Over dinner at the Ruwenzori View Guesthouse the conversation turned to the experience of driving to Murchison Falls National Park from Fort Portal. Two couples had done the more straightforward route, but it took them 11 hours. After considering just how many things can go wrong on an 11 hour drive we decided to break it up by driving south then turning north.
After Jim miraculously fixed the battery cable that broke (and stopped us dead in the water) we drove half a day south of Kibale to Lake Mburo National Park. The area surrounding the lake resembles the big hobby farms of the western US. Ankole cattle, the unique Ugandan breed with enormous horns, are raised here in huge numbers and only the really rich could possibly own this many cows. The line between farm and park is fluid as we have seen in much of Uganda. The lake is lovely and birdlife is prolific.

Moving on, it took another three days to reach Murchison – Lake Nabugabo and the town of Masindi provided the stopovers. At Lake Nabugabo the noisy Black-Casqued Horn bills squawked  repeatedly and loudly from dawn to dusk. They would have been annoying if they weren’t birds. However, in Masindi town at the long-running Masindi Hotel (famous for  Katherine Hepburn residing there while filming The Africa Queen) birds were not the problem. It was the ridiculously loud speakers on the street that rang out terrible pop music from 6:30am to well after midnight. An assault on the senses that drowned out the song birds, this relentless barrage of bad taste made us grit our teeth and leave town as quickly as we could. We’d been warned that Ugandans love their loud speakers but this was beyond the pale. Even the out-of-tune screeching of the call to prayers in Zambia held no candle to this. Too bad, Masindi is a lovely town but you’ll want to be deaf to live there.

At last, we came to the Nile. The Nile dominates Murchison Falls National Park. One of the world’s seven great rivers, here in Murchison all of the Nile’s water pours through a crevasse only 24 feet wide and  80 feet deep forming the park’s namesake. All that water channeled into one tight spot – now that is a rock and a hard place. We imagine kayakers standing at the top (and you can stand right at the top of the drop) calculating which run to take. Haha. If the falls doesn’t kill you (and it will) the crocs at the bottom will find you numb and delicious.  We traveled up the river by boat to experience another view of the falls: it is quite spectacular. If the Nile is running very high the falls become washed out but on our visit the water was showing the best drama. That will change. The rainy season is upon us.

Only the campsite locations detracted from thoroughly enjoying the whole of this Park. There is camping allowed in two places, both of them at the southern end of the park. Being Uganda’s largest park, it is problematic to game-drive it and make it back to camp before dark. We spent most of our visit near the Nile and did the far end of the park on our exit day. We encountered so many giraffe that morning, we nearly stayed another day just to play with them. Still, there is more to see in Uganda so on we went.