Mikumi National Park: Trip III

Sunrise

After a few months of self-isolation and limited movement, we're finally getting a chance to get out. Luckily, visits to national parks are quite good in the times of a pandemic due to limited interactions with people. We had to attend a meeting in Mikumi so naturally parlayed a trip to the national park (Trip I, Trip II).

One of the best things about Mikumi is that one can stay in reasonably priced accommodation in Mikumi town and still make it inside the park early enough to take advantage of prime wildlife viewing hours. On the road in we actually saw three hyenas cross the road, an exciting sighting in any national park. We made it to the gate when they opened at 6:30am and spent the morning leisurely driving around. At some point we decided that we'd like to check out the miombo woodlands in the NE side of the park and headed up the western side of the park. I'm a sucker for exploring areas of national parks that are seldom visited or areas that have not previously visited. It appeared they had recently repaired the roads and we passed through some uneventful recently burned miombo woodland until we reached Choga wale Ranger Post. The ranger post was surrounded by more grassland and we happily greeted the rangers at the seldom visited post. We attempted to drive east to loop around to the gate but the road was impassable.

We thought we would have a meeting after lunch time but the meeting was delayed so we poked around the hippo pools and main area just north of the gate. Unfortunately we got notice that a huge pride of lions was spotted in an area of the park that was too far for us to reach. We did enjoy views of a solitary buffalo, solitary eland, a pair of Bohor Reedbuck, and all the other usual suspects. We were also pleasantly surprised to see quite a few domestic tourists, mostly whom I assumed were from Dar es Salaam. It's good to see Tanzanians plugging the gap missing from international arrivals!

Hippo pool with low water level.

A pretty accurate map.