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The last town before the northern sectors

Kasese: the last real town before Kasenyi, Katunguru and Mweya

Kasese is a working town at the foot of the Rwenzori, on the road that runs down into the park at Kikorongo. It is where the scheduled flight lands, where the tarmac is still reliable, and the last place of any size before the northern sectors. This page stays short, because the sources we trust say less about the town itself than operator pages pretend.

If you only want the answer

Arrive in Kasese with a full tank and Ugandan shillings in your pocket. The town sits about 55 km from Mweya, roughly 70 minutes on paper and 1.5 to 2 hours in practice, and the airstrip is 4 km outside it. Coming from Kasese you enter the park at Kikorongo, either through the Crater Gate at Queen's Pavilion or by carrying on down to Katunguru. The stretch of road between Kikorongo and Kasese is cracking and subsiding, and geoscientists put that down to active fault lines rather than construction faults alone, so drive it in daylight and expect rough patches. UWA's current tariff lists electronic payment only, so bring a working card and pay ahead if you can.

What we can and cannot tell you about the town

Kasese is the last town of any size before the northern sectors of the park, and it is the road and rail town for the Rwenzori and the Kilembe mines country behind it. That much is not in dispute.

What we could not confirm from the documents behind this page are the specifics travellers actually want: named fuel stations, which banks have branches here, whether their ATMs reliably dispense cash against a foreign card, and whether a supermarket worth the name still trades in town. We are not going to fill those gaps with guesses copied from booking sites. Plan on the assumption that Kasese has fuel and shops and treat anything more precise as something to check on the ground or with your lodge.

The safe version of the advice holds regardless. Fill the tank in Kasese, because the park has no public fuel and the sectors south of the Kazinga Channel have none either. Carry Ugandan shillings, because fuel, markets and small businesses in western Uganda run on cash in shillings rather than on dollars or cards. Buy drinking water and anything you want before your lodge's kitchen opens, and pick up any medication you need while you are still in a town.

The road out of town is breaking up

The surface between Kikorongo and Kasese is cracking and subsiding. Geoscientists attribute that to active fault lines in this part of the rift rather than to construction faults alone, and district officials have been examining whether the contractor is still inside the defects liability period. That was reported by the Nile Post on 31 March 2026.

It is a short stretch and it is the one you will use every time you move between the park and the town, so it is worth knowing about rather than discovering at speed. Drive it in daylight, keep your following distance and expect the condition to have changed since anything you read, in either direction. Fault movement is not the kind of problem a resurfacing contract settles permanently.

Getting from Kasese into the park

From Kasese the road runs south-east to Kikorongo, at the equator on the north-western corner of the park, where it meets the road to Bwera. That junction is your entry point. From there you can turn in at the Crater Gate by Queen's Pavilion, at the far end of the 27 km Crater Drive, or carry on south to Katunguru where the park headquarters sit beside the bridge over the Kazinga Channel.

Distances from town are consistent enough to plan on, and the times are not. Kasese town to Mweya is about 55 km, roughly 70 minutes on paper. A routing calculation on 18 September 2026 gives Mweya to the airstrip as about 59 km at 1.3 hours free-flow. Free-flow means an empty road at the posted limit, so plan on 1.5 to 2 hours in reality, more if you stop at the equator markers or hit rain.

Gates open at 07:00 and close at 19:00, which is the only thing UWA states plainly about them, and it states it for the park as a whole rather than gate by gate. Leave Kasese early if you want to be in the Kasenyi plains while the light is still worth having.

The airstrip, and what it is not

Kasese airfield sits 4 km from town and is a grass strip, 1,750 by 30 metres at an elevation of 959 metres, according to the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority page consulted on 18 September 2026. Other sources give the runway as 1,600 metres or 1,570 metres, so the honest range is 1,570 to 1,750 metres with the authority's figure as the official one.

The field has no fire service, no air navigation service and no fuel. Aerolink Uganda flies here daily from Entebbe, with a minimum of two passengers, and this is the airstrip its timetable means when it lists Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The recurring claim that Kasese is being upgraded to an airport is not true as of September 2026. It has been announced repeatedly since 2008 and never built. The most recent promise came from President Museveni at a campaign rally on 7 December 2025, with no specifications, no timeline and no funding. The full flight picture, including why Kihihi is the better strip for Ishasha, is on the flights page.

Where to sleep around Kasese

Kasese town itself is thin on verifiable beds. Queen Elizabeth Safari Lodge, run by the Queen Elizabeth Cultural Centre, gives its address as Mohokya on the Mbarara road, 4 km outside town. Its domain no longer resolves and the only rates we have are archived from 2022, which is too old to publish as current. That lodge also turns up in many lists placed at the Kazinga Channel, which its own address block contradicts.

What does have current published rates sits a little further out, around Kikorongo, which is the junction you drive through anyway. Simba Safari Camp, run by Great Lakes Safaris, publishes rack rates valid 1 June 2026 to 31 December 2027: camping with your own equipment at 11 dollars per person, a standard room at 58 dollars high season and 50 low season per person sharing, and a superior at 70 and 53. Park entry and activities are excluded, and a transfer from Kasese airstrip costs 100 dollars. Low season there runs 1 March to 31 May and 1 October to 30 November.

Kikorongo Safari Lodge, run by the Thembo family since April 2018, publishes a 2024/2025 rate card in dollars per room, with a premium cottage as a double or twin at 280 full board, 260 half board and 240 bed and breakfast, and an intimate or executive cottage at 250, 230 and 210. That card is two seasons old now, which the lodge has not updated, so confirm before you rely on it.

At the top end, Elephant Plains Lodge on the escarpment above Lake Kikorongo publishes 350 dollars per person sharing on full board in low season, 470 in mid season and 600 in high season, with high season running July, August, September and December. A transfer from Kasese costs 190 dollars. Its own site says both that it is in the park and that it is a short drive from the park gate, so treat its position as outside the boundary until it says otherwise clearly.

The Elephant Home at Kikorongo is a community-run guesthouse with a signpost 20.2 km from Kasese on the Mbarara road, just before the junction. Its last owner-published rates, from an archived copy of its own site dated May 2026, were 25 dollars per person for a self-contained twin or double and 20 dollars for a room or tent that is not self-contained, bed and breakfast. Its old domain now serves spam and should not be used.

Rates here are what the owners themselves published, with the date of the rate card attached. Nothing on this page is a booking price, and none of these properties pays to appear on it.

Money, and paying UWA

Carry Ugandan shillings for the town and a working card for the gate. UWA's current tariff booklet lists only electronic payment methods under its payments heading: mobile money through Airtel Money Pay and MTN MoMo Pay, POS machines, bank transfers, direct bank transactions and its online payment portal. Cash does not appear in that list at all.

UWA's own park brochure says something different, that payments can be made in Uganda shillings, US dollars, British pounds, euros and Visa, and describes a prepaid Wildlife Card loaded at the UWA head office in Kampala, at the Katunguru headquarters or at the Queen's Pavilion Information Centre. That card scheme does not appear in the current tariff, and whether it still works is unconfirmed. So is whether cash is accepted in practice at the gates in 2026. The two official documents disagree and public sources do not settle it.

Paying ahead is the obvious hedge, with one warning: the UWA payment portal at pay.ugandawildlife.org refused connections when we checked on 18 September 2026. If you cannot reach it, arrange payment through a licensed operator or the reservations office rather than assuming the barrier will take your card.

One ticket rule worth knowing before you enter from this side. Park entry runs 24 hours from the moment you go through, rather than to the end of the day, so an early morning entry from Kasese gets you more out of the same 40 dollars than a lunchtime one.

The provisioning list

  • A full tank, since the park has no public fuel and we could not confirm any dependable filling point south of Kasese on this side
  • Ugandan shillings in cash for fuel, markets and small businesses, which do not run on dollars
  • A working card or a prepaid UWA booking, because the current tariff lists electronic payment only
  • Photo identification for everyone travelling, since UWA requires proof of residency status for any rate below the foreign non-resident one
  • Drinking water and food for the drive in, plus anything you want before your lodge starts serving
  • Any medication you need, while you are still in a town that has pharmacies
  • Offline maps, since signal cannot be assumed once you are in the park
  • A vehicle you are happy to take onto murram, because the game tracks and the whole run south to Ishasha are unsurfaced

Sources