How to get to Queen Elizabeth National Park

Mweya to Ishasha is a half day, in each direction

Allow half a day each way, with two and a half to three hours as the floor in dry conditions. The figure of about two hours sits on almost every operator site without a source attached, and it does not survive contact with the road. The surface is murram and the limit inside the park is 40 km per hour.

We are not going to give you one distance, because no single figure is hard. The Ministry of Works and Transport calls the Katunguru to Ishasha corridor 87 km in its own press notice of 14 August 2026 about an inspection round. A parliamentary list of 11 June 2025 gives 88 km. The Ramboll report published by the ministry puts the Ishasha boundary about 90 km from the Katunguru bridge. Starting at Mweya adds roughly 20 km before you even reach Katunguru. Routing calculations over the real road network on 18 September 2026 return about 107 km, which matches the official parts added together, since the sector runs for tens of kilometres from its northern gate to its southern one.

The surface is still murram. At the ministry this road sits under maintenance and not under construction: the August 2026 inspection notice lists it with the Road Maintenance department. Tarmac appears on the list of roads to be surfaced in the State of the Nation Address of 5 June 2025, and then appears in neither the budget speech for 2025/26 nor the road programme for 2026/27. Promised, unfunded, and not begun.

The practical consequence is that Ishasha does not work as a day trip from Mweya. A day spent on the road there and back, in a park where the cats are active early and late, leaves you nothing. Sleep at or near Ishasha, or take the sector as a stop on the way to or from Bwindi.

Free-flow means an empty road at the posted limit. In western Uganda that is a floor rather than an estimate, because of the murram, the villages, the livestock and the rain damage.

Uganda has no official road numbers

If you read that you should take the A5 to Katunguru or the A2 to Fort Portal, that numbering comes from OpenStreetMap. Uganda does not publish route numbers for its national roads, and no ministry document uses them. Official papers name a road and give its length.

What Uganda does have is a functional class letter, which describes what a road is for rather than where it goes: A for a trunk route, B for a major arterial, C for a minor arterial, D for a collector street and E for an access street. That table sits in the ministry's Urban Roads Design Manual of July 2023, table 2.50, published on works.go.ug on 16 April 2026. An A in that system is a category, and it never carries a number after it.

So call the roads what the ministry calls them. The Mbarara to Kasese road. The Katunguru to Ishasha road. The Mityana to Mubende road. That also makes it easier to match what you read here against Ugandan news reports, which use names as well.

UNRA no longer exists

The Uganda National Roads Authority was abolished. President Museveni signed the UNRA (Repeal) Act 2024 on 18 December 2024, and Allen Kagina handed over the authority's assets on 30 December 2024. Its work now sits with the Ministry of Works and Transport, in the Department of National Roads.

The domain unra.go.ug does not resolve, checked on 18 September 2026. The live official site is works.go.ug. Any page that still sends you to UNRA for road conditions, contracts or project status is describing an organisation that was wound up more than a year ago, and it is a fair signal that the rest of that page is equally old.

Two routes from Kampala, and they are not equal

Take the southern route unless Kibale or Fort Portal is on your list. Both routes run about the same distance and both have problems, and the problems on the northern route are worse.

UWA's park page puts Queen Elizabeth about 410 km west of Kampala and says the direct drive takes at least 7 to 8 hours. UWA's brochure gives 410 km via Fort Portal and 420 km via Mbarara and Bushenyi. A routing calculation on 18 September 2026 returns 410 km at 6.1 hours free-flow. Operators publish 5 to 6 or 6 to 7 hours, and one gives the distance as 460 km, which conflicts with UWA's own figure. The 7 to 8 hours is what the authority itself says, and given the road conditions below it is also the realistic one.

The southern route, stretch by stretch

• Kampala to Masaka, about 127 km. The bottleneck is the 20 km through the Lwera swamp between Mpigi and Kalungu, under reconstruction since 2025 with one-way traffic and heavy queues. The cause is old culverts that were left in place at an earlier rehabilitation and are now subsiding, together with sand mining and rice growing that have changed the drainage. The contractor is CCCC. On 30 December 2025 traffic at Mpigi stood for more than twelve hours and drivers spent the night on the road.
• Traffic counts on that stretch conflict. Daily Monitor reported about 30,000 vehicles a day on 22 May 2026, against 20,908 in a count dated 19 November 2025.
• The Katonga bridge was washed away in the flooding of May 2023. On 22 May 2026 it was described as nearing completion, with traffic running over a temporary steel bridge alongside the old concrete one. There is a contradiction in the record worth carrying with you: in January 2025 the contractor was instructed to finish by July 2027.
• The Busega to Mpigi Expressway, 23.7 km, is not open and will not help you. Construction stalled in early 2025 and resumed on 16 July 2026, with completion now planned for the end of 2029. The cost has doubled from Shs547.5 billion to over Shs1.2 trillion and the Inspectorate of Government is investigating. There is no expressway at all between Mpigi and Masaka.
• Masaka to Mbarara, 138 km. Unconfirmed. We found no current rehabilitation project and no Ugandan press complaint about the surface for 2024 to 2026, which is not the same as evidence that it is fine. Plan for an ordinary Ugandan trunk road.
• Mbarara to Ishaka. The length is itself disputed: 59 km in the ministry's own report, 61 km in UNRA contract management records. The condition is bad and officially acknowledged as bad. Speaker Anita Among named this road on 6 August 2025 among the once functional roads now in disrepair. In May 2023 residents blocked it with tree branches and called it a death trap. On 8 September 2026 Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa announced that a reconstruction contract worth Shs249 billion had been approved, with China Railway 18th Group as contractor. No start date and no timeline were given.
• Ishaka to Katunguru, 58 km. Good and recent. It was rehabilitated between October 2017 and 2020 by Mota-Engil, financed entirely by the Ugandan state, and commissioned by President Museveni on 15 December 2020. It runs from Ishaka through Rubirizi to Katunguru on the Kazinga Channel, straight through the park. The published cost conflicts between Shs118 billion and Shs188 billion, and both figures are in circulation.

The northern route, and why it is the worse one

The 86 km from Mityana to Mubende is the problem. The contract went to EnergoProjekt in 2021 for Shs395 billion, with completion due in 2024, later extended to 2027. On 12 June 2026 Minister of State for Works Fred Byamukama set a hard deadline of March 2027 or termination, and stated publicly that Ugandan officials had taken 6 per cent at signature and a further 3 per cent on each payment certificate.

On 17 August 2026 Deputy Speaker Tayebwa apologised in public after a fatal crash at Kagavu on this road. According to the police, the lorry driver swerved to avoid a pothole and lost control of the vehicle.

None of that makes the route unusable, and it is still the right choice if you want the chimpanzees at Kibale or the Rwenzori on the same trip. It does mean you should not treat the two approaches as interchangeable on the map. One more thing waits for you at the end of it: the surface between Kikorongo and Kasese is cracking and subsiding, which we cover on the Kasese page.

The gates, including two that UWA's own website leaves out

UWA's website names five gates: Katunguru, Kabatoro, Kasenyi, Ishasha and Katerera. Its own printed brochure adds a sixth, the Crater Gate at Queen's Pavilion by the equator markers. Mapping data checked on 18 September 2026 shows a seventh, the Katookye gate at the northern end of the Ishasha sector, which appears on neither UWA list.

Gate hours are the one thing UWA states plainly, and it states them for the park as a whole rather than gate by gate: 07:00 to 19:00, in the park rules section of the tariff booklet.

Unconfirmed: the exact position and opening hours of Kasenyi and Katerera, and which gate counts as the main one. UWA does not rank them. Mapping data labels Kabatoro as the main park gate while the park headquarters sit at Katunguru.

The public road through the park, and the free transit claim

Operators write that anyone may drive the Mbarara to Kasese road through the park without paying entry. UWA itself says nothing about it, neither on its park page nor anywhere in the tariff booklet, so there is no official document that states it and none that contradicts it.

There is one piece of indirect evidence, and it is considerably stronger than an operator claim. In the Ugandan Parliament on 2 October 2024, MPs led by Gilbert Olanya argued that charging transit traffic through Murchison Falls was unfair while people in western Uganda drive through Lake Mburo and Queen Elizabeth for nothing. The Minister of State for Wildlife, Martin Mugarra Bahinduka, did not dispute that point. He defended Murchison as the exception, on the grounds that its road was built as a tourist road. A minister letting the claim stand unchallenged in Parliament is not a policy statement about Queen Elizabeth, and we are recording it as exactly that and no more.

For comparison, Murchison did levy a transit charge, from Shs20,000 to Shs500,000 by vehicle size, and President Museveni scrapped it for non-tourists on 5 October 2024.

What UWA does price is turning off that road. A self-guided game drive is a chargeable product at 10 dollars per vehicle per day, which implies that leaving the highway for the game tracks needs a ticket. The other park rules that apply to you on the road are simple enough: stay on the tracks, and keep to 40 km per hour.

The Katunguru bridge is being replaced

The existing 60 metre bridge over the Kazinga Channel is to be replaced by a new 225 metre structure built to a climate-resilient specification. The contractor is Centunion Espanola S.A., with Spanish export credit finance through SGIFI.

The reason sits in an independent review by Ramboll dated July 2025 and published by the Ministry of Works on 28 April 2026. It found eroded foundations, vegetation blocking the flow openings and insufficient clearance because of rising lake levels, and judged the bridge not resilient to rising water in extreme rainfall.

This is the only road crossing of the channel. Expect works, and allow for delay there on any day you plan to cross.

Vehicles, 4x4 and what the gate charges

• Entry for a foreign non-resident adult is 40 dollars, and 20 dollars for a child aged 5 to 15. The ticket runs 24 hours from the moment you enter rather than to the end of the day.
• Vehicle entry is charged separately and by vehicle type, per 24 hours. A foreign-registered saloon car is 40 dollars. A foreign-registered 4x4 or tour company vehicle is 150 dollars. A Ugandan-registered 4x4 is UGX 30,000. That gap is the biggest single cost decision on this trip, and most self-drivers here are in a 4x4.
• The 10 dollar vehicle surcharge that people remember applies to Murchison Falls only. There is no Queen Elizabeth surcharge.
• A self-guided game drive is 10 dollars per vehicle per day. A guide is 25 dollars per guide for a foreign non-resident, charged per guide rather than per person.
• Mweya sits 8 km from tarmac at Kabatoro, and in the dry season that is comfortable in a two-wheel drive. The wet season on that stretch is unconfirmed.
• Ishasha and the road down to it are murram, and 4x4 is advised. One self-drive source reports the route as occasionally impassable in heavy rain.
• Motorcycles are prohibited in the protected areas, along with trailers and vehicles carrying flammable goods, livestock, produce, poles, timber, sand or market goods, unless they are delivering a service inside the park or hold written permission from the Executive Director.
• The current tariff booklet lists only electronic payment methods: mobile money through MTN MoMo Pay and Airtel Money Pay, card machines, bank transfer and the online portal. Cash is not among them, although UWA's own brochure still says shillings, dollars, pounds, euros and Visa are accepted. The two documents disagree and we could not resolve it. The UWA payment portal at pay.ugandawildlife.org refused connections on 18 September 2026.

Coming from or going on to Bwindi

UWA's brochure places Ishasha directly on the route to and from Buhoma, which it puts 62 km further south. A routing calculation on 18 September 2026 gives Buhoma to Ishasha as 54 km at 1.3 hours, which conflicts with UWA's 62 km, and gives Buhoma to Mweya as 157 km at 3.8 hours and Rushaga to Mweya as 178 km at 4.6 hours.

The roads around Kihihi, Kanungu and Buhoma are largely unsurfaced or compacted in the mapping data, so those free-flow times are optimistic in the same way as everything else on this page. What the figures do show clearly is that the northern side of Bwindi is far better placed for a Queen Elizabeth combination than the southern side. If you are choosing a gorilla sector and Queen Elizabeth comes next, that difference is worth several hours.

Why the roads are like this

Uganda has 6,287.6 km of paved road, about 30 per cent of the national network, against 3,112 km in 2010/11. Those figures are from the budget speech of 12 June 2025. The growth is real, and so is the backlog behind it.

General Katumba Wamala has put 2,460 km of the paved main network in need of urgent maintenance, with a further 300 to 500 km falling into a more expensive state of repair within a year if nothing is done. The ministry asked for Shs3.153 trillion for 2025/26 and received Shs682 billion, which is 22 per cent of the request. In July 2025, 27 projects were stalled.

The safety picture follows from that. Uganda recorded 26,044 crashes and 5,383 deaths in 2025, against 25,107 crashes in 2024. Long days, tired drivers and night driving are the part of this you control.

Sources

• Ministry of Works and Transport, national roads
• MoWT Urban Roads Design Manual, July 2023, table 2.50 (PDF)
• Third party review of the Katunguru bridge project, published by MoWT April 2026 (PDF)
• Daily Monitor: government clears Shs249b Mbarara to Ishaka road contract
• Daily Monitor: Katonga bridge nears completion
• The Independent: construction and flood damage cause traffic delays on the Kampala to Masaka and Mityana roads
• ChimpReports: motorists trapped for over 12 hours at Mpigi
• The Observer: government apologises for delayed Mubende road works
• The Independent: minister backs UWA on charges for using the special road through Murchison park, 2 October 2024
• Nile Post: seismic fault lines threaten the Kikorongo to Kasese road
• UWA: Queen Elizabeth National Park
• UWA Queen Elizabeth park brochure with map (PDF)
• UWA Conservation Tariff, July 2024 to June 2026 (PDF)