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Our game viewing starts the moment we touch down. A pair of giraffe race
beside the airstrip, all legs and neck yet elegant in their
awkwardness. A line of zebra parades across the runway in their wake
while protective elephants guard their young under the shade of a fat
baobab tree.
Wildlife is concentrated along the cascading Great Ruaha River that is the
parks lifeblood. Home to hippo and crocodiles snacking on schools of
fish, it is a flooded torrent after the rains, dwindling to precious
pools surrounded by a blinding sweep of sand in the dry season.
Waterbuck, impala and the worlds most southerly grants gazelle risk
their lives for a sip of its waters a permanent hunting ground for
lion, leopard, jackal, hyena and packs of wild dog – rare elsewhere.
Ruaha’s 8000 resident elephants remain the largest population of any
national park in east Africa, recovering strongly form ivory poaching
in the eighties.
Scouring the vast wilderness of rocky outcrops and wooded hills, you may see the
say kudu’s corkscrew horns gleaming like worn metal behind a
camouflage of thorny thicket. Unique combinations of animals’ co-
exist here – both the greater and lesser kudu, sable and roan antelope
– Ruaha being the only protected area in the world where the flora and
fauna of eastern and southern Africa overlap.
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