“But the Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the end there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, the vegetation is different, the climate is different, and, most of all, the people are different from anything else to be seen in the whole range of Africa. Instead of the breezy uplands we enter a tropical garden.”
“I had travelled through tropical forests in Cuba and India, and had often before admired their enchanting, yet sinister, luxuriance. But the forests of Uganda, for magnificence, for variety of form and colour, for profusion of brilliant life—plant, bird, insect, reptile, beast—for the vast scale and awful fecundity of the natural processes that are beheld at work, eclipsed, and indeed effaced, all previous impressions.
…..Birds are as bright as butterflies; butterflies are as big as birds. The air hums with flying creatures; the earth crawls beneath your foot. The telegraph-wire runs northward to Gondokoro through this vegetable labyrinth. Even its poles had broken into buds!” The camera cannot do justice to such a panorama. In photographs these vast expanses look like mere scrubby commons, inhospitable and monotonous to the eye, melancholy to the soul. One has to remember that here are Kew Gardens and the Zoo combined on an unlimited scale; that Nature’s central productive laboratory is here working night and day at full blast; and that the scrubby common of the picture is really a fairyland of glades and vistas.” ….Winston Churchill
In 1907, Churchill waxed eloquent about Uganda on his safari. A century later, The Lonely Planet (https://www.lonelyplanet.com/uganda )voted Uganda the number 1 destination. CNN Travel (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/where-to-travel-best-destinations-2023/index.html ) also ranked Uganda as a top travel destination in 2023. Conde Naste Traveller Magazine (https://www.cntraveller.com/article/uganda-africa-giles-foden ) not to be left out also highly recommended Uganda as a top destination in 2023.
But what is it about Uganda? 300 million years ago when the pangea split into continents, the richest biodiversity on earth remained in a part of Africa that straddles Uganda and Congo. Here, in unique climatic conditions, biodiversity evolved into lavish richness unlike elsewhere in the world.
Ecologically Uganda is where the east African savannah grasslands meet the tropical rainforests from West Africa. As such one can track lions in the morning, trek chimpanzees through the rainforest the next day, navigate the Nile teeming with hippopotami and crocodile and then trek deep into Bwindi to stare into the pensive eyes of mountain gorillas. Uganda’s verdant biodiversity is attested to by Uganda’s status as the smallest of 4 African countries whose bird list tops the 1000 mark with a bird list of 1,066 species.
Gorilla trekking and chimpanzee trekking safaris are the most popular tours but that’s not to take away from big game encounters and unique cultural experiences.
Join Buutu Safaris at home as we reveal the intimate details of our Uganda The Pearl of Africa.
