Lake Mburo Boat Cruise Safari, Uganda | Expert Guide
A Lake Mburo boat cruise is a 2-hour excursion departing from the Rwonyo Jetty. It costs $30 per foreign non-resident and offers close encounters with hippos, crocodiles, and water birds. The best wildlife viewing is during the dry seasons (June–September, December–February) when animals gather along the shores.
Lake Mburo Boat Cruise Safari
A regular boat tour on Lake Mburo departs from the Rwonnyo jetty at 08:00 for a two hour journey on the eastern shores of Lake Mburo. In addition to the beautiful scenery and simple joys of drifting in a boat amongst wild animals, the launch trip is expected to give good sightings of hippo, crocodile, buffalo, waterbuck, bushbuck and otter.
Birdwatchers on the Mburo boat excursion may expect to see some of the more visible waterbirds such as the African fish eagle, shoebill stork, pied kingfisher and a variety of egrets, herons, Ross’s turaco, Narina trogon and the secretive African finfoot.
How much is the boat cruise on Lake Mburo?
A two hour boat tour on Lake Mburo in a small boat of 4-8 people capacity would cost you roughly $20 per person for visitors and 30,000 Uganda Shillings per person for natives. And the bigger boat is roughly $30 a person. Prices are capacity dependent.
What else to add to your boat cruise
Besides the boat trip on Lake Mburo, the park may be explored across the wide open spaces on a wildlife drive, horse back safari, bicycling safari and most exciting of them all, the guided walking safari. The unique aspect of Lake Mburo National Park is that you may watch wildlife without missing out on the big savannah game players.
Getting Close Mburo’s Wildlife
You know what a crazy, exhausting journey it is to gorilla hills in southwestern Uganda. Then you must want to split the tour equally between Entebbe International Airport and Bwindi with a boat cruise safari at Lake Mburo and a quintessential night in Uganda’s smallest national park.
Lake Mburo National Park, 240 km from Uganda’s capital, is the smallest of Uganda’s 10 National Parks and one of the only three with Bachelle’s Zebra and the only one with impala slender mongoose and gigantic bush rats. This underestimated jewel is dominated by five lakes (Lake Mburo being the largest), wetlands, an undulating environment, open grassland and acacia woodland to explore before or after your southwestern Uganda safari excursion.
Enjoy a 2 hour boat tour on Lake Mburo and get near to touching the huge and little wild animals that throng to the beaches. From the engine boat’s vantage position, you can watch buffalo, hippos, and an army of waterbird species, including the prehistoric-looking shoebill, dine within arm’s reach. Then maybe do a guided walking safari and get your adrenaline muscles pumping.
It’s the best in Uganda for walking with savannah nature animals. A ranger guide and a gun will take you on well worn trails and off the main road to find dispersed groups of impala, zebra and eland. Perhaps you won’t be as afraid of the big ones here as other parks because Lake Mburo National Park does not contain the big players like the lion and elephant. And that makes Mabura a terrific place to see the smaller mammals at a rewardingly unhurried pace.
While the boat cruise safari is one of the activities in Lake Mburo National Park that attracts extra attention, guests may enjoy more of the park’s thrills with a walking trip or slide onto horseback and get closer to the animals than you would expect.
If you are coming from the exciting experience in the thick forest, gorilla trekking, then you may spend a night or two at Lake Mburo National Park. It is small and appropriate for a private safari break for a modern nature explorer.