Africa's most remote national park — six hours from the nearest tarmac road, no tourist infrastructure, and a savanna so vast it feels like the continent began here
Kidepo Valley National Park (1,442 sq km, in the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda at the junction of the South Sudan and Kenyan borders) is consistently described by African wildlife guides and long-term African travelers as the most remote and least-visited national park in East Africa, and among the top five most authentic wilderness wildlife experiences on the continent. The isolation (the nearest major town, Gulu in northern Uganda, is 480km by dirt road — the last 170km unpaved; the park sees approximately 6,000-8,000 visitors per year versus Bwindi's 30,000+ and the Masai Mara's 2…
The Karamoja region's history is dominated by the Karimojong people (the Ateker-group Nilotic pastoralists who arrived in the Karamoja steppe from the Ethiopian highlands approximately 1,000 years ago) and by the AK-47 — the Karamoja region was heavily armed during the Idi Amin and Obote periods (1971-1986) and during the Lords Resistance Army war, with the proliferation of automatic weapons in the region enabling a cattle-raiding tradition that escalated from spears to machine guns in the 1980s-90s and effectively emptied the Kidepo Valley of wildlife by 1990 (elephant populations dropped fr…