9
Indeed, the standard of accommodation has improved nationwide. Older, historical hotels have been refurbished and new ones constructed. The 2007 Commonwealth Summit in Kampala was preceded by a dramatic increase in quality hotels in the capital, while luxury lodges and tented camps serve all the major protected areas.
GAME VIEWING
penetrable National Park and The ‘Royal Mile’ near Murchison Falls National Park, ranked number one and nine respectively by Travel African Magazine in its list of the top 10 birdwatching sites in Africa. Other major birding sites include Queen Elizabeth National Park, home to 604 bird species, and Semliki Forest, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which contains 46 Central African birds found nowhere else in East Africa. Cultural tourism sites and events celebrate the diversity of some 40 ethnic groups and the rich history of the traditional kingdoms. And if the excitement gets too much, travellers can rest and recuperate at one of the comfortable retreats on the shore of Lake Bunyonyi, beside the white beaches of the Ssese Islands, or overlooking the crater lakes of Fort Portal.
Coming full circle, large mammal populations in the grassland parks are once again worth watching, happily so for there is more to game viewing in Uganda than a game drive. In the 1960s, launch trips on the Nile below Murchison Falls and on the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park were highlights of a visit to these parks and refurbished launches once again expose visitors to memorable concentrations of waterside wildlife.
By way of illustrating Uganda’s tourism renaissance, writer Philip Briggs managed just 182 pages for the first edition of his Bradt Guide to Uganda in 1994. The current edition is now a tome of over 500 pages. But although Uganda now finds its main source of foreign exchange in a vibrant and expanded tourism industry, visits to Uganda remain refreshingly low-key and unaffected by mass tourism. Encounters with wildlife and interactions with local people in the revived Pearl of Africa retain a refreshing degree of exclusivity.