Month by month
Queen Elizabeth in October
October is the second wettest month of the year at 241 mm, and almost nobody discounts it. It is the strangest month in this park's calendar for exactly that reason.
If you only want the answer
October averages 241 mm over thirteen rain days, second only to April's 339 mm, yet most lodges keep it at full rates and Aerolink keeps its full flight schedule. The southern murram to Ishasha suffers as badly as it does in April. If you want the greenest park with four flights a day, this is the month; if you want a saving, November is next door and 53 mm drier.
Queen Elizabeth weather in October: the second peak
Two hundred and forty-one millimetres over thirteen rain days is the top of the second wet arc, and it arrives fast: 53 mm in August, 103 mm in September, 241 mm in October. Only April, at 339 mm over eighteen days, is wetter.
Afternoons sit at 27.3 degrees and nights at 19.5, so the temperature is unremarkable. What is remarkable is everything the water does to the landscape. The Kazinga Channel, Lake Edward, Lake George and the crater lakes all run full, the grass is high, and the park looks nothing like the pale, short-cropped version that the February photographs show.
The month the discounts do not come
Here is the oddity. Pumba Safari Cottages and Topi Lodge both define their low season as April, May and November, which leaves October at standard rates on 241 mm of rain. Elephant Plains runs its low season outside July, August, September and December, so October falls into its mid band rather than its cheapest. Only The River Station and Honey Bear Bush Camp treat October as green season, calling April, May, October and November their discounted window.
Aerolink does the same thing. Its reduced schedule, one flight each way per day, covers March, April, May and November. October keeps the full timetable, four departures from Entebbe, despite being 53 mm wetter than November. Whatever sits behind that decision, the effect is that October is the wettest month in which the park is still easy to reach by air.
Ishasha in October
The road is the same problem it is in April. Mweya to the Ishasha sector is about 109 km, unpublished by UWA and derived from routing over OpenStreetMap, with 104 km of that measured from the Katunguru bridge alone. Long stretches are murram and the circuits inside the sector along the Ishasha and Ntungwe rivers are unsealed and hilly, with sections that become impassable without four-wheel drive once the rains are in.
The Kasenyi plains in the north have a parallel problem on different ground. They are open grassland on black cotton soil, which after rain turns slick and sucking, and the early and late drives across them are exactly when the dew and mud are worst. A 4x4 is the sensible vehicle everywhere in the park this month, and a schedule with slack in it is the sensible itinerary.