RUAHA NATIONAL PARK
The game viewing starts the moment the plane touches down.
A giraffe races beside the airstrip, all legs and neck, yet
oddly elegant in its awkwardness. A line of zebras parades
across the runway in the giraffe's wake.
In the distance, beneath a bulbous baobab tree, a few representatives
of Ruaha's 10,000 elephants - the largest population of any
East African national park, form a protective huddle around
their young.
Second only to Katavi in its aura of untrammelled wilderness,
but far more accessible, Ruaha protects a vast tract of the
rugged, semi-arid bush country that characterises central
Tanzania. Its lifeblood is the Great Ruaha River, which courses
along the eastern boundary in a flooded torrent during the
height of the rains, but dwindling thereafter to a scattering
of precious pools surrounded by a blinding sweep of sand and
rock.
A fine network of game-viewing roads follows the Great Ruaha
and its seasonal tributaries, where , during the dry season,
impala, waterbuck and other antelopes risk their life for
a sip of life-sustaining water. And the risk is considerable:
not only from the prides of 20-plus lion that lord over the
savannah, but also from the cheetahs that stalk the open grassland
and the leopards that lurk in tangled riverine thickets. This
impressive array of large predators is boosted by both striped
and spotted hyena, as well as several conspicuous packs of
the highly endangered African wild dog.
Ruaha's unusually high diversity of antelope is a function
of its location, which is transitional to the acacia savannah
of East Africa and the miombo woodland belt of Southern Africa.
Grant's gazelle and lesser kudu occur here at the very south
of their range, alongside the miombo-associated sable and
roan antelope, and one of East AfricaÆs largest populations
of greater kudu, the park emblem, distinguished by the male's
magnificent corkscrew horns.
A similar duality is noted in the checklist of 450 birds:
the likes of crested barbet, an attractive yellow-and-black
bird whose persistent trilling is a characteristic sound of
the southern bush, occur in Ruaha alongside central Tanzanian
endemics such as the yellow-collared lovebird and ashy starling.
About Ruaha National Park
Size:
10,300 sq km (3,980 sq miles), Tanzania's 2nd biggest park.
Location:
Central Tanzania, 128km (80 miles) west of Iringa.
Getting there
Scheduled and/or charter flights from Dar es Salaam, Selous,
Serengeti, Arusha, Iringa and Mbeya.
Year-round road access through Iringa from Dar es Salaam (about
10 hours) via Mikumi or from Arusha via Dodoma.
What to do
Day walks or hiking safaris through untouched bush.
Stone age ruins at Isimila, near Iringa, 120 km (75 miles)
away, one of Africa's most important historical sites .