Lake Rukwa

Stroll on the beach

I love an “off the beaten path” excursion and Lake Rukwa offered just that. For a lake its size it is pretty low profile and certainly not a tourist draw. Known for its immense crocodile population, Lake Rukwa is an endorheic lake, meaning it retains its water and has no outflow to rivers or the ocean. This means historically it has fluctuated greatly in size. Some years it is less than 50km long, currently it is around 150km long meaning it's around the 25th largest lake in the world!

It’s easier to access via the west side of the lake but since we were in the area of the south we decided to try to reach the shores of the south. There wasn’t much information we had on it other than that it did seem possible to reach the lake from the south. We were slightly discouraged by the recent heavy rains as most of the roads indicated we’d go through low lying land adjacent to the lake, most of which would probably be flooded. Our fears were realized when the first two options for reaching the lake were not passable (Totoe and Mwambani). It was getting pretty late in the day but decided to press on to the Mbagala. We passed the unusually large and developed town of Mkwajuni and then through Saza. We passed a huge mine and along the road there seemed to be several "artisanal" mines.

The road was extremely muddy but we finally found a road down to Mbagala. It seemed we were up on an escarpment so the road went straight down a hillside to the lake shore. It was slippery but we made it and had time to hike the shores. Lake Rukwa is very famous for the crocodiles (man eaters!) so we were very cautious. We asked one local fisherman if there were crocs and he said no but then we asked a small child and he said there were many but, "If you see them you can just run". Uh, yeah, we'll just be very cautious and stay to open areas.

The walk along the shore was beautiful and I imagine another day it would be great to charter a boat and go along the coast. There was evidence of heavy fishing (fisherman have a local buoy design with plastic bottles) but the lake shores seemed sparsely populated. Very unfortunate that I wasn't brave enough to swim, but I am not sure I could "outrun" a croc...

Overlooking the east.

View to the west

Nice forested area to the north