Murchinson Falls National Park

Murchinson Falls is Uganda’s largest National Park! People come here to explore the amazing wildlife, experience the beauty of the Nile and to see the powerful water falls. The park actually used to have some of the highest number of animals living there, including about 15 000 elephants! Unfortunately, poachers and troops wiped out most of the wildlife at one point. So today there are no rhinos there, but other wildlife such as antelopes, impalas, elephants, giraffes, buffalos, baboons, warthogs, hippos and crocodiles  have all returned to the park. If one is lucky one can also see lions, leopards and cheetahs.

On Friday we packed up the car and started the 5-6 hour drive to Murchinson. Once we made it there and paid the park entrance fee it started to get dark very fast. We still had to actually drive through the National Park to get to the lodge we were staying at, so once the sun had gone down I think we were the only car left inside the park. The roads were not excatly the greatest and with the many different animals sounds it was quite exciting driving through the park by ourselves. The first night we stayed at the Nile Safari Lodge were we had a great meal and then went to bed early as we had a long day in front of us. However, as we were simply staying in wooden huts the sounds of wild animlas, especially from the hippos and the monkeys, were so loud and kept us up most of the night! It sounded like they were having a party at night with the birds singing as their music :)

  

The National Park just before dark & an outside shower at the lodge

The next morning we took a quick little game drive before we checked in at the Paraa Safari Lodge where we were going to stay for our second night. This lodge has more like hotel rooms and so we managed to get a good night sleep. Although, that night we could hear the elephants right outside the hotel! While having dinner we had seen them just at the border of the hotel garden so they must have been around there all night. We also saw a hippo on the lawn right outside our hotel room just before we went to bed. I’m glad our rooms were on the second floor haha :)

                                 On the ferry crossing the Nile & me driving for the first time in Uganda! (it took some time to get used to driving on the left side)

While in Murchinson we took a Nile launch trip. This is a 3 hour boat trip to the falls. The game viewing on the way there is absolutely excellent as many of the animals come down to the river for a drink of water. The amount of hippos there was amazing, they were simply everywheres! We also saw many crocodiles relaxing on the edge of the river, they lay so still that they don’t even look real.

 

                         

Hippos :)

     

      

    

Look at those teeth!

 

Flock of elephants :)

After our boat trip we still had some time to take a swim in the hotel pool and enjoy a drink at the swim up bar before we watched the beautiful sunset over the Nile.

 

The next day we got up really early and went for a morning game drive through the park. We decided not to have a guide and just explore on our own. The landscape and the way the light hits it in the morning is stunning. Unfortunately we did not see any lions this time, but plenty of other animals. Thanks to the lovely couple from Spain who came with us for the weekend I got most of these great pictures on here from them as they had a much better camera than we did. It had a really good zoom, but we actually got very close to most of these animals, and many of them were either sitting on the road or crossing it when we came driving.

 

 

How cute is this! Mama baboon taking care of her baby baboon :)

 

 

We had such a wonderful weekend in Murchinson Falls National Park. I recommend anyone who comes to Uganda to visit it because you get too see so many different things in one park (wildlife, savannah landscape, forest, waterfalls and the Nile river) compared to other parks which might not have waterfalls or different types of landscape. Also, Murchinson is not as crowded with tourists as so many other parks are. We encountered very few cars and it basically felt like we were the only ones inside the park! Here are a couple of pictures of how the car looked like after a fun weekend driving around the park :)