Tanzania 2019-23: Southern Highlands Safari - 1. Iringa and Ruaha National Park

On December 1st we headed off with our good friend Stanley Mbogo from Zorilla Safaris to explore some the National Parks and other areas to our south. Our first destination was Dodoma - Tanzania's capital city - for an overnight at the New Dodoma Hotel (not recommended). There are few reasons to visit Dodoma.

Next we stopped in Iringa for a couple of nights (Sunset Hotel - highly recommended). Iringa is home to Neil Baker who is the force behind the Tanzania Bird Atlas program and he was very helpful to me with my birding when we were living in Bukoba in 2010. We met up with Neil and his daughter Katie for dinner one evening and went birding with Neil to a lovely mountaintop in the clouds the next morning. We also had a tour of Neil's amazing library of East African bird books and journals going back to the earliest european explorers' notes. The mountaintop is called Ibofwe and is just over 2000 m high. We were alternately in cloud or sunshine. The grassland here was just beginning to bloom with dozens of wildflower species and Jenny enjoyed photographing these and trying to guess what they might be. Certainly there were daisies, lillies, orchids and peas. Neil quickly found me a few new birds - Uhehe Fiscal, Fülleborn's Longclaw, Black-lored Cisticola and Bertram's Weaver.

View from Sunset Hotel over Iringa

Dark-capped Bulbul, Iringa

Miombo Wren-Warbler, Iringa

Protea gageudi is a small tree growng in the Iringa highlands.

Laughing Dove, Iringa

Bertram's Weaver, Ibofwe

From Iringa we moved on to the nearby Ruaha National Park for 4 days. To save money on this trip we were staying in the government run (TANAPA) cottages in Ruaha and Mikumi NPs and eating in the TANAPA restaurants. There are private lodges in these parks but TANAPA charges a large additional fee to stay in the private lodges and it really bumps up the price. The Ruaha cottage we were given was not pleasant. It was full of insects attracted by lights and we had no way of getting rid of them. Every night we came back to the cottage the situation got worse. We had a family cottage with two bathrooms. When you had a shower everything in that bathroom got soaked so we showered in one and used the other for everything else. The power sockets were falling off the walls and did not give us confidence when we used them. The beds were fine thankfully and the nets kept the insects out while we slept. Interestingly we had a look at the cheaper bandas near the park headquarters and they were neat, clean and bright. These are set up for self-catering tourists so staying there for us would have meant a 4 km drive to the restaurant and back for each meal. The restaurant, by the way, was excellent with tasty basic meals, cold beers and sodas and your choice of soccer games or weird soap operas on the big screen TV. What more would you want?

Knob-billed Duck

A large pool on the Ruaha River.

A mouse - yet to be identified.

We watched this family of of six Bat-eared Foxes emerge from their den each evening.

African Hawk-Eagle

Newly hatched Nile Crocodiles

Nile Monitor

Plains Zebra

These folk picked the wrong place to do a 3-point turn.

This was a nasty looking scorpion.

Black-backed Jackal

White and Saddle-billed Storks

Ruaha NP itself was magnificent. Until recently it was the largest park in East Africa but the new Nyerere NP further east is apparently larger. The park straddles the transition zone between the acacia savanna of the north and the Miombo woodland of the south. It is also dominated by the Ruaha river. For our visit the wet season was just beginning and the river was barely flowing in places. Last year the park flooded with a fair bit of infrastructure damage and tourists needed to be evacuated. The combination of vegetation types and the river means lots of wildlife to see. We saw 166 bird species. New for me were Dickinson's Kestrel, Eleonora's Falcon and Purple-crested Turaco. Mammals were not thick on the ground but we had great views of lions, bat-eared Foxes and Greater Kudus. We also managed reasonable views of Lesser Kudu on one occasion but dipped on the Sable and Wild Dogs. There were very few other tourists in the park - we maybe saw two other safari vehicles per day.