The rains, without the myths
Queen Elizabeth in the green season: what actually changes
This park never dries out, so the green season here is a matter of degree rather than a separate half of the year. What the wetter months do change is the murram, the flight schedule, the price of a bed and the birds in front of you. This page works through each of those from our own weather data.
If you only want the answer
The green season in Queen Elizabeth is March to May and October to November, with April the wettest month of the year at 339 mm over 18 rain days and October the second peak at 241 mm over 13. Nothing closes. The $40 entry fee and the $30 Kazinga Channel launch cost the same in April as in July, and no seasonal park discount is published. Three things do change. Aerolink drops to one flight each way per day in March, April, May and November. The murram south to the Ishasha sector, about 109 km from Mweya, gets slow to impassable without a 4x4. And the lodges that publish a low season put it in April, May and November, which is where the real saving sits. October is the odd month out: it is the second wettest of the year and keeps both the full flight schedule and, at most places, full rates.
Two peaks on top of a floor that never reaches zero
The useful thing to understand about the rains in Queen Elizabeth is that they sit on top of a baseline that never goes away. The driest month of the year, June, still averages 18 mm. The second driest, July, averages 24 mm. From there the year rises through January at 32 mm, February at 36 mm, August at 53 mm and December at 70 mm to the months that are properly wet: September 103 mm, May 175 mm, November 188 mm, March 213 mm, October 241 mm and April 339 mm.
That gives two wet peaks a year, in April and October, separated by the short June and July gap and the longer December to February gap. It is a classic equatorial pattern and it is the reason advice written for parks in Zambia or Zimbabwe does not transfer here. UWA's own reading of its Mweya station names March, April, May and August to November as the wet months and calls the rest dry, which agrees on the shape while putting the boundaries in slightly different places.
The practical consequence is that the wetter months change the logistics and the prices more than they change the wildlife. The elephants, the buffalo, the Uganda kob and the hippos are still here in April. What is different is how long it takes to reach them, how many flights there are, and what a bed costs.
| Month | Average max | Rainfall | Rain days | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 28.3 °C | 32 mm | 2 | Drier, hot |
| February | 29.4 °C | 36 mm | 3 | Drier, hottest |
| March | 28.1 °C | 213 mm | 12 | Rains arrive |
| April | 26.8 °C | 339 mm | 18 | First peak |
| May | 27.2 °C | 175 mm | 11 | Easing |
| June | 27.3 °C | 18 mm | 1 | Driest month |
| July | 26.9 °C | 24 mm | 1 | Second driest |
| August | 27.6 °C | 53 mm | 5 | The turn |
| September | 28.3 °C | 103 mm | 8 | Building again |
| October | 27.3 °C | 241 mm | 13 | Second peak |
| November | 26.6 °C | 188 mm | 8 | Still wet, coolest days |
| December | 26.9 °C | 70 mm | 4 | Drying out |
Open-Meteo climate normals for 1991 to 2020, at 0.25 degrees south, 29.98 degrees east. Averages hide bad years. A wet June happens, and so does a fortnight of sun in April.
The murram to Ishasha is the thing to plan around
Queen Elizabeth is cut in half by a sealed public highway, the Kasese to Mbarara road, which crosses the Kazinga Channel at the Katunguru bridge and stays driveable whatever the month. The approach roads from Kampala are tarmac for their full length. That is the part of the network the rain does not touch.
The southern sector is a different proposition. The Ishasha sector, where the tree-climbing lions are, sits about 109 km from Mweya. UWA has never published that distance, so the figure comes from routing over OpenStreetMap; measured from the Katunguru bridge alone it is 104 km. A good part of the route is murram, and inside the sector the circuits along the Ishasha and Ntungwe rivers are unsealed and hilly. Allow two and a half to three hours one way in the dry, more in the wet, and treat some circuit sections as impassable without a 4x4 during the peaks.
The Kasenyi plains in the north have their own version of the problem. They are open grassland on black cotton soil, which turns slick and sucking after rain, and they are exactly where you want to be at first and last light. A 4x4 is the sensible call there in any month and close to a requirement in the wet ones. The northern crater route is worse again: UWA writes that fewer tourists take the time to visit the northern crater area for scenery due to poor roads in this section of the park.
One thing does get easier. The Mweya peninsula itself is a short, maintained approach and a two-wheel drive manages it in the drier months, though a 4x4 is more comfortable once the rains are in.
Flights thin out in four specific months, and October is not one of them
Aerolink is the scheduled way in, and its 2026 timetable contains the single most useful piece of seasonal planning information for this park. Flights A8 117/118, A8 121/122 and A8 131/132 operate all year except in March, April, May and November. In those four months only A8 111/112 remains, which means one flight in and one flight out per day, departing Entebbe at 07:00 and Kasese at 08:35.
Line that up against the rainfall and something odd falls out. The airline thins its schedule in November at 188 mm but keeps it full in October at 241 mm, the second wettest month of the year. Whatever drives that decision, the effect for a traveller is that October is the wettest month in which you still have four ways in by air.
The flight does not reach the park in any case. Aerolink lands at Kasese airstrip, a grass strip with no fuel, no fire service and no air navigation service, roughly 55 km and 70 minutes from Mweya. There is an airstrip on the Mweya peninsula itself, about 1 km from the lodge, but it does not appear in the scheduled timetable. Door to door from Entebbe by air runs 4 to 5.5 hours against 8 to 9 hours by road.
The birding argument for the wetter months
Queen Elizabeth carries over 600 recorded bird species, the longest list of any protected area in Uganda, a claim that traces back to Byaruhanga, Kasoma and Pomeroy in 2001 and that survives checking. The protected area holds more than half of all the bird species recorded in Uganda.
The seasonal part of that is the northern winter. Large numbers of Palearctic waders, gulls and terns arrive between September and April, which means the good birding window opens as the second rains build and closes as the first rains peak. September and October are the months where the migrant arrival and the green landscape overlap. The Kyambura salt crater lakes, Nshenyi, Bagusa and Maseche, also take in migrating flamingos from Kenya and Tanzania.
Be careful with one bird in particular. The wetlands on the north shore of Lake George have been a Ramsar site since 1988 and are listed as important habitat for the shoebill, but UWA reports in the same document that the birds formerly seen in the Lake George basin have probably shifted habitat, on the strength of irregular sightings over the preceding decade. Anyone who needs a shoebill should not book Queen Elizabeth for it.
Who should pick which window
- April or May, the wettest stretch: pick this if price and quiet matter most. Pumba Safari Cottages and Topi Lodge both run their low season in April, May and November, Elephant Plains drops from $600 to $350 per person full board, and Ishasha Wilderness Camp is outside its high season. Accept a single daily flight and slow murram in exchange.
- March: the switch month, from 36 mm in February to 213 mm in March. Prices have not fully dropped and the flights have already thinned, which makes it the weakest value in the calendar for most people.
- September: pick this if birds matter. The Palearctic migrants start arriving, rainfall is at 103 mm rather than October's 241 mm, and the tracks are still holding from the June and July gap. It is high season at several camps, so it is not cheap.
- October: pick this for the greenest park with the full flight schedule still running. The catch is that most lodges do not treat it as low season. The River Station and Honey Bear Bush Camp are the exceptions, both counting April, May, October and November as their green season.
- November: the coolest afternoons of the year at 26.6 degrees, low season at Pumba and Topi, and the last of the four reduced-flight months. A reasonable compromise if you can handle 188 mm.
- Anyone whose trip depends on reaching Ishasha on a fixed day should aim at June or July instead, at 18 and 24 mm. That is the one stretch where the southern murram is dependable.
What does not change
UWA prices the park the same all year. A foreign non-resident pays $40 per person per 24 hours in April and $40 in July, and the ticket runs 24 hours from the time of entrance rather than to the end of the calendar day. The Kazinga Channel launch is $30 per person for a roughly two-hour run from the Mweya marina, capped at 40 people, in every month. Ishasha is a sector of the same park and carries no separate fee. Birding and day walks are $25, a self-drive game drive is $10 per vehicle per day, and lion tracking in the Kasenyi plains is $200, rising to $500 from 1 January 2027.
Gate opening hours for Queen Elizabeth are not published by UWA, and no seasonal closure is published either. Nothing in the tariff or the park material suggests any part of the park shuts for the rains.
One seasonal risk sits outside the weather. Anthrax has twice moved through the hippo population, killing at least 300 animals in the 2004 to 2005 outbreak and 132 in 2010. During an outbreak UWA can restrict boat activities or access to stretches of shoreline, and that is not tied to any particular month.