Nyerere National Park (Selous)
About Nyerere National Park (Selous)
Nyerere is the largest national park in Africa — around 30,000 square kilometres carved out of what was the Selous Game Reserve, which is why almost everyone still calls it the Selous. To put the size in perspective, it is larger than Belgium, and it receives a small fraction of the visitors the northern circuit does.
That ratio is the whole argument for the southern circuit. A morning's game drive here can pass no other vehicle at all, and the camps are spread along an enormous river system rather than clustered around a gate.
The Rufiji, the largest river in Tanzania, runs through the middle of it and everything is organised around it: wide, brown, braided into channels and sandbanks, lined with borassus palm and riverine forest. It spills into a chain of shallow lakes — Tagalala, Manze, Nzelekela and others — connected by channels that fill and empty with the seasons, and those lakes hold the richest wildlife in the park. Hippo and crocodile in extraordinary density, elephant and buffalo on the margins, and the highest concentration of waterbirds in southern Tanzania.
What genuinely distinguishes Nyerere from the northern parks is what you are permitted to do. Boat safaris put you on the water at eye level with hippo and within a few metres of crocodile and drinking elephant — an angle no vehicle can give. Walking safaris go out at first light with an armed ranger and change the scale of everything, and fly-camping lets you walk out and sleep where you finish, under mesh, with hyena circling and lion audible. None of this is available at Seronera or on the crater floor.
The park is also one of the last strongholds of the African wild dog, a species down to a few thousand animals across the entire continent. Nyerere and the wider Selous ecosystem hold one of the largest surviving populations, and the denning season around June to August is the best chance in Tanzania of watching a pack at length.
One thing to know before you arrive: the Julius Nyerere hydropower dam has been built across Stiegler's Gorge and has flooded a substantial area upstream, permanently changing that part of the park. It is better heard now than discovered on the ground.
Access is by light aircraft from Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar or Arusha, and the park pairs naturally with the coast — a few nights on the Rufiji followed by Zanzibar or Mafia is one of the most satisfying itineraries in the country and avoids the northern circuit entirely.
What to see here
12 places inside Nyerere National Park (Selous) worth planning around.
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The Rufiji River #
The largest river in Tanzania runs through the middle of the park, and everything here is organised around it. It is wide, brown, braided into channels and sandbanks, and lined with borassus palm and riverine forest.
It makes the game viewing different from the northern circuit in a specific way: animals come to a river rather than to scattered waterholes, so sightings concentrate along the banks and the drives follow the water. Enormous crocodile lie on the sandbars, hippo pods run to a hundred animals, elephant cross between channels, and buffalo, giraffe and waterbuck come down to drink through the afternoon.
The Rufiji is also why Nyerere feels remote in a way the north does not. There are far fewer camps, they are spread along a very large river system, and a morning's game drive can pass no other vehicle at all.
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The Lake System #
The Rufiji spills into a chain of shallow lakes — Tagalala, Manze, Nzelekela and others — connected to the river by channels that fill and empty with the seasons, and this is the richest wildlife country in the park.
The lakes hold hippo and crocodile in extraordinary density, and their margins draw everything else: elephant herds, buffalo, giraffe, and the highest concentration of waterbirds in southern Tanzania — fish eagle, skimmer, pelican, storks and a long list of waders on the drying mud.
Because the water is shallow and the shorelines open, the lakes are where boat safaris go and where the light is best in the late afternoon. Most camps are positioned within reach of them, and a circuit of two or three lakes is the standard and best full-day drive in the park.
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African Wild Dog #
Nyerere and the wider Selous ecosystem hold one of the largest remaining populations of African wild dog in the world — a species reduced to a few thousand animals across the whole continent, and one of the hardest of all the large carnivores to see.
They are found here with a realistic frequency rather than a theoretical one, particularly in the denning season around June to August when a pack stays put around a den site for weeks and can be returned to day after day. Watching a pack hunt is unlike watching cats: they run their prey down over distance in daylight, in a coordinated, chattering, relentless pursuit.
Nothing is guaranteed with an animal that ranges over hundreds of square kilometres, but if seeing wild dog is the point of a trip, this is where the odds are best in Tanzania, and it is the single strongest reason to choose the south over the north.
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Walking Safaris #
Walking is permitted here in a way it is not in the northern parks, and it is the reason a great many repeat visitors come south.
You go out at first light with an armed ranger and a guide, for two to four hours, and the safari changes completely. Instead of scanning for big animals from a raised seat, you are reading tracks in the dust, being shown which trees are used for what, standing at the edge of a hippo pool at ground level, and approaching game on foot with the wind managed carefully. Every sense is involved, and the animals are appropriately larger.
It is not dangerous in the way people imagine, and it is not a hike either — the pace is slow and much of the time is spent standing still. Most camps in the park offer it as a standard activity, and anyone reasonably mobile can do it.
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Stiegler's Gorge #
The Rufiji narrows into a gorge around a hundred metres deep and about the same across, named after a Swiss engineer killed by an elephant near the site in 1907. The river accelerates through it and the walls drop away sheer.
It has long been one of the landmarks of the park and a standard excursion from the camps upriver. It is also the site of the Julius Nyerere hydropower dam, built across the gorge and completed in recent years, which has flooded a substantial area upstream and permanently changed this part of the park — a fact worth knowing before you arrive rather than after.
What remains accessible around the gorge and the river below it is still dramatic country, and the geology on show — the river cutting through hard rock in a landscape otherwise defined by sand and floodplain — is unlike anywhere else in the park.
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Boat Safaris on the Rufiji #
The activity that most distinguishes Nyerere from every park in the north. You go out on the river in a small boat, usually in the late afternoon, and approach the wildlife from the water.
It changes the angles and the distances entirely. Crocodile that would slide away from a vehicle stay put on the sandbank; hippo pods are met at eye level and are considerably more impressive for it; elephant come down to drink and to cross while you sit still on the current; and the birdlife along the banks — bee-eaters nesting in the sand cliffs, skimmers working the shallows, fish eagle overhead — is at arm's length rather than across a plain.
Boats run at sunset with the light coming down the water and the palms in silhouette, which is the photograph the southern circuit is known for. It is offered by most camps and should be done on more than one evening.
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Lake Tagalala and the Hot Springs #
Tagalala is the largest of the lakes and the most reliable for game, and at its far end a set of geothermal springs runs out of the rock into a series of pools shaded by palms and fig.
The water is hot, clear and clean, and visitors are allowed to bathe in the upper pools — one of very few places inside a Tanzanian national park where you can get into water safely, since the hot springs are above the level crocodile and hippo use. Camps run it as an afternoon excursion combined with a boat trip on the lake.
The setting is the point: a natural hot pool in dense green vegetation, in the middle of an enormous wilderness, reached by boat and a short walk. It is the closest thing the southern circuit has to a spa, and it costs nothing but the drive.
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Fly-Camping in the Miombo #
Beyond the permanent camps, Nyerere is one of the few places in Tanzania where you can walk out and sleep where you finish — a fly camp, meaning a light tent or a bedroll under a net, put up for one night and taken down in the morning.
You walk in with a guide and an armed ranger, dinner is cooked on a fire, and the night is spent with nothing between you and the miombo woodland but mesh. Hyena will circle, hippo will graze past the camp on their way up from the water, and the lions will be audible and sound considerably closer than they are.
It is not for everyone and it is not comfortable in any conventional sense. It is also, for a certain kind of traveller, the single most memorable night available in the country — and it exists here because the park is vast, empty and licensed for walking in a way the northern parks are not.
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Beho Beho and the Selous Grave #
In the hills north of the Rufiji, at Beho Beho, a simple stone marks where Frederick Courteney Selous was buried in January 1917. He was a hunter, naturalist and collector whose name the reserve carried for most of a century, and he was killed here at sixty-five while serving with the British forces in the East African campaign.
The grave sits under a tree in open woodland, and getting there is half of it: the Beho Beho country is higher, cooler and more broken than the river floodplain, with views out over the whole northern sector. Not far away is the site of the wartime skirmish itself, and the German commander who was fighting the campaign, von Lettow-Vorbeck, is said to have sent his respects when he learned who had been killed.
It is a strange, quiet place to stand in, and it raises the question the park has now formally answered by changing its name. Selous made his reputation shooting the animals that this land is now protected to keep, and both facts sit in the same hundred metres of ground.
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Birds of the Rufiji #
The park's bird list runs past four hundred and fifty species, and the river system is why. Water, sandbank, floodplain, palm stand, miombo woodland and lake margin all sit within a few kilometres of each other, and each holds a different set of birds.
The set pieces are on the river. Carmine bee-eaters nest colonially in the vertical sand banks, hundreds of birds in scarlet and turquoise pouring in and out of holes in the cliff, and the colonies are active from around August. African skimmers work the shallows at dusk with the lower bill cutting the surface. Palm-nut vultures sit in the borassus, fish eagles call from every second tree, and open-billed storks, spoonbills, herons and a long list of waders line the drying mud of the lakes.
Because so much of it is done from a boat, the birding here is unusually easy: you drift rather than drive, the light is low and behind you late in the day, and the birds allow a boat far closer than they allow a vehicle. From November the migrants arrive and the list rises again.
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The Elephant Recovery #
The Selous ecosystem once held one of the largest elephant populations on earth, and then it lost the great majority of it. The crashes came in two waves, the first in the 1970s and 1980s and the second and worse from around 2006, when industrial-scale ivory poaching took the population from tens of thousands down to a fraction of that within a decade.
What has happened since is worth stating just as plainly. Ivory demand fell, enforcement was rebuilt, the reserve's northern sector was raised to national park status in 2019, and elephant numbers here have been climbing again through recent counts. Herds are larger and more visible than they were, and the animals are gradually becoming less nervous of vehicles, which is the slow tail of the same story.
For a visitor it means two things. The elephants you see here are a recovering population rather than an untouched one, and some of them remember why. And tourism to the southern circuit is not incidental to that recovery, since the fees are a substantial part of what pays for the patrols that made it possible.
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Getting There: Flights, Roads and the Gates #
Nyerere is enormous and the journey shapes the trip, so it is worth planning rather than leaving to an agent's default.
Flying is what most people do. Light aircraft leave Dar es Salaam daily for the airstrips in the northern sector, and the hop takes well under an hour, over the delta and the floodplain with the river braiding below. It is expensive, and it removes an entire day of driving each way. Driving from Dar to the Matambwe or Mtemere gates takes roughly six to eight hours depending on the road and the season, which is a long day but a scenic one through the Rufiji villages and the palm country.
The third option people forget is the railway: the TAZARA line runs along the western edge of the ecosystem, and a train to Kisaki puts you at the park boundary for very little money and a great deal of time. Whichever way you come, note that the southern circuit's big camps close in the heavy rains around March to May, and the roads inside the park are what close first.