Ruaha National Park

That is my favorite park, nothing compare the others, wildlife, people, a real feel of Africa!

Ruaha was probably the most splendid park we have spent time in. Beautiful Baobab valley on the way there and hundreds of elephants inside the park along with all other kind of wild life did make a huge impression.

An awe-inspiring experience

This was the first time we'd visited Ruaha in the green season and it was a completely different experience from the dry season. I hadn't expected everything to be so lush. Everywhere was green, green, green! The birdlife was amazing - so many different species that it was difficult to know where to point the camera at times. One disappointment was that we didn't see as many raptors as usual. Because a lot of the animals had moved away from the area as there was no scarcity of water, a lot of the raptors had gone with them. Animal sightings were pretty good too, though obviously not as many as in the dry season. The weather was wonderful - we had no rain during our eight day stay and it was pleasantly warm day and night, though it did heat up a bit during the middle of the day but not uncomfortably so. Our camp (Mwagusi Safari Camp) was terrific as always with the most wonderful food and friendly staff. Our guide was exceptional, as was our driver. Ruaha is really picturesque with the most beautiful, varied landscape although the proliferation of trees and bushes did make photography a little tricky at times. We choose Ruaha because it is more remote than other parks in Tanzania, and consequently much less crowded. We have already booked to go back next year!

Ruaha national park is one of the few Tanzania’s famous wilderness area where one can have a rare experience of game viewing spiced up by the fascinating landscape.
Ruaha National Park has a high diversity of plants and animals including elephants, buffalos, antelopes and some of rare and endangered species like wild dogs.
The park is one of the Tanzania birds’ paradise with more than 571species and some of them are known to be migrants from within and outside Africa.

We arrives in Ruaha late in the evening in a heavy rainstorm so it was only next morning when i looked out of my window at the Ruaha Cottages and saw granite mountains, elephants and Giraffes grazing aloong the Ruaha river in the valley below that the wild beauty of it hit me . Its simply unbelievably, heart-breakingly stunning.

fantastic experience

where do i start?
Lets start at the beginning, left our camp which was located just about 7 km from the gate at around 6 in the morning in a land rover puma and a toyota, it was a huge squad of about 20 people.
at the gate, we meet the rangers in charge of collecting the entrance fees, the guys where awesome and kind, they even gave us a heads up on where to find what.

this time we didn't sleep in the national park, but there are so many options on different pricing if your interested, the cheapest are the government open campsites and the national parks hostels, where food can be bought at the rangers village inside the park or make your own food:)

the weather on the day was extremely hot "but what did we expect?? we were in the rift valley anyways it was bound to be hot" but later in the day it started raining just as we stopped for our lunch at one of the parks picnic sites.

the scenery was out of this world, the dry mwagusi river turned out to be an awesome animal spotting ground, and the greenery of the park did the landscape justice

we didn't have a guide, just a group of youngies. but we stopped all then guides in the other cars and they where very helpful and showed us all the places where we found leopards and lions and buffalos and crocs and hippos.

we saw so many animals families upon families of elephants, so many antelopes and impalas and kudus and jackals and pumbas and timons, zebras, baboons, so many different birds, squirrels, giraffes, and many more, and the wild flowers there are just beautiful.

the highlight of our trip is when a ranging male elephant chased one of our cars i was in the car behind just looking at the action i forgot to even film haha. and ruaha elephants are known to be one of the largest in east africa (after the ngorongoro and tarangire ones).

all in all i would do this again. i had a fantastic time, hope you have fun visiting ruaha :)

As wild as possible

When I was thinking about visiting Tanzania, it was primary because of marine reservation park in Mafia Island and whale sharks. But when you travel half the world you want to see as much as possible right? So visiting one of the inland national parks was obvious. And the I saw a BBC documentary about Ruaha, and it was clear as a sky where to go.
Ruaha was my second Africa national park (Kruger was the first one) and I have to say I was blown away by the nature and the wildness. Right the day when we get to accommodation we saw two lioness close to the watering hole and we where there alone. Just me and my wife, sitting silently in the car listening to the birds and the breathing of the two lioness. And then herd of elephants come to the same watering hole and drove the lions away. I guess that is what watching the wild means. During the whole week we saw around only 8 other cars cruising the park, rest of the time it was just us and plain nature. The best way how to enjoy the park is to pack some supplies, drove early morning to some place where the animals gather (watering holes, fords, pools, river) sit and watch the animals coming and going and you will be rewarded for sure. Of course you need your own car.
I have been there during dry season - November - and the temperature was enormous - 50C during the day and 35 during the night. So be aware of this while there is no air conditioning in the accommodation and zircon in the car is useless while you drive so slowly through the park that it is not working well. The accommodation is basic. We stayed in the cottages (run directly by the NP). Two rooms, toilet + shower. Price 50USD pp/pn. Yes, I know it is quite a price for basic accommodation. The cheaper type, bandas, 30USD pp/pn, don’t have toilet and shower and basically it is just a metal hut with bed. And metal hut in 50C degrees during the day quickly change in to an oven. So the accommodation and the services absolutely do not match the price, but you have to accept that you pay a lot because there is no other way. In the whole Ruaha there is no proper shop, just two dinning places, where you get mostly chicken and rice or potatoes. So if you can, bring a lot of your own supplies. The only thinks you can buy there is bier, water, coke, rum and gin. Hope they restock the rum and gin while they had only one bottles, which we bought out. And of course in the cottages there is no fridge, I never drunk so much warm bier as in Ruaha.
The great think about staying few nights in Ruaha is, that the accommodation is not fenced. So you sit a front of the cottage enjoying the view and suddenly there is a herd of kudus just five meters a front of you, or hyena. Regular guest every evening, looking for some leftovers.
You wanna stay in the wild and under proper roof at the same time? You have enough money to spent? You have your own car (our 4x4 Toyota Rav 4 was OK)? Than Ruaha is perfect place to spent few days and watch and listen.

200 Elephants Per Day

I spent a lot of time choosing our Tanazanian safari destination. I wanted something exceptional, inexpensive, with a taste of adventure (not tourist traps). I found that the best places for that are Katavi and Ruaha. But the first one is really far from Dar. So decision was quite easy eventually. Ruaha is really beautiful place, with landscape full of hills and baobab trees. Great Ruaha river is full of animals in dry season. We saw in one day more then 200 hundred elephants, one hundred giraffes, and many other animals (lions, udu, zebras, hippos etc.). We met just one car during one day. I can recommend Ruaha for everyone who wants taste real safari adventure. I felt we were first visitors there.

Ruaha, a real taste of wild Africa

In the last 10 years I have visited many of the best well known national parks in Africa, including those of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa. During October and November of this year 2015, I traveled to Tanzania again to explore Selous, Mikumi and Ruaha and end the trip in Mafia Island for diving with whale sharks. The plan is basically always the same, buy a flight to a major city (in this case Dar es Salaam), prepare a driving gps with off-road programs, points of interest and hundreds of maps, and rent a 4WD vehicle with camping equipment if possible.

We arrived to Ruaha NP after having visited Selous and Mikumi, it took us about 8 hours from Mikumi, with a two hour stop in Iringa to refuel and buy some food, water and drinks. From Iringa to Ruaha NP the road is not very good and you will need a 4WD car, you have two options to make the second half of the route, take the one to the right, the road is much better.

At the main gate you will spend some time, paperwork is slow, also payment by credit card is preferred, if you are not sure of the number of days you are going to stay, you can always extend your permit in the HQ office close to the airstrip, like we did twice. The accommodation options are the usual, expensive luxury private lodges, cottages, bandas and camping but not very massive. I can only tell about camping because I have never used the other options. We were assigned to "public campsite #1", it is located in the Ruaha river bank with a very scenic view, some trees provide shadow and there are some facilities like a kitchen building and very basic toilets, we were the only group in the campsite. Campsite #1 is about two or three km from the rangers camp, it was a pleasure to share a beer with the park people in the community hall every night, you can even join the buffet they have available for the park personnel and their families (10,000 tsh or 5 USD).

If you have good maps loaded in your off-road gps you don't need a guide to move safely around Ruaha NP, if in doubt, just ask anyone in the community hall, but the best routes for game drive are obvious, simply follow the river sides. If you are not good at spotting animals you will appreciate the help of a guide that you can hire in the rangers camp for about 30 dollars a day. We start the morning game driving very early in the morning after a brief breakfast, and it usually lasts until we can no longer stand the heat, then we go back to the campsite to have a shower and a rest. Wildlife is great in Ruaha, we saw lots of elephants, giraffes, buffalos, wildbeast, zebras, waterbuck, impalas, warthogs, grand kudus, hipos, crocodiles, osprays, ostriches, etc. As for predators we saw hyenas, leopards, jackals, wild dogs and lots of lions, we missed cheetah, we were told that in that season they move to another part of the park. Game drive in the evenings is also very interesting but I prefer to choose a good spotting point close to the river and relax watching how animals come to drink. We spent 5 days in Ruaha NP, so we had time to explore the hills and some other parts of the park, specially Mwagusi river, where we found the wild dogs pack.

October and November are very hot in Ruaha, but it is the beginning of the raining season and we were rewarded with a couple wonderful storms. We were told by the people in the HQ camp that the park was in lack of visitors, and that it was diificult to maintain the park with such a low number of visitors. Poaching is a big problem in Ruaha because it is a very large park.

We met just a few tourist, Ruaha is not Serengueti or Ngoro-ngoro where you can meet dozens of other vehicles in every game drive, in Ruaha you may meet one or two if you are lucky, and we always stopped and shared our findings (the elephants herd drinking in the river or the pride of lions eating a zebra in the river side).

In general, Ruaha is, if not the best, one of the two best parks I have visited, I cannot tell about luxury lodges or other accommodation types, but camping is great and you will enjoy the nature very close. Campsite #1 will surprise you, a pride of lions lives there and will share the camp with you, just respect the norms and follow the recommendations and you will be safe.

I hope this comments help someone to enjoy Ruaha as we did.

Regards,
Alberto Aragones

A spectacular alternative to the crowded northern circuit and certainly worth a trip of its own.

Ruaha is my favorite Tanzanian national park due to its fairly remote location and the spectacular landscape. An incredible variety of wildlife and some very well-trained outfits operating there. Ruaha's remote location and massive area, two of the things that are most attractive, are also its main vulnerabilities. I had made many visits to the park when I lived in the area from 2005-2008 and was concerned when I returned earlier this year because of all of the accelerated poaching that's gone on in the area over the last several years. Ruaha's remote location and massive area, two of the things that are most attractive, are also its main vulnerabilities. The quality of safaris for guests however, remains mostly unchanged in my opinion. Most of the game viewing tracks are in a relatively small portion of the park that is well-protected. Having heard so much about how hard the park has been hit, I was surprised at the abundance of wildlife (this is of course not to minimize the scale of the problem in Ruaha, particularly farther afield in the north and out into the WMAs and game reserves).

I've stayed at River Lodge and Mwagusi in the past (only River Lodge on this visit) and have to say that both Chris and Peter Fox run top notch operations: well maintained camps, excellent food and services, and really do a spectacular job training their guides on Ruaha-specific flora and fauna.

Two recommendations:
1. "Ruaha National Park: An Intimate View" by Sue Stolberger, is probably the best guide out there to flowers, plants, and trees of miombo woodlands, not just in Ruaha but for most of the country. It's a bit cumbersome to navigate until you get used to it, as the plants aren't grouped taxonomically, but Sue's insights and comments more than make up for this minor setback. I've seen a number of guides even up on the northern circuit using it as a reference. It is tough to get a copy of, but the main gate of the Park has copies in their storage room if you ask specifically for it. That is where I purchased a copy in May. I think it was US$45.

2. "A Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Tanzania" by Charles and Lara Foley is another excellent resource that has recently become available and can be purchased more widely. It is also easy to use in the field as well with a good index that makes looking up details a breeze.