uganda’s mist-wreathed forests, where tiny LBJs (twitcher-speak for ‘little brown jobs’) chime like bells from afar, rarely seen. And the megafauna can prove distracting in the tawny protected grasslands; at the slightest whiff of a lion, your companions may forget all thoughts of birds and vote to set off in pursuit. In all respects, the channel offers a pleasing balance. On our waterborne safari, I watch an elephant shaking its mighty ears on the channel’s fringes, spot crocodiles bathing on the banks and hear hippos grunting like portly old gentlemen in the shallows, but it’s the dizzying numbers of birds that impress me most. “There’s plenty of phytoplankton, crustaceans and fish for them to feed on,” says Yasin. It’s little wonder the channel’s a-flutter.
Yasin hails from the village of Kazinga, a fishing settlement at the Rutanzige end of the channel. We ease round a bend to a spot where Kazinga’s barias (fishermen) have hauled their slender wooden boats onto the shore. In the many African parks and reserves where settlements are banned, this would be incongruous, but QENP is different: it’s part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve where rural communities, visitors and wildlife coexist. When the park was created in 1952, its dozen or so villages remained, their residents scratching a living by growing bananas, tending smallholdings and fishing for ngege (Nile tilapia, delicious grilled) or emamba, emale and semutundu (lungfish, mudfish and catfish). Over time, the park’s population has grown.
Local rules allow the barias free rein to fish these peaceful waters, as long as they don’t use harmful gear, such as cheap fine-mesh nets that trap juvenile tilapia. With so many families fishing here and living hand-to-mouth, the restrictions aren’t universally popular, but Yasin sees the benefits. “People have to understand that in the long, run, it’s better for everyone,” he says. “Allowing the fish to mature and reach their full size relatively undisturbed improves yields. It’s better for other wildlife, too, which in turn is good for tourism, of course. And that, for Uganda, is unquestionably the future.”
Protecting forests
Mountain gorillas are the country’s star wildlife attraction, but they are particularly vulnerable. Their stronghold, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, is in the highlands around 30 miles south of QECA’s southern tip. Like all great ape habitats, this rainforest feels uncompromisingly wild. In reality, however, it has a fragility that keeps conservationists awake at night.
This year, it’s three decades since Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) rangers began leading tourists on mountain gorilla-tracking expeditions in Bwindi. UWA partners with local communities in protecting the forest and its gorillas from threats such as mining and logging as well as snares, which are intended for bushpigs and antelopes. Due to the rangers’ diligence, Bwindi’s gorillas increased in number from 300 in the 1990s to 459 in 2018. But there’s still much to be done.
Like QECA, Bwindi lies amid low-income rural populations, but there, the similarity ends. Since 1991, it’s been protected by fortress conservation, whereby forest-dwellers were evicted and unauthorised people kept out. Local development projects do receive a share of park revenues, but at just $18 (£15) from the $740 (£610) each tourist spends on the entrance fee and gorilla permit, the percentage is small.
For Bwindi’s Indigenous Batwa people, the jolt of being uprooted from the forest, their ancestral home, was catastrophic. “The Batwa resent the implication they were poor conservationists, and have been requesting adequate support ever since,” Caleb Kahima tells me at a spirited Batwa cultural show for tourists ready to trek into hills in search of gorillas. The performers re-enact scenes from their forest-dwelling past, when they gathered plants rather than grew them, and procured just enough game and honey for their needs. Kahima, a former UWA conservation officer, chairs Community Initiatives for Biodiversity Conservation, an NGO based on the forest fringes. “We share sustainability skills such as climate-smart organic gardening,” he says. “We also make bricks from discarded bottles, then build 20,000-litre tanks to allow communities to harvest rainwater,” he continues. “This is much more biodiversity-friendly than seeking water in the forest.”
Partly tourist-funded, such initiatives are making life beyond the trees more viable. Gorilla tourism also helps keep UWA afloat. Behind the scenes, however, there’s a feeling that it’s not enough for ape-watching excursions to generate money: they should also be more responsible, ensuring gorillas themselves don’t lose out.
Tracking mountain gorillas can be one of Africa’s most thrilling and rewarding wildlife experiences. After jumping in a vehicle and driving past towering trees and through lush highland plantations, you head into the jungle on foot and are soon assaulted by the ripe, potent scent of vegetation. With every step, anticipation propels you forward, towards that moment when your hour-long encounter with a huge alpha male silverback and his family begins.
Getting close to the animals, however, is a contentious issue. There’s increasing scientific evidence that when tourists approach gorillas, it disturbs their wellbeing and jeopardises their health. Some believe it’s no coincidence that in 2020, when tourists were almost entirely absent, 12 of the 70 or so adult females in Uganda’s tourism-habituated gorilla families gave birth, rather than the normal three to five per year.
UWA insists visitors stay at least 10m away from the gorillas and wear face masks in their presence. The aim is to avoid exposing gorillas to infections or stress-related illnesses and, as head ranger Benson Kanyonyi tells me, to foster respect. “Tourism is important,” he says. “But these animals aren’t just here for us. They belong to the entire world.”
The road to recovery
Mountain gorillas have spent 30 years in the limelight, but they’re by no means the only rare and charismatic creatures in southwest Uganda. Back in QENP, I’m hoping to glimpse some of its feline superstars: lions.
Normally, when scanning for lions, you look down. Often, they’re deep in the shade. But on a late-afternoon drive through the park, my eyes are cast up. It’s partly because the scenery’s so striking, with the Rwenzori Mountains on the horizon and spiky Euphorbia candelabrum succulents silhouetted against the steely sky. But it’s also because the lions I’m looking for climb trees. While I’ve occasionally seen this elsewhere, in QENP it’s a cultural norm, passed from mother to cub. For cats more than twice as heavy as leopards, it’s quite an impressive feat.
QENP received its name in April 1954, to commemorate the young Queen Elizabeth’s first visit. Over the years, it’s suffered what seems an unfair share of setbacks, particularly in the period following Idi Amin’s notorious 1971 coup. During the distress and unrest that followed the installation of the brutal dictator, wildlife poaching was rife. QENP, once magnificent, has been overshadowed by more fortunate East African safari areas ever since. Gradually, however, under UWA’s careful stewardship, the green shoots of recovery have emerged. An aerial survey completed in 2018 counted several thousand elephants, along with healthy numbers of the park’s signature herbivores, buffalos, hippos and Ugandan kob, handsome antelopes that are a crucial food source for lions. The park’s rangers have also forged fresh links with the UK, skill-sharing with Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Hampshire and even creating a Ugandan Queens Park Rangers football team.
We pause at a deep wallow where buffalos lounge contentedly, like mud-caked patrons at a spa. The lions have proved elusive, but it hasn’t dampened the good mood. For QENP’s communities, however, the lions are a serious matter. Despite the ecological benefits that apex predators provide, rural dwellers who consider them threatening persecute them or set snares to poach their prey, sometimes catching them, too. To measure how the area’s lions and other carnivores are coping, South African conservation biologist Alex Braczkowski is leading an annual survey. As well as gathering much-needed data, it will provide conservation education in the community and train young Ugandans in scientific techniques.
Visitors luckier than me can contribute by taking GPS-tagged lion ID photos during their drives, which are then uploaded to a database Alex and his team are compiling. This and several other local conservation projects are tourist-funded via the Volcanoes Safaris Partnership Trust (VSPT), whose regional base overlooks Kyambura Gorge, south of the Kazinga Channel. The gorge, a sun-dappled forested gash in the savannah, is home to a community of around 30 wild chimpanzees. Visit and you may glimpse their knuckle prints, or hear their screeches reverberating through the trees. Like characters in a desert-island saga, the group has become isolated from other chimps by a growing cluster of villages, fanning out from a busy road. American primatologist Nicole Simmons, who’s been monitoring the situation since 2006, reports that only one female chimp from elsewhere has successfully found its way into the gorge and joined the group, making inbreeding almost inevitable.
For the villagers, chimps make rowdy neighbours, but VSPT is helping to bring harmony. To explain, Partnership Trust guide Saidi Kakuru takes me on a stroll to the nearby Volcanoes Community Conservation Centre, home to several thriving agribusiness projects.
Donning protective gear, we visit the Omumashaka Bee Keepers Cooperative, watching as puffs of smoke from smouldering eucalyptus chips and banana fronds send the bees into a daze. We learn about organic coffee-growing with the Kyambura Women’s Coffee Cooperative, an enterprise run by disadvantaged local women, many of whom are widows or living with HIV. Their flourishing arabica and robusta crops adjoin an area of mixed planting that separates the villagers’ smallholdings from the gorge. “We’re very proud of this buffer zone,” says Saidi. “We’ve planted it with indigenous trees including figs, the chimps’ favourite food, to deter them from raiding banana and maize plots, and it’s been a total success.”
Even more ambitiously, VSPT and the Jane Goodall Institute want to create a new wildlife corridor connecting Kyambura Gorge to Maramagambo Forest, a prime chimp habitat, around four miles away. If successful, it could prove a lifeline for the Kyambura chimps. And as with the many other future-focused initiatives that are blossoming in southwest Uganda, there’s every reason to hope.
Getting there & around
There are no direct flights between the UK and Uganda. RwandAir flies from Heathrow to Entebbe via Kigali in neighbouring Rwanda six times per week.
Average flight time: 11h.
Alternatives include Ethiopian Airlines via Addis Ababa, Kenya Airways via Nairobi and Qatar Airways via Doha (all 12h or more).
Stays at safari lodges often include road transfers or domestic flights. It’s also possible to self-drive; it takes seven to 10 hours from Entebbe to Queen Elizabeth National Park or Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP). Driving between the parks takes at least two hours. AeroLink Uganda flies from Entebbe to Kasese (for northern QENP) or Kihihi (for BINP and southern QENP); flights take between 1hr 5m and 1hr 35m.
When to go
Southwest Uganda is a year-round destination. Queen Elizabeth National Park is hot all year, with daytime temperatures around 25–29C. Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is milder: it’s normally 20–23C by day and cool by night. October to November are the rainiest months.
More info
Uganda — Bradt Travel Guide (edition 9). £17.99
How to do it
Volcanoes Safaris offers a seven-day southwest Uganda safari, including three nights at Kyambura Gorge Lodge and three nights at Volcanoes Bwindi Lodge, from US$11,180 (£9,019) per person full board based on two people sharing, including domestic flights, private transfers, safari drive in Queen Elizabeth National Park, one gorilla trekking permit and excursions. Excludes international flights.
This story was created with the support of Volcanoes Safaris.
Published in the December 2023 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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