Ruaha National Park

Size: 10,300 sq km (about 6,400 sq miles). Tanzania’s 2nd biggest park.

Location: Central Tanzania, 128 km (about 80 miles) west of Iringa

Getting here: Getting there Charter flights from Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Iringa and Mbeya. Year-round road access from Dar es Salaam (about 10 hours), Mikumi, Iringa and Arusha via Dodoma.

To do: Day walks or hiking safaris through untouched bush. Stone age ruins at Isimilia, near Iringa, 120 km (about 75 miles) away, one of Africa’s most important historical sites.

Best time: For predators and large mammals, dry season (mid May-December); bird watching, lush scenery and wild flowers, wet season (January-April).

Accommodation: Riverside lodge; 1 dry season tented camp (2 more planned); self-catering bandas, 2 campsites.

Our game viewing starts the moment we touch down. A pair of giraffe race beside the airstrip, all legs and neck elegant in their awkwardness. A line of zebra parades across the runway in their wake, while protective elephants guard their young under the shade of a fat baobab tree.

Wildlife is concentrated along the cascading Great Ruaha River that is the park’s lifeblood. Home to hippo and crocodiles snacking on school’s of fish, it is a flooded torrent after the rains, dwindling to precious pools surrounded by a blinding sweep of sand in the dry season. Waterbuck, impala and the world’s most southerly Grant’s gazelle risk their lives for a sip of water… a permanent hunting ground for lion, leopard, jackal, hyena and packs of wild dog – rare elsewhere. Ruaha’s 8000 resident elephants remain the largest population of any national park in East Africa, recovering strongly from ivory poaching in the eighties.

Scouring the vast wilderness of rocky outcrops and wooded hills you may see the shy kudu’s corkscrew horns gleaming like worn metal behind a camouflage of thorny thickets. Unique combinations of animals co-exist here – both the greater and lesser kudu, sable and roan antelope – Ruaha being the only protected area in the world where the flora and fauna of eastern and southern Africa overlap.