To reach the site, they had to cut their way in.
“We had to machete through kilometres of untamed wilderness, wade through marshes and rivers just to reach the site. On our journey we passed a pride of wild lions never seen by travellers. This was one of the most exciting things I have seen and felt on safari, knowing these cats had never been viewed before.”
Jonathan Wright, co-founder, WildPlaces Africa
That is the part of the Kulu Ora story worth stopping on. A pride of lions inside Uganda’s largest national park, in 2026, that had never had a vehicle in front of it.
Kulu Ora opened in March 2026 on the Nile in Murchison Falls National Park. It is WildPlaces Africa’s seventh property, and it sits in a part of the park that until recently had no tourism in it at all.
The quiet half
WildPlaces describes the setting as a newly designated low-impact zone of 75,000 hectares — 185,000 acres, or about a fifth of the park — shared with one other property, its own Papa’s Camp, five tents on the south bank named for Ernest Hemingway, who survived two plane crashes in this stretch of country. Kulu Ora is the first lodge built in the zone.
The zoning is the operator’s own description. The geography isn’t in question, though. Murchison’s tourism sits in the north, around the Delta and the falls — the boats, the game drives, the traffic on the tracks. Kulu Ora is not there, and that is the whole point of it.
There is a trade-off worth knowing before you go: the falls themselves are an excursion from here, not a morning’s drive, and you won’t be ticking off a classic Murchison itinerary in a day.
What happened to this park
Murchison Falls was gazetted in 1952, one of Uganda’s first national parks, and at 3,840 square kilometres it is still the largest. The falls give it its name: the Nile is squeezed through a gap of about seven metres and drops some 43 metres into the pool below.
Then the country came apart. Through the Amin years and the wars that followed, the park was shot out. Elephant numbers here are put at around 15,000 in the 1960s and roughly 200 by the mid-1990s. Hippo and buffalo went the same way.
What has happened since is the reason a place like this can exist at all.
Murchison now holds the world’s largest population of Nubian giraffe — the subspecies once called Rothschild’s, still listed as critically endangered. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation’s 2025 count puts around 1,736 in the park’s northern sector, about 87 per cent of Uganda’s total. In 2010 the whole country held fewer than 300.
The park also holds Uganda’s largest lion population. The country’s biggest carnivore survey to date, run through 2022, estimated around 240 lions across some 3,200 square kilometres of Murchison, and a peer-reviewed study of the Nile Delta section found a density of about 14 lions per 100 square kilometres. Those are good numbers by any measure.
They are not numbers to take for granted — wire snaring in this park is a documented problem, and the Wildlife Conservation Society has pulled thousands of snares out of it. Which is part of what a lodge in an empty corner is for. WildPlaces says its presence here extends anti-poaching patrols and wildlife monitoring into a section that had neither, and puts a payroll into the communities around it.
It also makes an untouched pride, in a corner nobody drives, a genuinely unusual thing rather than a line of marketing.
The lodge
Kulu Ora stands where the Kisangani River runs into the Nile, on what the lodge calls the Kisangani Plains, at a point where the river divides around a jungle island. The name means “river” in two local languages. The Nile here is not the slow brown water of the lower park; it moves, and you hear it from the deck.
The suites are canvas-walled and ensuite, strung out along the bank so none of them looks at another. Timber floors, high canvas ceilings, and tent walls that open to the river on two sides. Bathrooms run to deep copper tubs positioned to face the water, twin basins, and linen robes. Each suite has its own stone-lined plunge pool on the deck, looking out over the Nile. One is a two-bedroom suite with a shared living room, which makes it the one to ask for if you are travelling as a family or a pair of couples.
The furnishing is the part that sets it apart from most new-build safari camps. Everything is handmade or upcycled from vintage British pieces — locally made linen sofas against Georgian sideboards, handmade iron-hinged chests, soft natural textiles — alongside commissioned work by a young Ugandan artist. The library was put together by co-founder Pamela Wright and runs from Africa-focused writing to novels you would actually take to a pool. It reads less like a lodge than like a well-kept house that happens to be in a national park.
The main lodge sits under canvas in neutral, earthy tones, open on the river side. There is a swimming pool long enough to swim lengths in, with a bar, a deck and daybeds around it, and a spa and massage room perched above the Nile, where the treatments use oils and butters made in Uganda. Meals move around — the dining tent, the pool deck, or a table set out on the riverbank — and much of what is on them comes out of a walled kitchen garden that grows herbs, salads, vegetables, chillies, lemons and pawpaw.
Days here
Game drives are the backbone, including night drives — not something every Ugandan park allows, and worth doing in country this empty. Beyond that: walking, birding, fishing on the Nile, boat time on the river, and enough space to spend an afternoon doing none of it.
The lodge calls the area a predator hotspot, and says lions are seen daily, often several prides, among big herds of Uganda kob. We can’t test that from here — but the carnivore numbers above make it plausible, and the zone has almost no other vehicles in it.
It also combines. WildPlaces runs six other properties across Uganda, so Kulu Ora slots into a route with chimpanzee tracking at Semliki or gorillas at Clouds in Bwindi — which is how most people will end up seeing it.
Built to be taken away
The most interesting design decision is structural. The tents sit on metal girders and wooden poles rather than foundations, and WildPlaces says that aside from the swimming pools, the whole lodge could be dismantled and removed inside a week, leaving nothing behind. Power and hot water are solar. Guests move between suites in electric carts. The walled garden keeps wildlife out of the crop and, more usefully, keeps the crop’s seed out of the park.
That is the lodge’s own claim rather than anything an outsider has tested, but it is at least testable, which is more than most eco-lodge copy manages: a building either comes out in a week or it doesn’t. We’d like to go and see.
Practicalities
Kulu Ora is open year round, with the drier stretches — December to March and June to September — the easier ones for game viewing. Access is a scenic drive of about six hours from Kampala, or an hour’s flight from Entebbe to Pakuba or Bugungu airstrip followed by a two-hour game-drive transfer in. Private charters are possible.
WildPlaces doesn’t publish rates. At the March opening, Travel Weekly reported USD 990 per person per night sharing. On top of that, a conservation levy of USD 25 per bed night goes to the WildPlaces foundation, funding park protection and community projects. Rates and opening dates still showing on some booking sites are out of date — take them from the lodge.
Getting to Uganda is easier than it was. Uganda Airlines flies Entebbe to London Gatwick nonstop, though the route was interrupted for several months in early 2026 and only resumed in May, so it’s worth confirming the current schedule.
Sources
- WildPlaces Africa — Kulu Ora and Papa’s Camp property pages; Kulu Ora opening press release, London, 10 March 2026
- Uganda Wildlife Authority — Murchison Falls National Park; State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026
- Giraffe Conservation Foundation — State of Giraffe 2025; Murchison Falls NP surveys 2024/25
- Braczkowski et al., Communications Biology, October 2024 — Nile Delta lion density; Uganda national carnivore survey, 2022–23
- Wildlife Conservation Society Uganda — lion mortality and snare removal
- Travel Weekly, 28 March 2026; ATTA; Tourism Update; Sleeper; Hotel Designs
- Britannica — Murchison Falls National Park