Departure from Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar on a morning flight for Ruaha National Park. Afternoon game drive. The park is named after the river that flows through a rugged valley in the heart of the semi-arid central highlands of Tanzania. It covers twenty thousand square kilometres and is the largest park in the country. Ruaha is remote and difficult to access (usually by plane) but it offers visitors exceptional game drive opportunities.
Game drives in Ruaha National Park. The Ruaha River, which overflows during the wet season, becomes a very active habitat for animals during the dry season (June–December). Its banks are a favourite hunting ground for lions, cheetahs and leopards.
There are also about twelve thousand elephants and a large population of African wild dogs, which are now very rare. Numerous species of antelope live in the park, whose geographical position makes it a transition environment from eastern Africa’s typical savannahs dotted with acacias to the miombo forests typical of southern Africa.
Transfer to the airstrip and departure for the Selous Game Reserve. As fifty-five thousand square kilometres, Selous is the largest protected area in Africa or anywhere in the world. It is part of an even broader ecosystem, which extends into the Reserva do Niassa across the Mozambique border. The Selous Game Reserve is larger than Switzerland and has no human settlements, so it is a wild universe of great beauty and variety. Only the northern area, crossed by the Rufiji River, is open to tourism. Afternoon boat safari.
Two days dedicated to the exploration of the Selous Game Reserve. The Selous is home to the largest number of animals compared to any other protected area in Tanzania: sixty thousand elephants, forty thousand hippopotamuses, three thousand five hundred lions, one thousand three hundred African wild dogs (now the rarest predators in existence), five thousand sable antelope, one hundred and thirty thousand buffalo, and about four hundred and fifty species of birds. Selous is prevalently flat and characterized by higher temperatures than the parks on the northern circuit, with very different habitats like miombo forests, clearings dotted with baobab trees, ebony, acacias, stony hills with low grass, plains that flood during the rainy season, swamps and lakes amid the meanders of the Rufiji. Here tourists are fewer than in the busier Northern Parks.