Queen Elizabeth National Park

Listen first. Somewhere out in the tall grass, a hippo grunts — a deep, rolling sound, like laughter from under the ground. The air smells of warm dust and wet reeds. Above you, the sky is wide and pale, and on a clear day, a line of mountains rises far to the north. Welcome to Queen Elizabeth National Park, in the far west of Uganda, where the savanna meets two great lakes.

You have probably travelled here from Mbarara, the busy market city of the southwest. The drive takes a few hours. Along the way, the land changes. Banana plantations and long-horned Ankole cattle give way to open grassland, candelabra trees, and a sense of space. By the time you reach the park, the towns have thinned out. What remains is the old shape of the Albertine Rift — the western arm of the great valley that splits East Africa.

That rift is the key to everything you see here. Over a very long time, the ground stretched and sank. Water filled the low places and formed Lake George and Lake Edward. Volcanic activity punched holes into the earth and left crater lakes behind. Rain from the Rwenzori Mountains fed the rivers. The result is a park with savanna, swamp, forest, and open water side by side. That mix is why so many different animals live here.

Now a little history. The park was created in 1952 under the name Kazinga National Park. Two years later, in 1954, it was renamed to mark a visit by Queen Elizabeth the Second. Here is a detail many visitors miss. In the 1970s, during the rule of Idi Amin, the park briefly carried another name — Rwenzori National Park. Later, the royal name returned. So the name on your map has changed hands more than once.

At the centre of the park is the Kazinga Channel. It is a natural waterway that links Lake George in the east with Lake Edward in the west. If you take a boat trip, you will understand why people come here. Hippos crowd the shallows, sometimes in groups so close together that they look like a row of grey stones. Buffalo stand knee-deep in the mud. Elephants walk down to the bank to drink, and crocodiles lie still in the sun.

The birds along the channel are just as busy. Pied kingfishers hover above the water and then drop like small arrows. Fish eagles sit on dead branches and call with a sharp, high cry. Cormorants spread their wings to dry. Birdwatchers often name this park as one of the richest in the region. More than six hundred bird species have been recorded across its different habitats. That is a remarkable number for one protected area.

On the grasslands, the animal you will see most often is the Uganda kob. It is a reddish-brown antelope, and the males carry curved, ringed horns. The kob appears on Uganda's national coat of arms. Watch them carefully. Males often defend small patches of ground, and females move between these patches to choose a mate. Where there are kob, there are often lions nearby, waiting low in the grass.

This brings us to the park's most surprising residents. In the southern sector, called Ishasha, lions climb trees. They rest along the thick branches of large fig and acacia trees during the heat of the day. Lions in most places do not do this often. Nobody is fully certain why these lions do. Some people suggest the branches offer a cooler breeze, or relief from biting flies, or a better view of the kob below. Whatever the reason, a lion asleep in a tree is a sight that stays with you.

The park also has a deep green secret. Kyambura Gorge is a narrow valley cut into the flat savanna. From the rim, you look down into a strip of thick forest, with a river running along the bottom. Chimpanzees live in this gorge. Because the forest is so narrow and so isolated, the group here lives almost like an island community. Walking down into the gorge feels like entering another country — cooler, darker, and full of birdsong.

In the north of the park, the land changes again. This is the area of the explosion craters. The road climbs over high ridges, and on either side, round bowls open in the ground. Some hold lakes. Others are dry and covered in grass. Here is the second surprise for many visitors. The equator runs through this park. Somewhere on your journey, you will likely cross from one hemisphere to the other.

People live here too, and that is important to understand. Several fishing villages sit inside the park, along the shores of the lakes. Near the town of Katwe, people have harvested salt from a crater lake for generations. The work is hard. Workers stand in the salty water and collect crystals by hand. This is not a park emptied of human life. It is a landscape where wildlife and communities share the same ground, and that balance is not always easy.

The park is also part of a wider protected landscape. It connects with forests and reserves around it, and across the border with Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Animals do not stop at borders. Elephants and other wildlife move between these areas. UNESCO has also recognised the park as part of a biosphere reserve, a programme that looks at how people and nature can live together over the long term.

Now, stop for a moment. Look around you. Notice the colour of the grass — gold, green, or burnt brown, depending on the season. Listen for the hippos, the eagles, or the wind in the acacias. Feel the heat on your skin and the dust under your feet. As you move on, keep your eyes on the edges — the shade under a tree, the bank of the channel, the line of the horizon. That is where this park keeps its quiet surprises.