Ecotourists find wildlife aplenty in Uganda

Queen Elizabeth National Park, one of six established in Uganda since 1986, is home to not only lions, warthogs, and waterbuck, but also buffalo, elephants, baboons, and 612 bird species. The park sprawls across 764 square miles in southwestern Uganda, with dense rain forests to the south and the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains to the north.

Bisected by the equator, the park's topography is marked by lush savannah plains, nearly a dozen crater lakes, and a gorge that has one of the country's only habituated chimpanzee groups. The park also lies along an important migration route between Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. For safari-goers, Uganda's national parks, sanctuaries, and reserves offer a chance to see the "big five" - rhinos, lions, leopards, elephants, and buffalo - without the crowds found in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania.

"The focus here is ecotourism and that's what people appreciate," said Tony Ofungi of the Uganda Tourist Board. "We don't have the planeloads of tourists and minibuses surrounding the animals in the parks."

The country does have plenty of wildlife. Much of it was decimated during Idi Amin's eight-year dictatorship and after his ouster in 1979, when animals were poached for food and black market trade. The Uganda Wildlife Authority and local nonprofit groups have spent the past two decades working to boost the number of animals, and reintroduce species that had disappeared.

Poachers wiped out the rhinos by the mid 1980s, yet in the past three years, Rhino Fund Uganda, a nonprofit governmental organization, has reintroduced six white rhinos.