Activities and experiences
Things to do in Queen Elizabeth National Park
A two-hour boat trip down the Kazinga Channel for $30, game drives on the Kasenyi plains where the ranger guides know where the lions are, a chimpanzee trek into a gorge you cannot see until you are standing over it, and the tree-climbing lions of Ishasha about three hours' drive to the south. Prices are UWA's own, from a tariff booklet that expired on 30 June 2026 and is still the only one it publishes.
If you only want the answer
The Kazinga Channel cruise at $30 is the signature and the Kasenyi plains are where the game drives work. Chimpanzee tracking at Kyambura is $100 with park entry charged on top, lion tracking is $200 plus a $10 community fee until it trebles on 1 January 2027, and Ishasha in the far south needs a night of its own.
The Kazinga Channel cruise
Thirty dollars per person, around two hours, leaving from the marina on the Mweya peninsula. Foreign residents pay $25, other African nationals $20 and East African citizens UGX 30,000, and a school group pays UGX 450,000, which works out at UGX 15,000 a head. A launch in Queen Elizabeth takes a maximum of 40 passengers, against 45 in Murchison Falls. On duration the tariff says approximately two hours and the park brochure calls it a two-hour return voyage between Mweya and the channel's entrance into Lake Edward, so the two UWA documents agree for once.
Two different operations run on the same stretch of water and only one of them publishes a price. UWA sails its own boat from the Mweya marina, and the $30 is that boat. Mweya Safari Lodge, part of Marasa Africa, runs its own boats on the channel and confirms a Kazinga Channel river cruise on marasa.net without publishing a price, a boat name or a departure time. Concession holders' boats are charged once per trip under the tariff instead of per 24 hours. Various other lodge and tour boats work the channel as well, and none of them appears in UWA's tariff at all.
Departure times are the gap. No official UWA document gives one for this cruise, so the time you are quoted comes from your lodge or your operator. Activities are booked at the Visitor Information Centre on Mweya according to the brochure. Minimum uptake on the large boats is the equivalent of 15 people. The tariff also carries a $120 minimum charge for small boats, but that clause names Murchison Falls and Lake Mburo only, so whether it applies on the Kazinga is not stated anywhere.
Game drives on the Kasenyi plains
Kasenyi is where the game drives happen. It lies north of the channel on the Lake George side, open plains with the park's main Uganda kob concentrations and the lions that hunt them, and UWA's own brochure puts it in one sentence: Kasenyi's experienced ranger guides can usually locate lions. The brochure calls it half an hour's drive from Mweya while a routing calculation over the mapped road network gives 36 kilometres and about 1.3 hours, most likely because UWA means the direct park track and the router goes round. Budget for the longer figure if you are driving yourself.
The pricing is per guide rather than per person for a day drive, which is worth reading twice. A guided day game drive in your own vehicle costs $25, $20 for a foreign resident and UGX 25,000 for East Africans, and a full vehicle pays that once. Driving your own circuit with no guide costs $10 per vehicle per day. In a UWA vehicle, where one is available, it is $30 per person by day and $40 by night, with a minimum uptake of three people for foreign visitors and five for East Africans.
Night drives cost $30 per person in your own vehicle with a UWA guide, $20 for foreign residents and UGX 30,000 for East Africans, and they are sold only to visitors sleeping inside the park, with a UWA guide compulsory. One oddity: the night drive line is missing from the tariff's Queen Elizabeth summary table at the back of the booklet while Murchison Falls, Kidepo Valley and Lake Mburo each have one. It appears in the general game drive tables, so it exists.
The other northern circuit is the Crater Drive, 27 kilometres between the Kabatoro and Crater gates, following the rims of extinct craters according to the brochure. The Crater Gate is at Queen's Pavilion by the equator markers.
Ishasha is a destination, not an afternoon
The tree-climbing lions are in the Ishasha sector at the southern end of the park, and getting there from Mweya is about 109 kilometres and two and a half to three hours each way. The distance adds up from two official sources: 22 kilometres from Mweya out to the Kasese to Mbarara road, from UWA's own brochure, plus the 87 kilometre Katunguru to Ishasha corridor, from the Ministry of Works and Transport on 14 August 2026. A routing calculation over the mapped road network gives 107 kilometres for the same journey, within two per cent of the official addition.
The road is murram rather than tarmac, it has been on the list of roads still to be surfaced since August 2022 and was still on it in June 2025, and the park speed limit of 40 km/h alone puts 109 kilometres at 2.7 hours before a single stop. Operator pages saying about two hours would need an average of 55 km/h on a road where 40 is the legal maximum.
Ishasha costs nothing extra. There is no Ishasha line anywhere in the tariff and one Category A ticket covers every sector of the park. The trap in the south is the clock rather than the gate: entry runs for 24 hours from the moment you pass through, so the classic route of sleeping in the north and driving south through Ishasha the next morning often tips into a second day's entry. Sleep in or near Ishasha so you have a morning and a late afternoon there, or take the sector on the way to or from Bwindi.
Chimpanzee tracking in Kyambura Gorge
A permit is $100 for a foreign non-resident, $80 for a foreign resident and UGX 50,000 for an East African citizen, and park entry is not included. The tariff states it in one line: rates include guide fee, exclude entrance fees except for Kibale. So a foreign non-resident pays $100 for the permit plus $40 for entry plus vehicle entry, where the same person tracking at Kibale pays a single price with entry inside it.
What the fee does include is the guide and a nature walk on the day you track. The rules are UWA's standard ones: minimum age 12, a maximum of one hour with the animals, a minimum distance of 10 metres, no going into the forest if you are unwell, no smoking, eating or drinking while tracking, and no flash photography. Foreign non-residents and Rest of Africa visitors can only book chimpanzee permits through a licensed tour operator, and UWA points to the list at utb.go.ug/tour-operators. Treks start at 08:00 and 14:00, and Mweya is about 35 kilometres away, an hour to an hour and a half, so the morning trek means an early start.
UWA has acknowledged in its management plan that Kyambura bookings were being taken both at head office and at park level, producing double bookings. Whether that still happens in 2026 is unconfirmed, which is another reason to book ahead. And read our wildlife page on what you are actually booking: a group of roughly twenty to thirty animals, less habituated than those at Kibale, with no published success rate from any source.
Lion tracking, mongoose tracking and the hippo census
The tariff has its own heading for experiential tourism in Queen Elizabeth, so these are official products rather than lodge inventions. Lion tracking costs $200 per person for a foreign non-resident, $150 for a foreign resident and UGX 200,000 for an East African citizen, plus a $10 community fee and your own vehicle costs, and it must be booked in advance. You go out with researchers to collared lions. It runs on the Kasenyi plains in the north, which means it is not a way of reaching the tree climbers in Ishasha. Several operators advertise lion tracking at $50, a figure that appears in no UWA document we could find.
Mongoose tracking costs $30 for a foreign non-resident, $25 for a foreign resident and UGX 30,000 for East Africans, on the Mweya peninsula. The hippo census experience costs $100, $80 and UGX 100,000, and lets you join a count. Note that UWA does not publish the results of those counts per water body, which is part of why no figure exists for the Kazinga Channel on its own.
Two prices change on 1 January 2027, set out in a letter from UWA's director, reference TDO 93/04, dated 26 February 2026. Lion tracking goes from $200 to $500 for foreign non-residents, with $300 for foreign residents, $300 for the rest of Africa and UGX 250,000 for East Africans, a rise of 150 per cent. Chimpanzee tracking at Kyambura goes from $100 to $200 for foreign non-residents, $150 for residents, $100 for the rest of Africa, with the East African rate held at UGX 50,000. If either activity is central to your trip, the cost of going in 2026 rather than 2027 is not small.
Walks, birding, cycling, fishing and filming
- A birding or day nature walk costs $25 for a foreign non-resident, $20 for a foreign resident and UGX 20,000 for East Africans. Queen Elizabeth sits in the cheaper band with Murchison Falls, Lake Mburo, Kidepo and the reserves; the forest parks charge $40. The tariff says fees are per person and that rates exclude entrance and other activity fees, and the guide is included in the price with no separate ranger charge.
- A night nature walk costs $50 for a foreign non-resident, $30 for a foreign resident and UGX 20,000 for East Africans.
- Cycling costs $30, $25 for a foreign resident and UGX 30,000 for East Africans. It appears only in the Queen Elizabeth summary table; there is no separate cycling chapter.
- Sport fishing is priced twice in the same booklet and the two prices disagree. The sport fishing permit table gives $15 for one day and $25 for four days for Queen Elizabeth, with UGX 20,000 and UGX 60,000 for East Africans. The Queen Elizabeth summary at the back gives $20 for a foreign non-resident, $15 for a foreign resident and UGX 20,000 per day. Either way the permit excludes park entry, so settle the figure before you pay.
- Filming and commercial photography carry 40 per cent on top of the activity and entrance fees, rising to 50 per cent of the activity fee if you fly a drone. Prior booking is required.
- Camping is Category A wilderness at $40 per person per night for a maximum of 16 people, Category B private at $30 for a maximum of 20 including non-paying staff, and Category C public at UGX 40,000 with latrine, water, firewood, fireplace, shelter and security. A UWA dormitory bed is UGX 25,000 for adults. The brochure places campsites at Mweya and at Ishasha, and UWA also lists bungalows and cottages on Mweya.
Booking, gates and the fines behind the rules
- Since 1 March 2026 the seven-day reservation window has been withdrawn. A permit is only held once it has been paid for in full at the time of booking, so an operator can no longer hold an option for you while you decide.
- Rebooking a chimpanzee permit late costs 25 per cent of the permit price.
- Gates open between 07:00 and 19:00. That is a park-wide rule from the tariff's park regulations; UWA publishes no hours for individual gates.
- Your entry ticket runs for 24 hours from the moment you pass the gate rather than for a calendar day, and time beyond that is charged as another day.
- The speed limit is 40 km/h throughout the park. Speeding costs UGX 100,000 per offence, as do littering and sounding your horn.
- Driving off the tracks costs $150 per person in the vehicle, billed to the driver. Hitting an animal costs $500, sitting on top of a moving vehicle costs $100, and failing to pay fees costs $150 per person.
- Keep every official receipt for verification until you leave, which the tariff asks for in as many words.