Selous Game Reserve & Ruaha

Many people combine visits to Selous and Ruaha as part of the same safari. They are both located in the south and are just a short flight away from eachother.

Selous Game Reserve

Located in southern Tanzania, this is Africa’s largest park – and second largest in the world. To put this into perspective, it is twice the size of Denmark. However, this statistic is misleading as a great proportion of Selous is off limits to visitors, who are restricted to the area north of the River Rufiji. Yet even though the accessible parts of the park only account for around 5% of its total size, Selous is a fantastic place to visit. Comprising dense tracts of miombo wilderness, palm-fringed channels of the meandering Rufiji, sweeping sandbanks and marshy islands it is a pretty park and attracts a plethora of exciting game and stunning birds.

Despite great problems with poaching in the recent past, the park is still probably best known for its huge population of elephants (estimated at 65,000) which represents over half of the total number in Tanzania. It is also teeming with buffalo and its rivers are awash with hippo, whose numbers are estimated at 150,000 and 40,000 respectively. Lion, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra, impala, greater kudu, hartebeest and eland are also abundant. The birdlife includes some real treasures such as the Malagasy squacco heron, Pel’s fishing owl, trumpeter hornbill, purple-crested turaco, malachite kingfisher and carmine bee-eater.

A visit to Selous, particularly to the western areas, brings with it a mild feeling of exclusivity. It is little visited compared to many of Tanzania’s parks with only 1% of visitors to the country making it to the park – and seeing a beautiful bird or an exciting animal is infinitely more special if you are the only one there.

Ruaha National Park

The park gets its name from the river that forms part of its boundary, a watercourse which turns into the Rufiji and crosses the Selous Game Reserve further downstream. The best time to visit this park is from July to December. Outside these months, the rains render the tracks impassable and when the grass is long, visibility in the park is reduced so heavily that game-viewing becomes extremely difficult.

Considered by many as a seriously well-kept secret, Ruaha boasts a fantastic variety of game, including elephant, numerous antelope (including the elusive sable and roan antelopes and the magnificent greater kudu), ostrich, cape hunting dogs, hippos and crocodiles and over 400 recorded species of bird. The wildlife has suffered at the hand of a bad poaching problem yet Ruaha still has more elephants than any other national park in Tanzania. It also supports a vast number of predators; abnormally large prides of lion, a strong leopard population and numerous cheetah seen wandering the open plains. African wild dogs are here too – a fantastic sight for anyone lucky enough to see them.

With thanks to Nomad Safaris for the above photographs from Sand River Safari Camp.