Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda Queen Elizabeth National Park is Uganda’s most visited wildlife park and one of the most diverse in Africa. It sits in western Uganda straddling the equator and is named after Queen Elizabeth II, who visited the park in 1954 when it had just been gazetted. The park covers over 1,900 square kilometres of savannah, wetlands, forests, and lakes, and it borders both the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lake George. The Kazinga Channel, which connects Lake George and Lake Edward, is the centrepiece of any visit. Daily boat trips along the channel offer extraordinary wildlife viewing from the water, with hippos, Nile crocodiles, and hundreds of bird species visible from close range. The channel is considered one of the best birding spots in Uganda, and serious birdwatchers come here specifically for the combination of water and forest birds. The Ishasha sector in the southern part of the park is famous for its tree-climbing lions, a rare behaviour seen in only a handful of locations worldwide. Spotting a pride lounging in the branches of a fig tree against the open savannah is something you will not see anywhere else in East Africa. The park also has large populations of elephants, buffalos, topi, kob, and warthogs. The best time to visit Queen Elizabeth is during the dry seasons from June to August and December to February. Getting there from Entebbe takes about five to six hours by road, or you can fly to Kasese airstrip and be in the park quickly. It pairs well with a gorilla trek in Bwindi, which is a few hours further south.