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Safiri Tanzania
Katavi

Destination guide

Katavi

Tanzania's wildest, loneliest great park

Katavi is one of Africa's last true wildernesses, a vast, remote park in far western Tanzania that sees only a handful of visitors a year. Here the seasonal floodplains and the shrinking Katuma River concentrate wildlife on an epic scale, with hundreds of hippos crammed into muddy pools, immense buffalo herds and prides of lion that follow them. Untamed, roadless and gloriously empty, Katavi rewards the adventurous traveller with a raw safari experience of a kind that has all but vanished elsewhere on the continent.

By the numbers

3rd largest

Park rank

national park in Tanzania

Very few

Visitors

one of Africa's least-visited parks

1974

Established

gazetted as a national park

Hundreds

Hippos

packed into dry-season pools

Mpanda

Gateway town

~40 km north of the park

Fly-in

Access

airstrips at Ikuu and Sitalike

Best time to visit

The dry season from June to October is by far the best time to visit, when receding water forces game into extraordinary concentrations along the Katuma River and its pools, and roads are passable. The wet season from November to April floods the plains, disperses the wildlife and makes access difficult, with many camps closing altogether.

Common questions

Katavi lies in a very remote corner of western Tanzania, far from the northern circuit, so it receives only a few thousand visitors a year, offering one of the most solitary safari experiences in Africa.
The dry season from June to October, and especially August to October, is best, when shrinking water forces hippos, buffalo and predators into dramatic concentrations along the Katuma River.
Most visitors fly in by light aircraft from Arusha, Dar es Salaam or Ruaha to the Ikuu or Sitalike airstrips, or to Mpanda; overland access via Mpanda is possible but long and rough.
Katavi is famous for enormous concentrations of hippo and crocodile in its drying river pools, vast buffalo herds sometimes a thousand strong, and the lion prides that follow them.