Description
The luxurious Mihingo Lodge is situated in a magical setting adjacent to Lake Mburo National Park. Designed to blend in with its fragile surroundings, this environmentally friendly lodge offers comfort, relaxation and the experience of being at one with nature. The infinity pool overlooks the valley below where buffalo, warthogs, bush buck, eland, impala and zebra can be seen at the waterhole. To further enhance your experience of wild Africa, Mihingo Lodge is the only lodge in Uganda to offer daytime and overnight horse safaris into the national park.
Accommodation
Mihingo Lodge has 12 luxury, tented rooms designed to provide guests with privacy and tranquillity. Each room has its own unique charm and character, whether it is nestled in forest, overlooking the lake, perched on a rocky outcrop or down by the water hole. Although no two rooms are the same, Suni and Ralph have ensured they all share stunning views and provide guests with a light and airy sanctuary and a feeling of being alone in the bush. Each spacious canvas tent is equipped with en-suite bathrooms, hot and cold running water, showers, and flush loos. The rooms have been sensitively designed to complement the local environment with great attention to detail. The doorways are framed by stunning pieces of dead olive wood found on the land.
Horse Riding Safaris
Horse safaris are an awesome way to see the wildlife around Mihingo Lodge. Without the noise of an engine you can hear so much more and you really feel part of nature. Riding a horse means you often get the chance to see the more timid animals. If you are very lucky you may see eland and buffalo. Ralph and Iddy were even lucky enough to see 2 leopards on a horse ride! However, this was a very rare sighting. You will nearly always see a mixture of warthog, topi, impala, duiker, bushbuck, waterbuck and zebra. Of course the time of year and the weather do affect the number and variety of animals that you see, as the animals graze where the grass is the most delicious.Watching animals from a horse is so peaceful and a totally different experience from being on a game drive; zebras come towards you to check out the strange relative without stripes. Even the eland that are usually very shy, look curiously at the horses without running away, but keep their distance.
Conservation
The Mihingo Conservation & Community Development Fund was set up by Ralph as a separate non-profit organisation with the aim of preserving the wildlife outside the Park and reducing human-wildlife conflict. During the building of the lodge an entire clan of spotted hyenas were poisoned in the Park highlighting the need for a project focusing on the communities and the wildlife living beyond its borders. To date MCCDF has focused on a compensation programme for livestock killed by Park predators, channelled donations of equipment to two local primary schools, started a sponsorship scheme for students to secondary school and we have begun identifying leopards in the area. Since we started the project we have compensated for hundreds of kills and have seen many leopard cubs grow up and the hyenas on our side of the park have increased in number, from the occasional two to four hyenas to a regular twenty at the time of writing.
