Tanzania · national park since 2019
Nearly 31,000 square kilometres along the Rufiji River, carved out of the old Selous Game Reserve. Almost 22,000 hippo, nearly 35,000 buffalo, and boat safaris that hardly any other Tanzanian park can offer.
Photo: Richard Mortel (CC BY 2.0)
Nyerere lies south of Dar es Salaam in eastern Tanzania, reached by road through Kibiti or inland via Morogoro, with the Rufiji River running through the open northern strip that visitors actually use. At almost 31,000 km² it is Tanzania's largest national park, carved out of the old Selous Game Reserve in 2019.
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So this guide runs on the park authority's own tariff document rather than a copied operator page, on thirty-year climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps tell us directly. Every claim carries a date. Where TANAPA is silent, so are we, apart from saying that it is silent.
Nothing here is for sale. Listing a camp is free and no position on any page can be bought. Some outbound links earn us a small commission, and that changes neither the order of a list nor a single figure on these pages.
Found something out of date? Tell us and it changes the same week.
Nyerere is built around the Rufiji River, and boat safaris are the reason this park is different from almost every other in Tanzania. These are the three ways most visitors actually spend their time.
The signature activity, and almost no other Tanzanian park offers it: hippo pods by the hundred, crocodiles on every sandbank and bee-eater colonies at eye level in the riverbanks. Go at dawn or in the last hour of light.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
Walks run with an armed ranger through the miombo and river terraces that make this good walking country. Several camps offer fly camping, where you walk out and sleep under canvas.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
The default way to see the recovering elephant population and the highest recorded leopard density in miombo anywhere. Night drives are not permitted inside the park, whatever older operator copy says.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
Eighteen places to stay, from a TANAPA campsite to a fly-in camp above the Rufiji. These four are not the best four; they are the four that mark out the range.
The cheapest way in
The only genuinely cheap way to sleep inside Nyerere, at $35.40 a night including VAT, against several hundred dollars at the nearest camp.
Budget, and open all year
The biggest lodge on the circuit and the only sizeable one that never closes, a few minutes from Mtemere airstrip.
Mid-range, on the river
A classic tented camp on a bend of the Rufiji near Mtemere, at around half what the lake-circuit camps charge, with boat safaris starting from camp.
The top end
The park's oldest and grandest address, stone and thatch bandas on a hillside above the Msine, first opened as a hunting camp in 1972.
$70 plus VAT per person per day, the concession fee your lodge adds, and the low-season discount most sites miss.
See the fees →Selous or Nyerere, why only the northern strip is open, and how that decides what you see.
Read more →An hour by air from Dar or Zanzibar, or a long drive. Which gate you use changes your trip.
Plan the route →Census numbers rather than marketing: 34,950 buffalo, 21,963 hippo, and no cheetah at all.
What you'll see →June to October for the dry season, March to May most camps close, and boats that run all year.
Pick your month →Boat safaris on the Rufiji, walking with an armed ranger, fly camping, and where night drives actually happen.
See activities →Our own research
We collect the official tariff of every park we cover, convert it, and hold each one to the same standard day. Twenty-nine parks are in the index now, the famous ones included. These three pages come out of that table.
Ngorongoro charges $278 for a standard day and $148 of that is the descent into the crater. The ranking straight down, with the line item behind each number.
See the ranking →One person, one car, no one to split the vehicle fee or the campsite with. Uganda's foreign-vehicle tariff turns the order upside down.
See the self-drive ranking →The highest nightly rates any camp in our network puts in writing, and why the real top of the market names no price at all.
See the rates →Every change to this guide, dated.
