The cheapest way in
At The River Ishasha
The cheapest bed in the Ishasha sector, a few minutes outside the park on the Ntungwe, with camping from $10 and platforms for rooftop tents.
Uganda · national park since 1952
Queen Elizabeth National Park Independent Guides & Information
A channel between two lakes with more hippo along it than most people have ever seen in one place, and a southern sector famous for lions resting in fig trees. Those two are a long stretch of murram apart. Most of what is written about this park treats it as one destination, and it is five of them, hours from each other.
Photo: Duncan Wright (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The UWA tariff read line by line, including the ten places it contradicts itself
Every lodge with the sector it is in and whether it is inside the park boundary
Real drive times between the sectors, measured rather than copied
Climate normals by month, for a park with no genuinely dry season
Where Queen Elizabeth National Park is, and which gate you want
Queen Elizabeth is 410 km and seven to eight hours from Kampala to Mweya, with the Ishasha lion sector a further half day south on murram that is still under maintenance. Kasese and Mbarara are the two towns visitors use to reach its gates, on opposite sides of a park that is really five destinations rather than one.
- 1 Katunguru Park Gate On the Mbarara to Kasese highway where it crosses the Kazinga Channel; park headquarters are here
- 2 Kabatoro Gate Signed by UWA as the main park gate, about 8 km from Mweya
- 3 Crater Gate, Queen's Pavilion By the equator markers, at the far end of the 27 km Crater Drive from Kabatoro. Named in the brochure but not on UWA's website list
- 4 Katookye Park Gate The northern gate of the Ishasha sector. Absent from UWA's website list and spelled Katokye by some operators
- 5 Ishasha Sector Offices The southern sector, known for lions resting in fig trees
- 6 Southern Gate, Ishasha The gate on the route towards Buhoma and Bwindi
- Pan with a hide or viewing platform
- Dam
- Gate or barrier on the map
- Tarred trunk road
Why this guide exists, and where the numbers come from
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So this guide runs on the park authority's own tariff document rather than a copied operator page, on thirty-year climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps tell us directly. Every claim carries a date. Where UWA is silent, so are we, apart from saying that it is silent.
Nothing here is for sale. Listing a camp is free and no position on any page can be bought. Some outbound links earn us a small commission, and that changes neither the order of a list nor a single figure on these pages.
Found something out of date? Tell us and it changes the same week.
Where to stay in Queen Elizabeth National Park
Forty-two places to stay, scattered across five sectors hours apart. These four are not the best four; they are the four that mark out the range.
The park authority's own beds
Mweya Hostel
Old institute buildings on the Mweya peninsula, inside the park boundary and a short walk from the launch jetty, though confirm who is actually taking the booking.
The sensible middle
Ishasha Jungle Lodge
Two kilometres from the Katokye gate, so nights here carry no entry ticket, with the fig tree lions a short drive away.
The top end
The River Station
On the Kazinga Channel in the Kyambura Wildlife Reserve, with a plunge pool on every room and two shared activities a day included.
Everything you need to plan a visit
Entry fees
$40 a head per 24 hours, $30 for the Kazinga cruise, and the $150 line for a foreign-registered 4x4 that almost nobody flags to self-drivers.
→How far is Ishasha, really
The works ministry calls the Katunguru to Ishasha corridor 87 km, and you add about 20 km from Mweya to reach Katunguru. It is unpaved, inside a 40 km/h park. Plan half a day, not the two hours that circulates.
→Where to stay, by sector
Mweya, Kasenyi, Ishasha, Kyambura and Katwe are hours apart. Every entry says which sector and whether it is inside the boundary.
→When to come
This park has no truly dry month. June and July are the only reliable window, and April brings 339 mm. Real climate normals, month by month.
→Our own research
We priced every park in Africa
We collect the official tariff of every park we cover, convert it, and hold each one to the same standard day. Twenty-nine parks are in the index now, the famous ones included. These three pages come out of that table.
The most expensive safari parks in Africa
Ngorongoro charges $278 for a standard day and $148 of that is the descent into the crater. The ranking straight down, with the line item behind each number.
See the ranking →The most expensive parks for self-drivers
One person, one car, no one to split the vehicle fee or the campsite with. Uganda's foreign-vehicle tariff turns the order upside down.
See the self-drive ranking →Africa's most expensive published safari beds
The highest nightly rates any camp in our network puts in writing, and why the real top of the market names no price at all.
See the rates →