Murchison Falls is Uganda’s biggest park by a wide margin, and the falls themselves are the reason it exists: the Victoria Nile, having flowed placidly across most of the country, is forced through a basalt gap seven to eight metres wide and thrown 43 metres down into what early travellers called the Devil’s Cauldron. The noise reaches the viewpoint before the water comes into sight.
Below the falls, the river widens back out and becomes the park’s main wildlife corridor. A boat cruise to the base of the falls passes hippos in numbers that run into the thousands, along with Nile crocodiles sunning on the banks and, with reasonable luck, a shoebill standing motionless in the papyrus. Game drives across the northern savannah cover elephant, lion, giraffe and buffalo, while Budongo Forest on the park’s southern edge adds chimpanzee tracking to a itinerary otherwise built around open country.
Murchison Falls was gazetted in 1952, survived a rough patch of poaching in the 1970s, and has recovered into one of the region’s most complete parks — savannah, forest and river habitat inside a single boundary, at close to 3,900 square kilometres including the surrounding conservation area.
Two to three nights allows a falls cruise, a savannah game drive and a Budongo chimp trek without rushing any of them. Murchison sits far enough north that most visitors treat it as a standalone few days from Kampala rather than a stop on a longer southern circuit.
Park entry fees and gorilla and chimp permits in Uganda are set by the Uganda Wildlife Authority.
