The Book:Uganda's Great Rift Valley
Introduction
In 1907 Winston Churchill famously described Uganda as ‘a pearl’. Indeed from space (or more conveniently from the Google Earth internet site: http://earth.google.com) the whole of Eastern Africa resembles a collection of precious stones - shimmering blue sapphires - scattered across a crumpled green-brown cloth. These are not jewels of course (though they are equally accidents of geology) but a series of lakes. You will quickly notice something curious about them, for despite great variations in size and shape they form a strangely regular pattern. For on either side of the 68,800km2 Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest expanse of freshwater, a glittering pendant of lesser lakes dangles southwards.
Nature rarely creates patterns by accident and this is no exception. These lake chains are trapped within the two gigantic trenches of the EAST AFRICAN RIFT VALLEY SYSTEM; twin cracks in the earth’s crust which carve through Africa from the Red Sea to Mozambique for a distance of 5600km. To the west of Lake Victoria, a series of elongated lakes - Albert, Edward, Kivu, Tanganyika, Rukwa and Malawi – lie in the trough of the 3000km-long WESTERN RIFT VALLEY like a string of sausages to create one of the most obvious water patterns on earth. To the east, the EASTERN RIFT VALLEY of Kenya and Tanzania contains another, less blatant line of (mostly) smaller but more numerous lakes.
Rifting is what happens when adjacent tectonic plates move apart or (in this case) a single plate attempts to crack to form two plates. The East African rift is not the only such feature on earth but it is the only really big one that can easily be visited. Other examples are inconveniently located beneath kilometres of water as mid-ocean trenches. Only in East Africa can we see what a major rift valley is all about.
This book describes Uganda’s part of the Western Rift Valley; the 500km-long Albertine Rift between the Virunga volcanoes and Murchison Falls. Your first encounter is likely to be when you descend into its trough to visit the national parks of Queen Elizabeth, Semliki or Murchison Falls. You’ll quickly appreciate that this 40km-wide valley is no featureless expanse, but a vast and varied landscape; a collage of forests, swamps and grasslands; lakes and rivers; gorges; volcanic craters and hot springs, all enclosed between two parallel, mountainous escarpments. The equator cuts across the valley, parts of which are as low as 600m above sea level (a.s.l.) and temperatures are appropriately hot. Yet the landscape is dominated from all directions by the freezing, 5000m high snow peaks of the Rwenzori – a range known to the Ancient Greeks and Arabians as the Mountains of the Moon.
This is a book of three parts. The central section is a guide to Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP). Indeed this book began simply as a guide to QENP before it became apparent that to concentrate on the park alone was to ignore much more that is of interest and significance in the area. For QENP lies on the floor of the Albertine Rift Valley, a geographical feature that despite its remote location in the heart of Africa is of great international importance. East Africa meets West within its trench: Here Congo forests melt into East African grasslands and wildlife from both areas is represented. The rift’s western escarpment divides Africa’s two greatest rivers, the Nile and Congo; indeed the rift stole the Congo’s headwaters, diverting them north to create the modern Nile and give rise to Ancient Egypt. Earlier in prehistory, the wider rift system is considered the ‘Cradle of Mankind,’ the setting for our first uncertain steps as an upright biped. But paradoxically, despite a five million year hominid history, it is only during the last 150 years that Europeans - whose ancestors left Africa 100,000 years ago - came to visit the area. Yet we are far from being the rift’s oldest residents; QENP is home to two spectacular ‘living fossils’ – crocodiles and cycad trees - that have lived here, virtually unchanged for 200 million years, some 190 million before either the rift or human beings began to take shape. Consequently, the QENP chapter is preceded by a description of the geographical features of the Albertine Rift Valley and a short geological and human history. These wide ranging events are equally relevant to additional, less-known protected areas on the rift valley floor, and additional chapters describe Semliki National Park and the Toro-Semliki and Kabwoya Wildlife Reserves. Mgahinga, Kibale, Bwindi and Murchison Falls are also (if less obviously) rift valley parks. As these are described by their own Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) guidebooks, their mention here is limited to their rift valley setting.
If this book has a message, it is that there’s far more to tourism in the Albertine Rift Valley than launch trips and game drives at QENP and Murchison Falls, and gorilla tracking in Bwindi Forest.
If you detour from the ‘join-the-dots’ itinerary that links these locations you can discover the Ndali- Kasenda explosion craters, the Semliki Valley, Mpanga Falls, the ‘undiscovered’ jewel that is Kabwoya Wildlife Reserve and much more beside. Whether you are equipped with a Toyota Landcruiser, a bicycle or simply a sensible pair of shoes there is plenty to explore.
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