Ruaha National Park the second largest National Park after Serengeti, is in its pristine ecological condition: It is a less frequented park making any visitors experience, a unique one. Ruaha is a park where at every turn of one's head, nature is undertaking its course. It is at Ruaha where when walking across the new bridge upon just entering the park, our eyes turned to the right looking for crocodiles basking on the Ruaha River, when we saw a speeding fish eagle in motion, fixated on a fish on the shallow waters, swoop down and clutch its meal while we watched with shear amazement. With the splatter of the water and wiggling of the fish, causing ripples on the calm Ruaha River startled the crocodile making it slither back into the water. Just as that was an amazing experience, our ear picked up a "grunting-oink" sound, and we turned around and saw a spray of water made by a hippopotamus partially submerged in water. These are few among the many experiences of the Ruaha National Park.

Ruaha's unusually high diversity of antelope is a function of its location, which is transitional to the acacia savannah of East Africa and the miombo woodland belt of Southern Africa. Grant's gazelle and lesser kudu occur here at the very south of their range, alongside the miombo-associated sable and roan antelope, and one of East AfricaÆs largest populations of greater kudu, the park emblem, distinguished by the male's magnificent corkscrew horns.

A similar duality is noted in the checklist of 450 birds: the likes of crested barbet, an attractive yellow-and-black bird whose persistent trilling is a characteristic sound of the southern bush, occur in Ruaha alongside central Tanzanian endemics such as the yellow-collared lovebird and ashy starling.

Second only to Katavi in its aura of untrammelled wilderness, but far more accessible, Ruaha protects a vast tract of the rugged, semi-arid bush country that characterises central Tanzania. Its lifeblood is the Great Ruaha River, which courses along the eastern boundary in a flooded torrent during the height of the rains, but dwindling thereafter to a scattering of precious pools surrounded by a blinding sweep of sand and rock.