Uganda has some of the most remarkable natural diversity in the world. James Wallman discovers a cornucopia of wildlife, tribal traditions and two impressive new lodges where luxury has a conscience
Ugandan legend has it that the sign to the Karamoja region in northeast Uganda used to read: ‘Welcome to the human zoo.’ Many of the tall, dark Karamojong – the men, at least – still wear little else but brightly coloured bead necklaces and Kalashnikovs – the tool of choice for cattle raiding. Scars on their arms, meanwhile, are not simple adornment – each indicates a human kill.
Today, much of Karamoja is peaceful, but it is still not advisable to drive there. When Unicef workers recently commenced delivery of 330,000 mosquito nets to combat malaria, they travelled with armed guards and wore newly issued, body-form flak jackets.
Despite the dangers, the past few years have seen a few intrepid tourists heading to the north-eastern tip of the Karamoja region where it borders Sudan and Kenya. The main attraction is one of Africa’s most remote game parks, the Kidepo Valley National Park. Rather than drive, most visitors fly in to a grassy landing strip a few miles north of the park’s entrance and a few south of a 10-room safari lodge.
Apoka Lodge is built around a mammoth rock whose centrepiece is a swimming pool that overlooks a watering hole frequented by zebra, warthogs and buffalo. The Ugandan Safari Company (Tusc) opened the lodge in 2006 and owners Jonathan Wright (a Uganda-born Briton) and his Canadian wife, Pamela, have been involved in conservation-tourism in Uganda since 1992.
Guests can visit local people in a traditional mud village called a manyatta. To protect the settlement from cattle raiders, a thorny thicket fence encircles the village. To gain access, any welcome visitors must crawl through a metre-high entrance, where they sometimes get stuck – to the muffled and high-pitched amusement of locals. Inside are swept mud yards with circular houses in the centre. Bundles of sorghum are hung up to dry, skins are spread on the hut floor for sleeping, and there are the essential utensils for turning millet into bread and porridge.
One manyatta, known as Garamesh, is home to Charles ‘Dik Dik’ Yella (and to his three wives and five children). Yella’s job at Apoka is to accompany guests, after they have enjoyed an aperitif, a three-course meal and excellent South African wine, to their wooden cabins – which sit on stilts and feature rain showers and two-person, outdoor baths – in case they bump into any lions, zebra, warthogs, buffalo or elephants that might have wandered into the camp.
To see the rest of Kidepo Valley National Park’s wildlife, including cheetah, leopards and giraffe, visitors must go outside the camp on sunrise and sunset game drives. Sightings are not guaranteed. The only thing for certain is that they will not bump into other tourists – they have the park’s 1,442sq km all to themselves.
It was only at the end of three days of magical sightings – a flock of ostriches grazing near the Sudan border, a baboon colony watching us watching them on the banks of a dry river-bed, a mother elephant and her baby in tall, golden grass – that I saw one of the elusive big cats, a lone male lion lying in the sun near the previous night’s buffalo kill.
‘These are wild animals,’ whispered Tusc’s general manager Mike Rourke in his South African accent as we sat 10m away from the lion. ‘Tracking them is half the fun – this isn’t like going to some zoo.’
Tusc opened another property, at the other end of the country, in August. Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge, in the south-west of Uganda, is an eight-room luxury hotel surrounded by ridges of rainforest trees and terraced fields. It lies east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and just north of Rwanda’s volcanic Virunga Mountains.
Before the lodge opened, tourists visiting the Nkuringo gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park stayed in very basic accommodation nearby (where the toilets were outside) or a hotel one-and-a-half-hours’ drive down a pitted, twisted hill track.
The new lodge, with its oil paintings by Ugandan artists, comfortable sofas and a butler assigned to each room, has made visiting gorillas an altogether more high-end experience.
But enjoying a level of luxury in terms of accommodation does not conflict with the rawness of seeing big primates in the wild. Spending time with mountain gorillas – as they snap twigs, eat leaves, gaze meaningfully into the middle distance and display exceptional levels of flatulence – is one of the world’s more extraordinary experiences. ‘It’s overwhelming,’ says Uli Nowlan, a Clouds guest who used to run a wildlife reserve in Canada’s Yukon. ‘And what makes it extra special is that it’s not mass tourism.’
There are only eight places available each day – at $500 each – for the permitted one-hour viewing and the lodge has the right of first refusal for six of these; staying at Clouds pretty much guarantees your chance to see gorillas in the wild.
But the hotel does not just serve the interests of its clients. All Tusc lodges partner tourism with wildlife conservation and community development. That helps guarantee the mountain gorillas are able to flourish in their vast national park playground – the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is 330sq km.
The flipside is that up until now, protecting the largest of the great apes has meant local people have suffered. ‘The gorillas spend 60 per cent plus of their time outside the forest,’ Rourke tells me when we meet up in Kampala after my northern safari. ‘And when they’re there, they destroy the communities’ banana trees and other crops.’
The lodge is helping locals in a number of ways. Tusc gives the community $30 per person per night and also provides employment. Sixty of the lodge’s 65 staff are local. For many, these are the first jobs their families have ever had; until now, life was simply subsistence. ‘My parents don’t have jobs,’ 24-year-old housekeeper Cristine Asilimwe says. ‘They’re just poor farmers. Every day, digging the ground so they can eat.’
Tusc is working with local communities on a development plan to ensure that the 33,000-strong Bakiga tribe and groups of local Bufumbira peoples benefit, through education and enterprise initiatives such as pig-rearing.
Another plus-point is the $1.3m lodge itself, which technically belongs to the community. Tusc has a contract to run it for 15 years, with a first-refusal option to extend after that time.
The fortunate visitors can hopefully enjoy a guilt-free gorilla experience and also gain an insight into how local people live – without either group feeling they are involved with a human zoo.
What is overwhelmingly compelling is that you can not only see primates (whose genetic make-up is 97 per cent the same as that of humans), but you can also meet people who share 100 per cent of our genes but could appear to be a different species: pygmies.
The Batwa pygmies lived a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence for millennia in the forests of what is now Uganda. They slept in caves, made fire by rubbing sticks together and harvested wild food from their surroundings.
Transition to the modern world has not necessarily been easy. Norah Mtamba, a Batwa elder, tells me – via a translator: ‘In the forest we were happy. We used to forage for honey and fruit and hunt antelope, bush pigs, buffalo and duikers [a species of antelope].’
But when the government transformed their forest home into a national park in 1991, the Batwa lost their ancestral abode. Then, when hunting in the forest was reclassified as poaching, they lost much of their staple diet.
‘The big chiefs told us we had to leave the forest,’ says Mtamba. ‘And now we have nothing, no honey and no meat. Where can we get them from?’ Certainly not from the national park – Uganda Wildlife Authority wardens are authorised to shoot poachers on sight.
Non-governmental organisations and the government are trying to support the Batwa as they integrate into society, although not all want to be dragged from the iron to the information age.
Julius Mujisha lives with his wife and four sons in a patch of forest outside the national park, in a small hut made of branches and leaves. On the surface, Mujisha lives a life that has not changed for centuries. The consumerism of the 21st century has even made its way to his threshold, however, and the pygmy does not want to miss out. ‘I see other people wearing shoes, so I want to put them on too,’ he says. ‘But I don’t know what they’re for.’
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