By Gilbert Akampa Kakurugu,
MBARARA
Hangi Bashir, UWA’s head of communications and public relations, made the call during a meeting with Mbarara city journalists who visited Lake Mburo National Park.
Bashir commended the journalists for their work in promoting tourism in the country and urged Ugandans to consider visiting such tourist destinations. He noted that the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted the tourism industry, and locals could help revive it by supporting domestic tourism.
Bashir also urged investors to build affordable hotels that would enable locals to stay overnight while visiting such places.
The UWA tour guide, Asingwire Rebeca, led the journalists on a tour of Lake Mburo National Park, showing them various animals, birds, and reptiles, including buffalos, zebras, elands, and hippos. The park’s precariously endangered past has led to wildlife being virtually eliminated several times due to tsetse flies, ranching, and subsistence poaching.
The park’s entrance fee contributes 20% to local community projects such as building clinics and schools.
Lake Mburo National Park is Uganda’s smallest savannah national park and is located conveniently close to the highway connecting Kampala to the parks of western Uganda like Queen Elizabeth National park and Bwindi Impenetrable among others.
The park’s ancient Precambrian metamorphic rocks date back more than 500 million years and are home to 350 bird species.
Lake Mburo forms part of a 50km-long wetland system linked by a swamp, together with 13 other lakes in the area. Five of these lakes lie within the park’s borders and are home to healthy populations of various animals, including buffalos, warthogs, bush pigs, and hippopotamuses. In 2015, a group of giraffes consisting of 11 females and 4 males were translocated to L. Mburo National park and today, these giraffes have grown to almost 70 in number and this has also boosted on the number of visitors.
The park also contains much woodland, with no elephants to tame the vegetation. The savannah in the park’s western part is interspersed with rocky ridges and forested gorges, while patches of papyrus swamp and lush riparian woodland line many lakes.
Lake Mburo’s notable bird species include over 315 species, and it is the best place to view acacia-associated birds, such as the mosque swallow, black-bellied bustard, bare-faced-go-away bird, and Ruppell’s starling. A handful of birds are mainly recorded in the park, such as the southern ground hornbill and black-throated.
With UWA’s call, Ugandans can now experience the beauty of their country and support their local communities’ development at an affordable cost.
