Katavi National Park
Size
4,471 square kilometres (1,726 square miles), in the Rukwa Rift in western Tanzania
What Katavi is known for
Hippo, crocodile, enormous buffalo herds and emptiness
Katavi from Ruaha or Arusha
By air only, on Monday and Thursday
Best time to visit Katavi National Park
August to October, when the pools have shrunk the furthest
We recommend
Three or four nights, usually combined with Mahale Mountains
Katavi lies in the Rukwa Rift, a side branch of the Great Rift Valley between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, and it is so remote that it was only discovered as a safari destination in the late eighties. You still notice that. Where the Serengeti draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, a few hundred foreigners come here. Travellers report driving a whole day and meeting one or two other vehicles. The heart of the park is the Katuma, a river that cuts through the Katisunga plain and drains into the seasonal lakes Katavi and Chada. In the wet season those plains flood and the game spreads over an enormous area. And then it dries out.
That is what Katavi owes its reputation to. As the dry season goes on, the Katuma pulls back to a thin flow and separate pools, and everything that drinks comes there. In those shrinking pools hundreds of hippo can crowd together, so tightly packed that they climb over each other and fight for room.
Crocodiles dig themselves into burrows in the bank to sit out the drought. And across the plain move buffalo herds of more than a thousand animals, with reports of groups up to sixteen hundred.
That contrast between wet and dry is fiercer than in almost any other park in Tanzania, and it is the reason you come here.
Katavi is not a park for a first safari, and experienced travellers say so too. There are no rhino, so no Big Five. Leopard are here but are seen irregularly. It is hot and dusty, and there are tsetse flies, sometimes plenty of them.
What you get back for it is wilderness in the old sense of the word. Animals that are hardly used to vehicles, a handful of small camps in an area about half the size of Yellowstone, and the chance to go into the field on foot. For the traveller who already knows the north and wants to go further, there is little in Tanzania that matches it.
Hippo in large numbers in the pools of the Katuma. Crocodile along and in the river. Buffalo, often in very large herds. Beyond that elephant, zebra, Masai giraffe, impala, topi, waterbuck and reedbuck. Lion you hear and see regularly, and spotted hyena too. Along the water sit fish eagles, saddle-billed storks, open-billed storks, spoonbills, herons, crowned cranes and pelicans. From November to April the migrant birds are added to that.
The park is large and the distances are long, so exploring one sector can take a whole day. That is at once the reason you stay several nights here.
The central part turns on the Katisunga plain, a grassland of just over four hundred square kilometres that is the focal point in the dry season for buffalo, elephant and the grazers. Close by lies the Ikuu ranger post with the airstrip, and the circuit along the Katuma with the hippo pools. That is the most productive area of the park, and at the same time the only one where you now and then meet another vehicle.
To the southeast lies the Chada plain, a broad floodplain around Lake Chada. Research points to this area as the part with the highest mammal numbers, and in the dry season there are many elephant here.
In the north lies Lake Katavi, a seasonal lake that is full of birds in the wet months. And all around lie the miombo woodland and the escarpment edges, where the roan, the sable antelope and the eland live.
In a park of nearly five thousand square kilometres with a handful of camps there is nobody to tell you where the animals are. No radio traffic from colleagues, no line of vehicles to show you the way. Your guide has to find it himself.
He knows which pools still hold water this month and which have dried up, and that shifts from week to week. He knows where the buffalo herds are and which lions are behind them. And he knows the miombo, where the roan and the sable antelope hide and where you have to drive slowly to see anything.
He also knows how to get around the tsetse. They sit mainly in the wooded parts, and the floodplains along the water are the least troubled by them. That makes more difference to the pleasure of a day than you would think.
And here you walk. Katavi is known for its walking safaris, with an armed ranger, and that is one of the things that sets this park apart from the north. On foot you learn to look at tracks, plants and sounds, and you hear the landscape instead of the engine.
This is what you come for. The plains dry out, the Katuma pulls back to pools, and the game concentrates along the water. June is the start, with improving roads and game drawing together. July to September is the core, with strong concentrations and good access. August to October gives the fiercest sights, because the pools are then at their most shrunken. September and October are hot and dusty, and the first thunderstorm can come at the end of October.
November and December
Three or four nights, and as with Mahale the flight days largely set that, because the scheduled flight runs on Monday and Thursday. That works out well, because the park is large and the distances are long, so exploring one sector can take a whole day. With three or four nights you combine the central area around Katisunga and the Katuma with the Chada plain in the southeast, and keep time for a walking safari. Alongside the ordinary drives you can walk here with an armed ranger, which Katavi is known for, and fly camp, a night in a simple tent far from the camp. And anyone who is set on it drives. Katavi connects by road to the southern route, via Mbeya, and from there it is another five hundred and fifty kilometres (340 miles) over rough roads. A long drive, not possible in the wet season, and for those who like that sort of thing one of the last real overland routes in Tanzania.
Katavi lies in the far west, and you get there by plane. The scheduled flight runs on Monday and Thursday from Ruaha to Katavi and on to Mahale. From the north there are shared charters from Arusha, or picking up from the Serengeti, on the same days and likewise on to Mahale.
Because Katavi and Mahale belong together, and not only because the flights connect them. Together that is about seven nights, with the plains and swamps first and then the chimpanzees in the mountain forest on Lake Tanganyika, with a beach to recover on. You then couple that package to your main trip, in the north or the south.
This is the trip that comes after the north. Anyone going on safari for the first time is better off in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. Anyone who already knows those and wants to go further finds something here that no longer exists in the north. Katavi is a sequel to your safari in Tanzania, not a beginning.
There are only a handful of camps in Katavi, and that is exactly why it stays so empty. The most classic is a small tented camp of six tents, without a fence, with walking safaris and the option of fly camping, where you sleep a night in a simple tent far from the camp. That camp runs only in the dry season, from June to the middle of November. A second camp, also with six tents, lies on the edge of the Katisunga plain by the Katuma, with a two-storey dining area where you look out over the plain from above while the game moves to the river. And the third is more comfortable, with eleven spacious rooms, a swimming pool and a family suite, for those who want the wilderness without the camping.
The fixed neighbour of Katavi, because the flights connect the two. First the plains and the hippo, then the trek to the chimpanzees in the mountain forest on Lake Tanganyika.
The scheduled flight that runs on Monday and Thursday via Katavi to Mahale. Large elephant herds, baobabs and lions in strong prides, and a fraction of the visitors of the north.
Our fifteen day itinerary through Nyerere, Mikumi and Ruaha. This is the trip Katavi connects to most smoothly, because from Ruaha you step straight onto the flight west.