This is the eighth in a series of nine posts covering our 13-day tour around Uganda with Mountain Gorilla Coffee Tours (“MGCT”).
After we left Kisoro, we headed for Lake Mburo National Park. Our path took us past scenic Lake Bunyoni, where we stopped to admire the view.
We had two game drives (our final ones on this trip!) at Lake Mburo National Park: one in the late afternoon after we had checked into our accommodation (sort of, see discussion supra regarding the latest accommodation shenanigans) and one the following morning. The morning game drive was particularly interesting because a layer of fog was hanging low to the ground, giving everything a mysterious air.
We saw a greater variety of animals at Lake Mburo than we had at Queen Elizabeth National Park.
We saw several types of antelope that we either hadn’t seen thus far or hadn’t seen close up, including bushbucks, topis, and elands. Alas, the elands, which are the largest of the antelope species, were behind some trees a distance away – we could only squint at them through binoculars.1
Lake Mburo National Park was the only park we visited in Uganda with zebras. No matter how many times we see zebras, I still can’t stop marveling at their stripes.
There were also several species of birds in Lake Mburo National Park that were new to us.
Of course, some of our favorites were still present.
One of the most interesting animals we saw in this section of Uganda wasn’t even inside the park. It was the Ankole long-horned cattle, with horns so huge that it’s a wonder they can even hold their heads up.
Where We Stayed:
☆ Eagle’s Nest. Three-and-a-half goats. Take this rating with a bit of salt, as our accommodation near Lake Mburo National Park was something of a debacle, for reasons that were not the fault of the Eagle’s Nest. In fact, Eagle’s Nest tried to make things better. Anyway: Because we joined our group so late in the busy season, the existing reservation for our traveling companions couldn’t be expanded to include us. Eagle’s Nest offered to set up a tent for us, but we opted to stay instead at another place inside the park while our companions stayed at Eagle’s Nest. There was some mix-up with the other place, and, after a great deal of confusion, they revealed they had given away our lodging. We returned to Eagle’s Nest to stay in the tent they had offered to us initially, which was actually quite nice: it was a large tent set up with actual beds that were comfortable. The bathroom situation was less than ideal: I didn’t care for the bag-shower (particularly the part where we had to wait for someone to load the bag with hot water) or the eco-toilet that wasn’t your usual compost toilet. I was also less than enthused by the set menu, served buffet-style, at a vague time.
1 Eland fans will have to settle for the shots of them we got in Namibia during our visit to the AfriCat Foundation.
