parks.africa

Thirty independent guides to Africa's national parks

One site per park, written for people organising their own trip. No bookings and no commission from camps, just what the gate charges, what the road is like, and every place to stay with what it costs.

30PARKS
8COUNTRIES
962LODGES AND CAMPSITES
29PARKS IN THE FEE INDEX

Tanzania 6

Katavi7 places to stay Tanzania's third-largest national park counted 1,338 international visitors in all of 2024. visitkatavi.com → Mahale Mountains5 places to stay Forested mountains rise straight out of Lake Tanganyika, and in the forest lives the most-studied wild chimpanzee community on earth after Gombe. visitmahale.com → Nyerere18 places to stay Nearly 31,000 square kilometres along the Rufiji River, carved out of the old Selous Game Reserve. visitnyerere.com → Ruaha18 places to stay Twenty thousand square kilometres of baobab hills and lion country, with a fraction of the safari traffic of the north. visitruaha.com → Serengeti63 places to stay 14,763 km² of short-grass plains, kopjes and river country, where TAWIRI counted 1,571,960 wildebeest in March 2023. visitserengetipark.com → Udzungwa Mountains7 places to stay There is not a single road inside Udzungwa Mountains National Park. udzungwanationalpark.com →

South Africa 5

Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park40 places to stay One of Africa's oldest proclaimed game reserves, its two founding reserves gazetted on 30 April 1895: 94,984 ha of Zululand hills and river valleys where wild dog… visithluhluwe.com → Kruger61 places to stay Kruger charges no vehicle fee: an international adult pays R602 a day, about $36, and you drive yourself on tar and good gravel from any of nine gates. visitthekrugerpark.com → Pilanesberg51 places to stay A ring of hills about 25 km across, the eroded root of a 1,395-million-year-old volcano, with lion, leopard, elephant and buffalo inside it and no malaria, about two and… pilanesbergpark.com → Sabi Sand39 places to stay Around 65,000 hectares of private land on Kruger's western edge, with no fence between the two since 1993. visitsabisands.com → iSimangaliso Wetland Park86 places to stay 220 km of coast from the St Lucia estuary to Kosi Bay at the Mozambique border, where the last published count found 1,004 hippos in the St Lucia system and loggerhead… visitisimangaliso.com →

Zimbabwe 5

Gonarezhou14 places to stay Red sandstone cliffs above the Runde River, around eleven thousand elephants, and a camp network built for self-drivers rather than crowds. visitgonarezhou.com → Hwange33 places to stay Fourteen and a half thousand square kilometres of Kalahari sand with no river on it, kept alive by pumped waterholes. visithwange.com → Mana Pools21 places to stay On the floodplain of the Lower Zambezi, Mana Pools is one of the very few national parks in Africa where you may legally walk among big game. visitmanapools.com → Matobo18 places to stay Granite domes and balancing boulders half an hour south of Bulawayo, painted caves older than any written history in the region, and more nesting black eagles per square… visitmatobo.com → Matusadona38 places to stay A wedge of escarpment, valley floor and lakeshore grass between the Ume and the Sanyati, where most visitors arrive by boat. visitmatusadona.com →

Kenya 4

Amboseli31 places to stay A 392 km² basin of dust and salt at the northern foot of Kilimanjaro, kept alive by two swamps fed by the mountain's springs, and home to 2,065 elephants that… visitamboselipark.com → Masai Mara78 places to stay The Mara is the Kenyan end of the Serengeti migration, and the herds usually cross into it between July and October. visitmasaimarapark.com → Samburu36 places to stay North of the equator the Ewaso Ng'iro cuts a green line through dry country, and five animals live along it that you will not find in the Mara or Amboseli. visitsamburu.com → Tsavo37 places to stay Twenty-two thousand square kilometres either side of the Nairobi to Mombasa highway, holding around forty per cent of Kenya's elephants. tsavokenya.com →

Uganda 3

Kidepo Valley10 places to stay Tucked between South Sudan and Kenya in Uganda's far north-east, Kidepo Valley is the country's least visited savannah park: two broad valleys, mountains on every… visitkidepo.com → Murchison Falls20 places to stay The Victoria Nile crosses 3,840 square kilometres of northern Uganda, then forces its entire volume through a cleft barely six metres wide and drops 45 metres into the… visitmurchisonfalls.com → Queen Elizabeth42 places to stay A channel between two lakes with more hippo along it than most people have ever seen in one place, and a southern sector famous for lions resting in fig trees. visitqueenelizabeth.com →

Zambia 3

Kafue27 places to stay Zambia's largest and oldest national park covers 22,400 square kilometres, holds 21 antelope species, the country's biggest cheetah population and the lion prides of the… visitkafue.com → Lower Zambezi27 places to stay One hundred and twenty kilometres of the Zambezi River with a 1,200 metre escarpment behind it and Zimbabwe's Mana Pools on the far bank. visitlowerzambezi.com → South Luangwa31 places to stay Norman Carr took the first guests out on foot here in the 1950s, and the tradition never stopped. southluangwapark.com →

Botswana 2

Chobe54 places to stay The Chobe River floods with Zambezi water: from about March to May the bigger river backs up and spills across the floodplain, and by October, the hottest month… visitchobepark.com → Moremi35 places to stay The Okavango floods in the dry season, not the wet: rain that fell in Angola months earlier arrives in June, just as the land around it turns bone dry. moremipark.com →

Malawi 2

Liwonde10 places to stay A small park with a big river through it. liwondenationalpark.com → Nyika5 places to stay Malawi's largest park is nothing like the rest of Africa: rolling montane grassland higher than most alpine passes, herds of roan antelope and eland, 200+ orchid… nyikanationalpark.com →

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Planning a trip?

Start with the park you have in mind. Every guide opens with what a day actually costs, then the roads, the seasons and every place to stay. If the answer is not there, ask us and we will find it.

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Who is behind this

We spent a year and a half overlanding through Southern and East Africa and kept running into the same thing: the information you need to actually reach a park was wrong or years out of date. So I started building a guide for each one.

Every figure on these sites comes from the park authority's own tariff, the operator's own rate sheet, or a source we name and date. Where we could not verify something, the page says so. Where a link earns us a referral fee, the page says that too.

parks.africa is published by Visit Africa Publishers, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Write to hello@parks.africa.