Ruaha

Ruaha National Park is reachable from Iringa, so I decided to do an overnight trip there, unsure of how long it will be until I can return to this area. And it felt like an excellent Christmas/New Year treat as the rest of my trip has been shoestring-ish. I organised it through a dude I was introduced to via the conservation community, an expert birder who knows the place well. It turned out he couldn’t personally do the trip as his five-year old son had been circumcised five days earlier, and he wanted to stick around. It seemed like as good an excuse as any, and he arranged someone else to accompany me.

The density of Greek Orthodox churches on the drive from Iringa town through a rural region to the Ruaha entrance was quite surprising. There has been a lot of missionary activity in this area, and the churches all looked freshly painted and well-maintained, so the denomination must be thriving.

Ruaha is described as untrammelled in much of the marketing material about the National Park. This is always an appealing word from a wildlife-viewing perspective even though it refers to largely to predominantly white visitors with their binoculars, not to local people, and apparently Greeks, who have trammelled such places in a form of coexistence with wildlife since time immemorial.

Ruaha is indeed great for wildlife compared to many conservation areas that have lost a lot of wildlife to various threats. The Park offered up all the classics during the course of the day and because Ruaha is unfenced, the elephant sightings began before we even reached the gate. Good numbers of giraffe, buffalo, hippo, crocodile and zebra abounded and I enjoyed an eastern chanting goshawk surveying for prey from a high dead branch. The highlight was this old male lion very relaxed in a thicket next to the track. We watched him for a while and he was totally unbothered, only moving occasionally to swat flies.

Later the car battery packed in when we were enjoying the sunset at a viewpoint next to the Great Ruaha River. This wasn’t great with night falling in a Park with possibly 10% of the world’s remaining lions and Tanzania’s largest elephant population. The driver and guide sent me back to the huts with a passing vehicle whilst they waited for one of the Park’s mechanics to be dispatched to get the battery working again.