Driving through over a dozen national parks and reserves in less than a month is quite a challenge to take on, especially so when they are in a country like Uganda. A mighty 5000km of dirt track stood between the starting and finishing lines, and there was less than three hours’ worth of soothing tarmac along the entire route.

It seemed like an ambitious task to undertake, but we were only the latest to pick up the baton in a project that has been described as “an insanely optimistic and impossibly ambitious” attempt to map every driveable track in every protected area on the entire African continent.

Throughout the previous year, teams of modern-day explorers armed with GPSs, sat-phones and expedition-equipped 4WDs have been skirmishing out across South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda. The MAPA Project (Mapping Africa’s Protected Areas) is the first project of this magnitude that has been attempted anywhere in the world. The sum of all this knowledge was to be uploaded onto a dedicated layer on Google Earth to benefit researchers, self-drive tourists and, most importantly, African conservation. It is, quite literally, a continent-wide attempt to ‘put Africa on the map’.

“As a photojournalist I began to find it very frustrating trying to source information on national parks,” March Turnbull, MAPA’s founder, told me when we met in Rwanda. “I could never quite get a good grasp of how these parks fit together in the big picture of African conservation… Or, more poignantly, why they didn’t. For example, why was the DRC’s Salonga National Park so unknown? It has two million fantastically bio-diverse hectares, with everything from bonobos to plants that no one has yet identified. It’s roughly the same size as South Africa’s Kruger National Park, but few people have ever been there and nobody knows anything about it. If Salonga disappeared tomorrow nobody would even know! And that seems profoundly wrong. We couldn’t just defend ourselves in hindsight by saying, ‘well, we never knew.’ We have to go and do something about that now. We have to let the world know about it.”

By the time I met up with Turnbull at Kigali he was celebrating the near termination of Phase One of the project. All the big national parks and reserves in southern and East Africa had been mapped, and the teams were now working their way slowly towards the northern hemisphere. To accomplish the task of mapping Uganda’s parks, I had teamed up with South African photographer Eric Nathan and his fellow compatriots, Deon de Jongh and doctor Taryn Mitchell. Although we would be tackling some of the parks separately, it had been decided that we would travel for much of the time in a two-vehicle convoy because of difficult off-road terrain in fairly remote areas. More importantly, there is still officially a significant security risk in the Karamoja ‘bandit country’ that we would have to cross to reach Kidepo Valley National Park. Turkana raiding parties from Kenya, armed Karamajong cattle-rustlers and random Sudanese guerrilla units are still active from time to time in this traditionally lawless border area.

But, as Turnbull said, “If I really believed there was a significant danger I would be the first to pull the plug…but Kidepo would be a real prize for the project. It is exactly the sort of area we really ought to cover!”

We all battered through the various hiccups of the south with the thought of Kidepo as our Ugandan Holy Grail. Mechanical traumas with de Jongh and Mitchell’s Toyota unfortunately threw some spanners in the works and did nothing to soothe the pair’s ‘domestic woes’. Compatibility problems of this sort are not uncommon among relative strangers who are forced to live together 24/7 in what amounts (at least when communications break down) to a moving 6’x6’ cell. Throughout the first three weeks of our trip our constant worry was that one of the problems would escalate and leave us without time to make the long drive north to explore Kidepo. But we made good time, breaking camp early in the mornings and driving for long hours, only twice having to break our self-imposed prohibition against night-driving on the Ugandan roads.

Kidepo did indeed turn out to be ‘the prize’. We drove down over the Morungule ridge, which forms the park boundary, towards pristine savannah dotted with acacias and picturesque sausage trees. A vast buffalo herd appeared in the distance as a dark stain around the watering holes, and the sunset threw deep blue shadows into the crags of the mountains that curved along the Sudan border. Kidepo deserves its oft-quoted reputation as the most beautiful national park in Africa. The perfect plains and surrounding mountains are reminiscent of Ngorongoro Crater, but are rarely marred by the sight of even a single other vehicle. Herds of up to 4000 buffalo are frequently seen here, as are herds of hundreds of elephant. Over the course of the next four days, as we explored and mapped every track in the park’s 1442 square kilometres, we continually gasped at the perfect fairytale beauty of the landscape. The park boasts 463 species of bird and 77 species of mammal, including five primates and no less than 20 predators. Given the region’s troubled history we had feared that wildlife would, to say the least, be extremely timid. But now that security within the park itself is no longer an issue, it seems safe to say that Kidepo offers perhaps the best safari potential in all Uganda.

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We set up our base camp beside a pretty kopje, which offered sweeping vistas over the plains and their resident herds. During the relative cool that bracketed dawn and dusk, we managed to fit in about eight hours of mapping each day. In the midday heat, we met back at camp to spend some time processing the large amounts of GPS data, photos and notes that we’d collected. Each evening we then had to transfer our material to MAPA HQ via our satellite internet system.
Over the month we worked in some fairly wild camps, with one person writing while the other scanned the bush by torchlight for the eyes of belligerent elephants or the occasional predators who were drawn by the scent of our campfire sausages. Several times we were caught out by nightfall, and were forced to
find a sleeping place far from the official sites. During those occasions we just steered away from the tall grass and areas where the voracious tsetse flies could become sheer torture – these insects were far more of a preoccupation than the big cats.

Perhaps that is why I was so unprepared for the arrival of some inquisitive visitors one afternoon at our Kidepo kopje base camp. I was bashing out an email update to Matt, your magazine’s dedicated editor, when I glanced up to see seven lionesses lined up along a rock beside camp. They were barely 70m away and were watching me with the sort of feline curiosity that we are more used to seeing from our domestic tabbies. As I slowly eased up from my comfortably reclined position – feet up on the Landy’s bullbars – and moved cautiously around to the back of the vehicle, a couple of the cats sat up and pricked their ears. Uganda is renowned for its unpredictable lions, but I sensed that these cats were not aggressive. I knew that if they had been actively stalking me, I’d have never seen them coming. They seemed just to be idly curious – or perhaps, I thought, they simply weren’t hungry.

That Kidepo pride stayed to watch us all through the long afternoon and, even as we cooked that evening, we could see their amber eyes glinting in the firelight. Eventually they rose, stretched and sauntered away into the darkness. Later, in the early hours of the morning, we were woken by the last agonised bellows of a dying buffalo.