Africa Travel Information

In the Africa tourism and travel industry, Uganda is not often considered among the top holiday destinations. The country is overshadowed by its more famous East African neighbours, Kenya and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia in the South. However, travel enthusiasts with better information know that a safari in Uganda is an experience incomparable to any you can have in other African countries.

If you have never considered traveling to Uganda before, read this post to discover why you should. Henry Morton Stanley and Sir Winston Churchill were not crazy to refer to Uganda as the pearl of Africa.

1. Gorilla trekking and other primates safaris

A mountain gorilla in Uganda. Image Source: Fiver Löcker at Wikimedia commons

Have you ever watched the 1998 movie Mighty Joe Young? Or the Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Did you find them interesting? Of course, being movies, they have several exaggerations, but they well capture our (human’s) fascination with chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes, considered our close relatives. What better way could there possibly be to satisfy this fascination, than tracking these primates in their natural habitat.

Gorilla trekking is without doubt the number one tourist attraction in Uganda. The country is home to one of the world’s largest population of mountain gorillas, the biggest of all apes. Every year, thousands of visitors travel to Uganda just to observe these mighty apes in their true home in the wild. The Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is the most popular gorilla trekking destination in Uganda. Generally though, gorillas are also found in the Virunga mountains forest region, which transverses the Uganda, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo borders. Read the rest of this entry »

Map of Somalia: The country is quickly becoming a breeding ground for terrorism in Africa

I know, this is meant to be purely a travel blog, but the terrorist bombings in Uganda deserve a comment. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, you can read the news in Yahoo , BBC , CNN , and several other websites.

If truly it is the Somali Al Shabaab militia that carried out the attack, there’s real need for the entire African continent, and indeed the whole world, to move with greater speed to rectify the situation in Somalia. I know, we already have an African Union peace keeping mission on the ground, but obviously it is not achieving the desired results. The transitional national government is still very weak, while Al-shabaab and other similar radical groups seem to be gaining strength every day. By expanding their tentacles beyond Somalia, they are sending a strong signal that they want to remain a force to reckon with.

I am a travel blogger, and my knowledge of security matters is minimal, but I know one thing for sure: if Al Shabab or any other terror group gets rooted in the Eastern Africa region, it will adversely affect our travel industry, among other things. The 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, plus the 2002 Kikambala bombings in the Kenyan coast taught us quite as much. Tourism is an important part of the economy of at least four countries in Eastern Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Read the rest of this entry »

Lake Victoria in East Africa

If you live in Africa or keenly follow Africa news, you may easily relate the term “Great lakes region” more with political instability than with tourism and travel. Yet this region has enough unique and interesting attractions to make it rank alongside the traditional African safari destinations as a preferred holiday destination.

Strictly speaking, the “great lakes” refers to the series of lakes in or around the Eastern Africa Great Rift Valley.

Lake Victoria is the largest of the African great lakes, and is shared in unequal proportions by Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It is also the largest Lake in Africa, and the third largest fresh-water lake in the world (by surface area). The Lake is one of the main sources of the great River Nile, and a source of livelihood for many communities living around it.

The other great lakes include:

• Lake Albert at the Uganda-DRC border
• Lake Edward at the Uganda-DRC border
• Lake Kivu at the DRC-Rwanda border
• Lake Malawi (shared Malawi, Tanzania, and Mozambique). It is also the second deepest and third largest African lake.
• Lake Tanganyika (shared by Tanzania, DRC, Burundi and Zambia). Lake Tanganyika is the the deepest lake in Africa, and the second deepest lake in the world.
• Lake Turkana at the Kenya-Ethiopia border

Read the rest of this entry »