Savanna & plainss

Open grassland under a wide sky, alive with great herds.

Akagera National Park

Eastern Province, Rwanda

Rwanda's savanna park on the Tanzanian border — a landscape of papyrus swamp, lakes and rolling grassland that lost almost everything, then had lions and rhinos brought back and became the country's only Big Five park.

Savanna & plains Africa

Amboseli National Park

Kajiado County, southern Kenya, on the Tanzanian border

The land of giants beneath Kilimanjaro — a dry-lake savanna in southern Kenya where great herds of free-ranging elephants cross golden plains with Africa's highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, rising snow-capped just beyond the border.

Savanna & plains Africa

Chobe National Park

Northern Botswana, beside Kasane and the Chobe River

Botswana's great elephant park — floodplains, marsh and woodland along the Chobe River, where some of the largest elephant herds on Earth gather in the dry season.

Savanna & plains Africa

Etosha Pan

Northern Namibia

A vast white salt pan the size of a small country, so large it is visible from space — ringed by waterholes where elephants, rhinos, and lions gather in the dry season.

Savanna & plains Africa

Hwange National Park

Matabeleland North, north-western Zimbabwe, off the Bulawayo–Victoria Falls highway

Zimbabwe's largest national park: about 14,650 km² of grassland, teak and mopane woodland in the north-west, home to the country's biggest elephant population, painted dogs, roan and sable, and around 100 mammal species.

Savanna & plains Africa

Kruger National Park

Mpumalanga & Limpopo, South Africa

One of Africa's greatest and most accessible game reserves — a vast bushveld wilderness the size of a small country, home to the Big Five and an extraordinary abundance of wildlife.

Savanna & plains Africa

Masai Mara

Narok County, southwestern Kenya

Rolling grassland where the Great Migration crosses the Mara River — over a million wildebeest running the gauntlet of crocodiles and Africa's densest big-cat population.

Savanna & plains Africa

Nxai Pan & Baines' Baobabs

Nxai Pan National Park, northeastern Botswana, north of the Maun–Nata road

A fossil lake bed in the Kalahari, grassland that fills with game in the rains — and Baines' Baobabs, a cluster of ancient trees standing on the edge of a salt pan.

Savanna & plains Africa

Queen Elizabeth National Park

Western Uganda, between Lake George and Lake Edward

Savanna, crater lakes and forested gorges below the Rwenzori Mountains — home to the tree-climbing lions of Ishasha and Kyambura Gorge, a sunken forest in the plains.

Savanna & plains Africa

Serengeti

Northern Tanzania

The archetypal African plain — endless golden grassland that hosts the greatest land-mammal migration on Earth, as over a million wildebeest and hundreds of thousands of zebra move in a vast annual circle.

Savanna & plains Africa

South Luangwa National Park

Luangwa Valley, Eastern Province, Zambia

Nine thousand square kilometres at the southern end of the East African Rift, built around a river that moves every year — and the place where the walking safari was invented.

Savanna & plains Africa

Tarangire National Park

Manyara Region, Northern Tanzania

A baobab-studded savanna famous for its elephants — in the dry season, when the Tarangire River is the only water for miles, one of the densest concentrations of game in northern Tanzania gathers along its banks.

Savanna & plains Africa

Yala National Park

Southern and Uva Provinces, southeastern Sri Lanka

Dry-zone scrub, lagoons and granite outcrops on Sri Lanka's southeast coast — thought to hold the highest density of leopards per square kilometre anywhere, in a park that partly closes each year when the water runs out.

Savanna & plains South Asia