Katavi National Park

The handful of visitors who arrive in Katavi National Park have to work hard to get there – reaching Katavi means a four-hour flight in a tiny Cessna, or five days’ bumping through hard roads in a Land Rover. But the reward is a perfect, unspoilt wilderness where rules and conventions are left far behind. In Katavi’s streams, creeks and muddy pools, hundreds of hippo lie packed together, their silage smell thickening the air and the marshlands resounding with their symphony of grunts and snorts. Away from the plains, in Katavi’s sun-dappled, mysterious woodlands, a moving mass of shadow becomes a herd of elephant, padding silently along between the trees on their way to the plains, relaxed trunks swinging like pendulums between their forelegs.