Off the tourist trail: the best little-visited African national parks

Travelers looking to explore the continent of Africa now have new options when traveling from the United States.Announced this week, Delta Air Lines is expanding it's partnership with Kenya Airways allowing frequent flyers to earn miles on each other's flights when flying on the same itinerary, and provide a more seamless travel experience to 31 destinations in Africa and 57 in North America. Kenya Airways currently operates a nonstop service from their hub at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to New York's John F.

Iceland has many highlights, and it’s nearly impossible to choose one place over another.

For most travelers, entering the vast diversity of Ecuador’s Cuatro Mundos ("Four Worlds": the Pacific Coast, Andes, Amazon and Galápagos) requires nothing more than arriving with your passport.

Few visitors to Kenya can resist the siren call of its top wildlife-watching area, the Maasai Mara. Its sweeping grasslands ­— blonde and close-cropped in the dry season, green and earthy after rain — stretch for hundreds of miles. Famous for big cats and the drama of the Great Migration, this is the kind of place where a budding interest in all things safari can develop into an addiction.

Maybe you’ve been chasing national parks since the National Park Service celebrated its centennial in 2016. But have you ever made it to (or even heard of) Dark-Sky Reserves and Sanctuaries? These little-known protected parcels of land are some of the best places to stargaze in the world.

Northern Kenya is one of the world’s last great wildernesses. This rugged, dusty land is rich in history, cultural heritage and isolated appeal and offers the most epic of adventures for the wild at heart. Here, fiery desert plains give way to luscious jungles; bubbling oasis streams are set against imposing, glorious mountain ranges and black, volcanic lakeshores are trodden by some of the world’s most remote tribes.

Kenya is the safari capital of East Africa. A place where elephants, buffalo and wildebeest roam across vast plains. Flamingo flocks wade in the shallows, lions doze on sun-baked savannahs and herds of hippos graze by river banks. Yet in the scramble to see the country's wildlife, local culture often gets overlooked. Tribal people have historically been marginalised from the financial benefits of their land's natural riches.

One of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, the Victoria Falls are wider than Niagara and higher than Iguazú – and have more activities on offer than both of them combined. Rough Guides Managing Editor Keith Drew has the lowdown on everything you need to know about Africa’s adventure capital.

In last week’s #RGchat, we asked our Twitter followers to tell us what ‘wild’ meant to them. We didn't expect to get such a beautiful response.

Welcome to the Rough Guide to 2020! From up-and-coming destinations to old favourites with a new reason to visit, this guide has our pick of the best places to travel in 2020.

Africa is a continent of wild open savannahs, terracotta sunsets, thousands of vibrant green hills and rugged coastlines. You can be chugging along on a rickety old railway one day and standing atop a rust-coloured sand dune the next. As American author John Hemingway once said, “If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa.” There’s no end to the amazing adventures this continent offers, but as a starting point, here are a few of our favourite African journeys.

In preparation for the new Rough Guide to Ethiopia, the book’s editor, Edward Aves, travelled to the remote and little-visited Bale Mountains National Park.