Month by month
Katavi in May: the sky clears before the park does
May is a month of mismatch. The rain that defines March and April all but stops, just 6 mm falling on a single day by the long-run average, yet every camp in Katavi stays shut for the whole month. The weather recovers faster than the infrastructure does, and that gap is the whole story of May here.
If you only want the answer
May's weather has effectively turned dry, but the camps have not reopened and will not until June. Use the month to lock in early dates for the reopening rather than hoping for an early exception; there rarely is one.
Dry skies, closed gates
By rainfall alone, May looks like the start of the dry season: 6 mm over a single day, a sharp drop from April's 81 mm, and days already warming toward 29.0°C. But Chada Katavi, Katavi Wildlife Camp and Mbali Mbali Katavi all keep their doors shut through the whole month, holding to closure windows set well before the rain actually stops.
The reason is recovery time, not caution for its own sake. Roads soaked through March and April need weeks to firm up enough for safari vehicles, and camps that stood empty for three months need real lead time to restaff, restock and prepare rather than simply opening the gate the day the sky clears.
The quiet run-up to reopening
Flights mirror the camps: Safari Air Link still runs nothing on the western-circuit route in May, the same gap that has held since March, with scheduled service not resuming until 1 June. There is no early-access option worth chasing here, whatever an eager operator might suggest.
What May does offer is a preview. The floodplains are drying under clear skies even while the camps stay dark, which is exactly the transformation June's visitors arrive to see already partway done.
What to do instead
Use May to book, not to visit. Camps take reservations for their June reopening well ahead of the date itself, and the earliest weeks of June carry both the lowest rates of the year and rising demand as word gets around that the park is open again. If your travel window has any flexibility, shifting a May idea to the first half of June costs you almost nothing and gains you an actual functioning park.