Park Buffalo Ruaha Game Camp

Ruaha National Park isn't one of the best known parks in Tanzania, but it does have some of the country's best dry season game viewing, with lion and buffalo being two of the top species you have a very good chance of seeing well.

To complicate things slightly, this isn't a park like the Serengeti National Park or Ngorongoro Crater, where the game is almost impossible to miss. In Ruaha you really need to know where - and how - to look if you want to see the best that the park has to offer. This is why we strongly recommend either Mwagusi Safari Camp run by Chris Fox, (who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the park and an almost child like enthusiasm for the game) or Jongomero camp.

One of the highlights of Ruaha is the enormous herds of buffalo that the park is home to. In the dry season in particular, the buffalo face a vicious circle that only gets worse as the season progresses. In essence the problem is this: Buffalo are poor water conservers and need to drink twice a day. As the park gets hotter and drier, there are fewer places to drink, but the requirement for water gets greater. This means that the animals are forced to drink in fewer and smaller areas, and the consequence of this is that the food in that area is depleted and they have to travel further between water and food each day. Ultimately, they end up in very large herds (a few thousand animals) that are tied to drinking at a limited number of places.

All of this of course plays straight into the hands (paws) of the lion, who spend most of the dry season simply moving short distances up and down the main rivers, close to the water, and waiting for the inevitable arrival of the buffalo - they may be late, but at some point they have to come.

Mwagusi Safari Camp was the first tented camp in Ruaha. It's the obvious choice if you're serious about seeing the best that Ruaha has to offer. A charming and quirky small camp, with a great approach to game viewing. read more...

If you're lucky, when you're staying at Mwagusi, your guide will be able to get you to a place where you can sit quietly and wait for the arrival of the buffalo as they come to drink. Of course it isn't guaranteed that they'll come to exactly where you are, but if you're luck enough to be in the right place at the right time, the sight of over a thousand buffalo pouring into the bed of a dry river, only a few metres from where you're sitting, is one of the most memorable game experiences you're likely to have.

The icing on the cake is of course if there happens to be a pride of lion hunting in the area. If this is the case there can be prolonged stand-offs between lion and buffalo (which can result in stale mates and bizarre moments of what looks like nonchalance on the part of both sides) and attempts at a kill, many of which can fail, but some of which do of course succeed.

Don't come to Ruaha only expecting to see lion - like any other animal there's no guarantee that you'll see them, and Ruaha has a great many other species that are well worth seeing. However, provided you take your time, and your guide knows the park really well, you shouldn't be disappointed.

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Lion and Buffalo in Ruaha