Queen Elizabeth National Park

Clearly a visit to East Africa isn’t completely without a game drive. My mother visited me twice in Tanzania and had already seen the big animals, but we decided to spend a day in Queen Elizabeth National Park since it was close by. In a hired car from Fort Portal we tooled about the Kasenyi Plains and didn’t see much other than two new species of ungulate, the Ugandan kob and Defassa waterbuck. As we were pulling out of the plains a car stopped to look at something. We drove up to them and they said a group of lions was hanging out in the bushes. We couldn’t see the lions, so our driver took us around the corner on another road. Standing on top of the car and using Mom’s binoculars he found one lion in the distance—sitting in a tree! Our pathetic game drive was rewarded with a view of a rare tree-climbing lion’s butt.

Anne's mom at the equator.

Ugandan kob

Defassa waterbuck

Bird

Lion butt in tree (look for the tail).

The main reason we went to the park was to take a boat down the Kazinga Channel that connects two large lakes. As the tour boat chugged along we watched hippos and buffalos in the water and identified new birds. The pouring rain didn’t detract from the scenery and sightings much, and at the end of the journey we were lucky enough to see a few more lions in the distance and a herd of elephants very close up. It wasn’t the most exciting of our park visits, but it was nice.

Cape buffalo in pouring rain with lots of birds in the background.

Elephant bath time.

Drying out after the storm.