Kidepo Valley is in the remote northeast corner of Uganda. The park has an authentic wilderness feel and is a great destination for the adventurous traveller. It has excellent wildlife viewing during the Dry season, featuring several species not encountered anywhere else in the country.
Kidepo Valley National Park lies in the rugged, semi-arid valleys between Uganda’s borders with South Sudan in the northwest and only 5km from the eastern border of Kenya, some 700km from Kampala.
Kidepo is Uganda’s most isolated national park. Still, the few who make the long journey north through the wild frontier region of Karamoja would agree that it is also the most magnificent, for Kidepo ranks among Africa’s finest wildernesses. From Apoka, in the heart of the park, a savannah landscape extends far beyond the gazetted area, towards horizons outlined by distant mountain ranges.
The park has a very impressive mammal list. Twenty species of predator are resident, and several don't exist in any other Ugandan park (including cheetah and black-backed jackal). Lion is common and leopard also occurs. Elephants, Burchell's zebra, buffalo and Rothschild's giraffe are all regularly seen, but the black rhino has recently become extinct. Twelve antelope species are present – some of which don't occur anywhere else in the country.
The local communities around the park include pastoral Karamojong people, similar to the Maasai of Kenya, and the IK, a hunter-gatherer tribe whose survival is threatened.
- Mountain gorillas
- Dense Forest
