Travel to Ruaha

Ruaha

is our favourite safari reserve

in the whole of East Africa

a hypnotic place that gets better with every visit

Ruaha is a very large and extremely important wildlife reserve located in southern Tanzania.

This is a top quality safari location, certainly one of our absolute favourite places in East Africa. It’s a wonderfully remote and subtly beautiful place, which just gets better and better on every visit.

We estimate that the Ruaha receives only around 6000 international visitors per year (around 5% of the traffic into the Serengeti), which is staggeringly few people for somewhere of this size and quality.

The reserve has a genuine sense of wilderness, is home to a very good range of wildlife, contains a dozen high quality safari camps and has a reputation for unusually high quality guiding.

As well as vehicle safari by day and night, the better camps here in Ruaha offer some of the best walking safari in Africa.

Ruaha is one of those places that can really get under your skin. It’s not uncommon to meet people who’ve been coming back here every year for decades. If we were only allowed to go on one more safari for the rest of our lives, then Ruaha would certainly be a strong contender.

Although relatively little known, at over 20,000 square kilometres, Ruaha is actually Tanzania's second largest wildlife reserve.

The scenery is wonderful, with the main river set against a backdrop of dramatic granite domes.

Although the river itself reduces to a trickle during the Jun-Oct dry season, it attracts high densities of wildlife from the vast dry hinterland.

The reserve is renowned for its impressive baobab trees, many of which have taken a severe battering from you know who.

There are large numbers of herbivores, characteristically with several species clustered together in one spot.

Predators include good populations of lions, with prides renowned for epic battles during the driest Sep-Nov period.

Sightings of leopards, cheetahs and spotted hyenas are relatively common, but wild-dogs are more elusive.

Vehicle safari is the main activity, often punctuated by picnics and sundowners.

Walking safari is also unusually prominent here.

Safari guiding in Ruaha is amongst the very best in East Africa.

In fact Kichaka Ruaha offers arguably the best private guided safari experience in the whole of Africa.

Some camps are also able to offer bivouac camping in remote locations.

Ruaha contains several extremely good small camps, offering really authentic safari experiences.

Although the focus is very much on authenticity, the camps are not without a few luxuries.

Access is usually by light aircraft from Arusha, Serengeti, Selous, Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar.

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Despite being one of the best reserves in Africa, Ruaha tends to feature in a remarkably small proportion of trips, mainly because it is obliged to compete with the Serengeti region. It is one of those places that tends to appeal most to more experienced safari travellers.

The usual stay duration is 3-5 nights in one camp or 5-12 nights in two or three camps.

Safari planning

Ruaha is most commonly combined in trips with other safari areas across Tanzania, like Serengeti or Selous (Nyerere), often in addition to the tropical beaches of Zanzibar, Pemba or Mafia islands.

Since around 2018, with the opening up of ever more diverse sectors within Ruaha, we have steadily increased the number of nights here. Most trips now combine two lodges over around six nights, with some trips extending to nine or more nights in three or even four different lodges.

Can you let Ruaha completely replace Serengeti in your trip? That has become the burning question. For ever more people the answer is a very definite yes.

Seasonality

The classic time to visit Ruaha is generally considered to be during the Jun-Oct dry season, when the wildlife is focused on the river and easy to view. But there are also good reasons to visit during other months.

Getting there

Ruaha is almost always reached by light aircraft. To the south and east there are daily services in both directions (Dar, Selous, Ruaha). Connections with the north are slightly less predictable, but usually operate daily (Serengeti, Manyara, Tarangire, Arusha, Ruaha, Selous, Dar). There are also services to and from the west (Ruaha, Mufindi, Katavi, Mahale).

It is possible to include Ruaha in a private-guided overland safari, in combination with Mikumi, Udzungwa and Selous, but the routing includes a lot of busy main road miles, causing this style of safari to fade since around 2015.

Where to stay

Ruaha contains around a dozen lodges, whose average quality is unusually high. It is usually important to include a stop in the central area, then add further nights in one or more of the more remote areas.