Lions, hyaena, topi, waterbuck, warthog, and of course lots of kob, filled our two days of game viewing in the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP).

This is the closest it came to rivaling game viewing in Kenya and Tanzania. This group – like the vast majority of travelers – come to Uganda for just a few days to see primates, not for big game. But we wanted a more complete experience, and wanted to see the big game wildernesses.

And Ishasha is the best. The terrain remains unusual, with more non-acacia, deciduous trees more akin to the great rain forests just nearby. There are many more Euphorbia candelabra, and the grasses aren’t as diverse, coarser and fast growing.

But in the little Ishasha area of the southern part of QENP, converging rivers and an active plateau that is sinking, plus the fact that it is adjacent the large Virunga National Park in The Congo, create the conditions for the best big game viewing in the country.

This was Doreen Yashen’s first safari. Everyone else had been multiple times, mostly to Kenya and Tanzania, and expectations were not high. But when we saw our first real herds of non-kob ungulates, topi, it was a real treat for Doreen.

We had seen large families of buffalo further north, but at quite a distance. Uganda is not managing tourism for big game well. All parks exclude off-road driving, which really isn’t necessary given the visitor loads, and has cut very few tracks through the parks, leaving massive distances that can’t be traversed in the park.

Main highways cut parks like QENP in two, with a traffic pattern that certainly discourages movement back and forth in the park. And on the smaller park roads routinely you see workers on bicycles or motorcycles.

These are not conditions conducive for increasing wild animal populations and habituating them to tourists.

But more tracks have been cut in Ishasha and it’s a much smaller place. So we got much closer to the buffalo families.

The highlight was the early morning game drive that started out only a few hundred meters from camp with a hyaena kill of a baby kob. We just saw that at a distance, but then we stayed with the hyaena as they began eating and tearing apart the prey.

And at the end of the morning we watched a mother lion with two cubs skulking about – but never actually hunting – a variety of animals that walked by them. We got our fix on their location by watching a male kob pronking and snorting at them.

And the icing on the cake for Doreen especially came the next morning when a pride of 8 lion including two magnificent black-maned males was found.

Colobus swing in the branches just across the river from our camp, and Great Blue Turaco seem to have held a convention right behind my own tent! I watched five of them at once.

With the improved (mostly Chinese) roads being built all over the country, Ishasha is now less than a half-day drive from Bwindi. This makes it an ideal safari extension to a primate only safari.

Beautiful scenery, weird and abundant localized wildlife, and great fun on the Kazinga Channel headlined our day in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

QENP wraps itself around the Ugandan side of Lake George, and all of Lake Edward, and includes the famous Kazinga Channel which connects the two. Because of the on-again, off-again disturbances in Uganda’s north near the larger Murchison Falls National Park, it has become the most visited non-gorilla national park in Uganda.

When I first visited it with my wife during the Idi Amin years, we found one old and dying buffalo. There wasn’t a single other animal to be found. They had been hunted out by Amin’s soldiers.

Today the wildlife is coming back. On our early morning game drive and boat cruise in the afternoon on the channel, we saw about 25 elephant, tons of kob, lots of buffalo and hippo, and some waterbuck and warthog.

Along, of course, with many birds. The birdlife was not disturbed during the troubles Uganda has suffered and it remains now, as it was then and before, the richest avifauna area in Africa. The park has more than 650 species during the European winter when more than 100 migrants arrive.

Perched on a peninsula raised nearly 300 feet above the channel, Mweya Lodge where we stayed has become the poster lodge for Uganda. Comfortable, spacious, air-conditioned and totally modern, the staff is as good as most places in Kenya and Tanzania, something unusual for Uganda.

The view from our rooms was gorgeous: we looked northeast along the channel to Lake Edward and with binoculars could watch elephant and buffalo and hippo on the banks.

The early morning game drive would disappoint veteran travelers to Kenya or Tanzania, but it was great fun watching the “kob kourts” – the nickname for the circular territories that male kob create to lure in females for breeding.

Unlike most antelope, there’s no aggression between the males. They simply design their little areas often within 25m of each other, then sit in the middle of them, and wait. We would see groups of 4 or 5 females, like little teenage girls at a concert, flitting about the edges of a territory deciding whether to go in!

But the afternoon channel cruise was the highlight, as it always has been. The northeastern bank of the channel which faces The Congo is a geographically protected area, difficult for even the soldiers during Amin’s years to get to. It became something of a sanctuary that continues, today.

So its biomass is considerable, but unusual. Buffalo, elephant and hippo practically lay on one another, unperturbed. You’d never see that in a more natural situation.

While it was true as our boat guide pointed out that most of these were older individuals, not all of them were. We saw many very tiny hippo babies, and the tolerance that the different species shown one another was a sorry reminder of how horrible most of the wilderness was for Uganda’s wild creatures not too long ago.

And to extend theme even further, a fishing village which had been grandfathered into the park existed smack dab in the middle of the wildlife, towards the end of the channel. We watched boys swimming not 40m from buffalo and hippo.

The guide explained that there were confrontations between people and animals that had led to some notable deaths in the past, but nowhere near as I would normally expect. I imagine that the fishermen, like the animals, learned to live together peacefully as an alternative to the troubles on the other side of the channel.

So a very interesting and wildlife filled day! Tomorrow we’re off to more chimps and a more natural part of this large QENP.