Ruaha National Park & Selous game reserve
Lying between the two equatorial climates of east and southern Africa, Ruaha National Park is renowned for its remoteness, aridness and excellent game viewing, which includes the rare, greater kudu and huge concentrations of elephant. Ruaha's main representatives are its astounding 10,000 elephants - the largest population of any East African national park. The park as a whole offers some of the best wildlife, birds, flora and fauna on the continent, while the Ruaha River itself attracts large numbers of animals attempting to cool off.
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 main means of support 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, watched carefully by prides of lion, cheetahs and leopards that lord over the savannah, stalk the open grassland and lurk in tangled riverine thickets.