Kitulo National Park

Kitulo National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Kitulo is a high, cold, grassy plateau in the southern highlands of Tanzania, between the city of Mbeya and the northern tip of Lake Malawi, and it holds a distinction of its own: it was the first national park in tropical Africa to be created mainly for its plants, and local people call it Bustani ya Mungu, the garden of God. It is far from everything on the northern safari circuit. Mbeya, the nearest city, has an airport at Songwe with flights from Dar es Salaam, or is a day and a half by road; from Mbeya the park is reached in about three hours, through the town of Chimala on the main highway and then up a spectacular, unsurfaced road of fifty-seven hairpin bends to Matamba, where the park headquarters stand and the fees are paid, the last stretch needing a 4×4 in the rains, which is exactly when one wants to be there.

The few tours on offer are two-day trips from Mbeya or Iringa, with a vehicle, a driver-guide and either camping with the operator's equipment or a night in the simple guesthouses of Matamba, and longer southern-highlands itineraries that add Ruaha, the crater lake of Ngozi, the Matema beach on Lake Malawi or the Mbozi meteorite. Visits consist of walking and short drives across the plateau with a park ranger, to the flower meadows, the Numbe valley, waterfalls and viewpoints, with longer hikes up Mount Mtorwi or down through the forest towards the lake. It is a park for botanists, birdwatchers, walkers and anyone who likes having a landscape to themselves. Bring rain gear and warm clothes.

Visiting Kitulo National Park: what you will see

The park was gazetted in 2005, after a campaign by conservationists alarmed at the growing trade in wild orchid tubers, dug up by the hundred thousand for export to Zambia, where they are made into a kind of meatless sausage called chikanda; it covers about 413 square kilometres, the Kitulo plateau together with the adjoining Livingstone forest on its steep southern and western slopes. The plateau lies at about 2,600 metres between the Kipengere range, the Poroto mountains and the Livingstone mountains, with Mount Mtorwi, 2,961 metres, the highest point in southern Tanzania; it is volcanic, well watered, treeless, rolling montane grassland, cut by clear streams, the headwaters of the Great Ruaha river, which eventually feeds the country's main hydroelectric dams. In the rains it becomes one of the great floral displays of the world.

Some 350 species of higher plants have been recorded, including forty-five kinds of terrestrial orchid, several of them found nowhere else, which flower in succession in drifts of pink, yellow and white, together with red-hot pokers, aloes, proteas, geraniums, giant lobelias, lilies, gladioli, asters and everlasting daisies. A large dairy farm, set up with foreign aid in the 1960s, still operates in the middle of the plateau. The birds are as notable as the flowers: this is the only place in Tanzania where Denham's bustard breeds, the blue swallow, an endangered intra-African migrant, nests in holes in the grassland, and the mountain marsh widow, Njombe cisticola, Kipengere seedeater and pallid and Montagu's harriers are all here. Large mammals are few, some mountain reedbuck and eland, and zebras reintroduced; but in the forest on the slopes lives the kipunji, a long-haired, crested monkey discovered by scientists in 2003, the first new genus of African monkey described in more than eighty years, numbering about a thousand animals in all.

Kitulo National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park headquarters at Matamba are open in daylight hours. The flowers are the point, and they bloom in the rainy season, from late November to April, with the peak from December to March, which is also when the roads are at their worst, mist is frequent and it rains most afternoons; the mornings are usually clear.

From May to October the plateau is dry, golden-brown, sunny and easy to reach, good for hiking and for the views, and bitterly cold at night, with frost from June to August. Temperatures by day seldom exceed 18 degrees. Allow two days. Mbeya is three hours away, the Ngozi crater lake an hour from the city, Matema beach on Lake Malawi three hours south, and Ruaha a long day's drive north-east through Iringa.