4 Days in the Wild North: Kidepo Valley

Your morning begins at Entebbe Airport, where a scheduled light-aircraft flight carries you north across the green hills of Acholi, the land flattening and browning as Karamoja comes into view below. The flight takes roughly ninety minutes; your first sight of Kidepo is the Narus Valley opening beneath you, a pale-gold bowl edged by mountains.

After landing at Apoka airstrip, your guide Samuel Longoli meets you and drives straight into the Narus Valley for an afternoon game drive. There is no easing in: within an hour there are elephants at the waterhole, a pair of bat-eared foxes outside their den, and somewhere in the long grass, a low growl that turns everyone silent.

Sunset is taken on the terrace of Apoka Safari Lodge, cold Nile Special in hand, as the Didinga Hills go dark.

The alarm goes at 05:30 and you are in the vehicle before the sky is properly light. The Narus Valley at this hour belongs to the predators: a pride of seven lions—two males, four females, one cub—is found on a termite mound, watching a herd of Jackson's hartebeest that has not yet noticed them. You stay until the light is good enough to photograph and the lions decide to sleep rather than hunt.

A mid-morning breakfast is served back at the lodge before a walking excursion along the Kidepo River bed with an armed ranger. The sand holds the night's record: jackal prints, porcupine scrapes, and the broad five-toed press of a hyena. A Nile monitor vanishes into a doum palm root system as you approach.

The afternoon drive heads toward the Kanan area, where a small herd of Rothschild's giraffe moves through the acacia scrub and a lilac-breasted roller—Uganda's colours seem extravagant even here—perches on every available dead branch. Dinner is a shared table under the acacia trees, a fire burning low beside the generator hum.

Today you cross into the Nangeya Valley, a less-visited sector in the park's northwest that borders South Sudan. The vegetation changes almost immediately—thicker combretum shrub, rocky outcrops, and a drier air that carries the smell of dust and wild sage. This is cheetah country, and the park's small population is occasionally spotted hunting on the open flats in the early morning.

Samuel takes you to a rocky kopje where the klipspringer—always in pairs, always impossibly balanced—stand on the uppermost boulders. From the same vantage point you can see for perhaps forty kilometres into South Sudan, a vast unbroken plain with no visible road or building.

The return drive in the late afternoon passes through a large herd of Burchell's zebra, the animals unhurried and close to the vehicle. As the sun drops behind the Morungole massif, a family of warthogs trots toward their burrow in perfect single file. The guide pours cold water from the cooler box. Nobody says much.

The final morning starts before breakfast: a short sunrise drive to the Narus waterhole, where elephant families arrive to drink as the sky turns from grey to pink to gold. Buffalo are already there, standing shoulder-deep in the shallows, red-billed oxpeckers running along their backs.

Breakfast is packed. Bags go into the vehicle. The airstrip is a fifteen-minute drive, and the plane is on time. Kidepo shrinks to a brown oval below you, the Didinga Hills a dark line to the east, and then it is all green hills again and Kampala appears through the haze.