Day 30 - Iringa

Point of departure : Ruaha National Park

Point of arrival :Iringa

Accommodation: the rooftoptent - Riverside Camp (15km north of Iringa) - [email protected]

Km travelled today: 211 km Cum: 7 125km (gravel 187km cum 1 717km)

Countries so far: 5/16

Where to next? Iringa

Whatever the shortcomings of this campsite, the early morning wake up with the hippos, fish eagle, Egyptian geese and other unidentified bird calls, together with a wonderful sunrise viewed from our rooftop tent, more than made up for it.Even during the night we had a nocturnal visitor no more than 25 metres from the tent… a hippo out of the water just grazing on the grass nearby.

The game drive that followed packing up camp was, in all honesty, a bit disappointing.Nevertheless we had several sightings of elephant, hippo and giraffe as well as baboon, waterbuck, eland, kudu and zebra.We also had sightings of yellow billed stork, grey herons and egrets.The drive was quite interesting in that it definitely covered roads less travelled.Some of the tracks were decidedly overgrown and seemed to be returning to nature and in many places encroached on either side giving the Beast a bit of a whiplashing.We had to be out of the park by 14h00 (in terms of our 24 hour pass) and we made that comfortably.We then headed back towards Iringa.A huge storm preceded us there and a combination of higher altitude and the rain made the temperature a comfortable 24 degrees compared to the 39 degrees in the park.

We selected a camp site from one of our travel books and found the Riverside Camp, on the banks of the Little Ruaha (15km north of Iringa) with no problem.Pleasant, shady and reasonable ablutions a good place to spend the night.In camp we met up with John and Karen Ashton (an English/Danish couple) who are travelling south to north as far as Ethiopia and German couple Bruno and Ursula who have been travelling southern and central and east Africa for the last four years.It is possible we may meet John and Karen further on.

We later discovered, talking to Karen, that they had spent 3 days in Ruaha and had seen lots of game including lion.They were fortunate to bump into a young man who was doing research in the park and he told them were to camp and that the animals were all concentrated in the north east of the park.We spent time in the southern section which according to Karen was the most scenic.Apparently the park used to allow hunting in the southern section, hence the reason for the animals concentrating on the northern section.This now puts into perspective why the animals were so skittish each time we approached them.