Mikumi sits about 283 kilometres west of Dar es Salaam on the surfaced highway to Iringa, which makes it the only major southern-circuit park you can reach comfortably by road in an afternoon. That accessibility is its main advantage — it turns the south from a fly-in-only proposition into something you can add to a shorter trip.
The heart of the park is the Mkata Floodplain, open grassland flanked by the Uluguru and Lumango mountains. Lion, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, giraffe and elephant are all resident, and the openness makes for straightforward game viewing.
Mikumi shares an ecological boundary with the Nyerere ecosystem to the south, so wildlife moves between the two. It pairs naturally with the Udzungwa Mountains, two hours further on, for a combined savanna-and-rainforest trip.