Tanzania blog with Tanzania Odyssey

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Serengeti in June: The Great Migration

For all of us at Tanzania Odyssey, June remains one of our favourite times of year in the Serengeti. At this time, the huge migration herds are fairly dispersed across the plains, relishing the glorious green that is now splashed across the landscape. To arrive in Africa after the rains is like setting foot in a strange paradise on earth. This continent, so often characterised by the deep red of its earth and sun-scorched plains, comes alive with new life; its incredible distances seem a vast and fruitful garden, awash with thousands of variations of green.

June is a good time for bird-watching, and sparks a proliferation of butterflies. The air is fresh and clear, with low humidity, and long hours in a Land Rover – necessary if you wish to see the best of this region - are far more appealing. At this time the vast herds of the Great Migration are making their way into the north western plains, soon to face the often fatal challenge of crossing the crocodile infested Grumeti River. The crocodiles here are quite used to waiting for their annual feast! Recently, clients driving out with Nomad Safaris witnessed a 5km long line of wildebeest marching near Musabi, and watched a large pride of lions take down two wildebeest at once.

For safari-goers and all wildlife watchers, each venture into the bush is laden with potential; wildlife is finally lured away from its dependence on the few remaining water sources at the end of the dry season, and anything can happen. The vast distances of the Serengeti are breathtaking in themselves, scattered with rock kopjes and ancient land forms that seem to be the very stuff of creation, but it is truly a breathtaking experience to witness this landscape when the migrating herds are chewing their way to each furthest horizon.

The thousands of unfenced acres of the Serengeti and surrounding parks have been fantastically fought for, to protect a vast and unique ecosystem in this glorious region of East Africa. Here the lives of myriad strange and wonderful wild birds and animals play out; their freedom remains paramount. The ever-changing beauties of the bush may never be qualified or quantified; Man has set this land aside to watch and wonder at the strange composition of Nature’s art, but can never presume or predict what he will see.

lion vs hyena

On Safari in Tanzania

Africa makes sense of all that ecology-biodiversity-sustainable-habitat stuff that sounds so like the special pleading of socially inept, bearded weirdies when applied to a field in back-garden Britain. Here it has the depth and grace of a religious conviction

The Serengeti: under the lowering anvil nimbus, electric storms stutter on the horizon. The shimmering burnt-orange African sun plummets; a hot wind sways the social weavers’ intricately constructed nests in the whistling thorn. The heavy air vibrates with cooing of doves and the creaking-gate single note of the tropical boubou. High above, a pair of bateleur eagles catching a lazy late thermal precariously balance like their eponymous tightrope walkers. And over the undulating dry surf of grassland the game teems.

It teems and it teems. It teems from left to right and from right to left. It teems up and it teems down and it teems round and round until you are dizzy with teeming. Will this damn teeming never stop? The Serengeti game is divided into two teams: those that eat and those that are eaten. It is one enormous game of kiss- chase with biting. If you only know Africa you know. This is Attenborough country. The gnarly buzzcut acacias, the purple sky, the oily, pustulant sun that slides across the horizon, truncating the evening into 20 minutes of the most exotically beautiful light on earth.

The Serengeti stretches from northern Tanzania across the border into Kenya. This is where the annual migration of wildebeest takes place. Animals following the rains, pulling all the mint-sauce teams behind them. Wildebeest are God’s extras. Individually, they are odd, humpy creatures with long, mournful faces that seem to be continually muttering “Nobody knows the trouble I seen” under their breaths; collectively on the move at a stiff-legged canter, they are one of the great wonders of the world, making the Serengeti Cecil B De Mille Africa. A wildebeest’s only defence against the cruel market forces of a carnivorous world is statistics. There are so many of us, chances are it won’t be me. They even arrange to calve all at the same time in the same place, providing the lions and hyenas with the largest canapé smorgasbord in the world. Wildebeest are nature’s proof that communism works. It’s just not much fun. Their bones litter the plains.

The great grey-green greasy Grumeti river, all set about with fever trees, runs through the heart of the Serengeti. It is home to turgid pods of hippo and crocodile you could land small planes on. Each big enough to make a set of luggage that would comfortably take Joan Collins on a world cruise. Hippos look and sound like the House of Commons. Fat, self-satisfied gents with patronising smirks and fierce pink short-sighted eyes in wrinkled grey suits going “haw-haw” and telling each other dirty jokes. They sit like backbenchers in their soupy tearooms and defecate copiously, lifting their vast buttocks out of the water and spinning their tails like Magimixes. At night you lie awake and listen to them chunter and canvass outside the tent.

The Ngorongoro crater is other place you’ll know if you’ve only been to Africa by armchair. Seven thousand feet up, it is a volcano crater with more microclimates than you can shake a meteorologist at. A perfect soup bowl of game. In fact, Ngorongoro is Africa’s Mount Olympus of game. Purists with breath you could use for snakebite serum of the Outward Bound knit-your-own-bullet school tend to roll their malarial yellow eyes and harrumph like warthog farts at the mention of Ngorongoro, bellowing that it is Disneyland Soho on a Saturday night, St Tropez in July. And they have a point. It is the beaten trail. But then, imagine a life lived never having seen Disneyland or Soho or St Tropez and double it and double it again. The Ngorongoro crater fair takes your breath away. It is a spectacle. It makes The Lion King look like a song and dance. This is the real thing.

You will see a lot of other Toyota safari trucks. But the view at sunrise from Crater Lodge perched on the lip of the Volcano silences all criticism. And visitors too are a part of a safari’s rich ecology. Crater Lodge looks like Portmeirion designed by Danny La Rue and Puccini. A fabulously camp camp, a collection of individual ethnic petit palaces on stilts, where you get your own butler, savanna beds, a log fire and rose petals in your bath. It is the natural home of one of Africa’s most ubiquitous and photographed denizens, the honeymoon couple. I could sit and watch honeymooners for hours. They are endlessly fascinating and rewarding. The main reward being that I will never ever have to be on one of them again. Africa is perfect postnuptial ecosystem. It has danger, nature, adventure and the Tiffany of night skies. All the subliminal triggers for a really good “Me Tarzan, You Jane” sex life. For newlyweds, this is as good as having sex gets. A brief two weeks of libidinous malaria (sweating and shaking). Nothing in the world makes you feel younger, more alive, more fecund and vigorously, expansively free than other people’s honeymoon in Africa.

The problem, and it is a problem with safaris, is that many tourists get to see Africa, experience Africa, fire off enough film to garland an amphitheatre to prove that they’ve done Africa, but never actually set foot in Africa. They set from camp/lodge to converted long-wheelbased Land Rover without ever getting dust on their new Gore-Tex safari boots. Viewed from a truck, it is all as real and special and awe-inducing as most north-world people could ever want.

But looking through a window frame stutters the image into being a sort of stamp-collecting. You go in search of things: the big five (lion, elephant, leopard, rhino and Cape buffalo), a kill, a view. You find yourself asking endless questions like “What’s the gestation period of a Thompson gazelle?” “How far in kilometres will a hyena walk at night?” as if you are swotting for a Third World pub quiz. You record and tick things off in the anecdote album. Getting out and walking is a whole other thing altogether, the snapshots allied into a great rolling panorama. You stop being an invisible, omnipotent observer and take your place as apart of it. Both watcher and watched stalker and stalked. Meet it eye to eye. Danger is a big part of Africa’s turn-on. Travellers love travellers’ tales. The most commonly asked question is “Will it eat me?” And the guides have endless routines of blood-clotting stories. It’s all fun, but it misses the point. In the wildebeest’s statistics of danger, Africa is no more risky than most cities at night. “Will that bus eat me?” “Yes, if you stand in front of it.”

You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off. You can see the works, the intricate engineering, that fantastically complex and beautiful series of cogs and wheels and springs and checks and balances that makes the globe work. Africa makes sense of all that ecology-biodiversity-sustainable-habitat stuff that sounds so like the special pleading of socially inept, bearded weirdies when applied to a field in back-garden Britain. Here it has the depth and grace of a religious conviction.

So if you want to walk, you must, simply must go to the Selous, an area the size of Denmark, the largest untouched reserve in the world, named after the greatest of all white hunters a mythic figure who was the basis for Allan Quartermain. It is a vast area of thorn and cliff and sand and jungle, bisected and filigreed by the Rufiji river that runs through sand and cuts a new course after the rains every year, leaving behind lakes and deep gorges fringed with doum palms. Here is the world’s largest collection of hippo, of crocodile and elephant. It is home to some of the last wild black rhino and the biggest packs of wild dog.

Seen from the Sand Rivers camp on a bluff of sandstone, the river glides through a view that remains perfect and pristine for a decade of million years. You can camp out under mosquito nets on a dry river bed and listen to the great game being played out in the inky shadows, thrown by a moon as bright as a Wembley floodlight. You can count shooting stars around the ironwood fire. You can travel up rapids on little flat-bottomed boats, being chased by bull hippos like furious tugs, and cast for fearsomely aggressive tiger fish while watching for crocodiles, being both fisherman and bait. Or walk quietly and with the pounding heart of a peeping tom to watch elephants bathing. You can be one of the pitifully few people who have ever seen wild dog, the painted wolves of Africa, dappled patchwork resting in the shade of an acacia. Don’t think of any of this as frightening. It’s exciting. And if this all sounds like Mills & Boon travel writing, then I make no apology. I don’t know how to impart enthusiasm other than enthusiastically. But if you imagine it’s all too purple to be true, then fine. Stay at home. Nobody would be happier than me.

For westerners, Africa is a place that happens despite Africans. In all the yearning literature this place has spawned, the only indigenous characters are servants and bearers and extras – and that’s shaming. This is the one continent where travellers rarely say they want to meet the natives. Africans themselves spend precious little time enjoying or worrying about their game. The only giraffe most of them have time to care about is on their banknotes. But Tanzania in particular is a fantastically friendly and interesting human place, lively and complex. To come here and see only wilderness and animals is to see only half the story. In one-street towns there is an entrepreneurial imagination and energy that beggars Silicon Valley.

Stone Town is main town of Zanzibar, the Muslim island that was the centre of the Arab slave trade. Zanzibar is the island of cloves and ivory and it is where Livingstone and the other Victorian explorers began their treks into the mapless nothing. Built out of coral, the winding streets and courtyarded houses feel more North African than sub-Saharan. I sat in the English church that was built on the old slave market with the alter directly above its whipping post and listened to Anglican evensong in Swahili, “The Old Rugged Cross” sung with that unmistakeable mournful, soft sound of African voices.

Mnemba Island, off the coast of Zanzibar, isn’t actually Africa at all. It belongs to that other world of travel-brochure covers. I have never been anywhere that so completely encompasses every dream of the perfect desert island. You can walk round it in 20 minutes. It has just ten huts hidden in jungle. There is a bar and frankly miraculous food served on the beach by candlelight. It is always in the sunny 90s, but the coral-white sand never gets hot. The sea is the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, and there is a reef within doggy-paddling distance. Nothing in the place stings or bites, and there are more laid-back staff than punters. All you ever wear is a kukoi, a sort of gown-up’s nappy. Indeed you regress into it.

After flopping about three days, I’d unstressed into a five-year-old. I became gurgling, smiley, supine, oily lump of wants and simple desires, moving from sun to shade like a happy, nutbrown maggot. Snorkelling over tropical coral reef is exactly like watching the cartoon channel with the sound turned down. Weightless, intellectually neutral colour and movement. In the other huts the sated honeymooners done Tarzanning in the bush lazily played mummies and daddies. In the eaves, doves’ coos beat the intro over and over. The tune preyed in the back of my memory. What was it? “The Mighty Quinn”? No. “Here We Go round the Mulberry Bush”? No. Finally I got it. It was “Swinging Safari”.

Reproduced from Travel intelligence, Article by AA Gill

Game report from Ruaha (Feb 2009)

The rains have broken over the Ruaha! What was near desert, over a period of a few days has turned into lush woodland
with scattered green grass meadows. Dry sunny mornings are the norm with massive cloud build up during the day
climaxing in a late afternoon downpour drenching the sun baked earth. The Ruaha has come alive! The trees and bushes
have sprung into action producing leaves and flowers turning the whole park from a dull brown to every shade of green
possible.
Perhaps the most rewarding time to visit a park is during this transitional phase, to see the emergence of creatures rarely
seen in the dry season, and to witness the change in general animal behavior as a sense of relief seems to flood over them.
Suddenly there is food and energy to spare shown by the impala as they pronk and bound around for no apparent reason!
We have also seen the return of most of our migrant birds, some of which come from as far away as the Russian Steppes to
escape the harsh Northern winters, many however come from other areas within Africa. The most noticeable of these are
the cuckoos, several species, which start arriving anytime from October and proceed to wreak havoc among other birds
lives as they fly from nest to nest laying their superbly similar eggs in to the nests of other unsuspecting species ultimately
dooming the family. On hatching, the tiny seemingly helpless cuckoos are anything but. After usually hatching first, the
little cuckoo chick instinctively roll the other eggs out of the nest destroying them below, removing all future competition
concentrating all the adopted parents efforts solely on the one cuckoo. Should the intruder hatch after the hatching of
other chicks he is equip with a hook on the beak tip to dispatch his future rivals.
Several species off bee-eater have also returned to Ruaha, surely the most handsome family of birds in Africa. With such
vibrant colours, the bee-eaters can turn most people into avid bird watchers the minute they sight their first one as they
scythe through the air in search of their insect prey and land on a nearby branch to devour it allowing close approaches.
Dozens of new raptor species are frequently spotted, again some of these birds coming from as far away as Russia to take
advantage of food bonanza the rains bring.
The Amur falcons have returned in their thousands and vast flocks of these birds are often seen over the camp after a
shower of rain to cash in on the emerging termites which escape the mounds in their millions after heavy rain. The huge
spur winged geese and bizarre knob billed ducks although present in Ruaha throughout the year have been joined by
numerous others and are now are in huge numbers littered all over the park and can be seen on every pan and waterhole.
It is it this time of year when Ruaha comes into its own and lives up to its expectations of being one of the greatest bird
paradises in Africa.
Lions are still heard on most nights and are still wandering through the camp once a week or so. Festo located a pride of
15 lion all together resting the day away along the banks of the Ruaha river. Leopard as always is a lucky sighting but we are
expecting an increase as many moved away as the bush started to thin out in the dry season.
One species which will always be present in the Jongomero area is our elephants. With several herds being sighted a day
sometimes in the dry season, we are still getting good numbers of these creatures even now. A female elephant or baby has
not been seen for over a month, but all the boys are now beginning to congregate in to large herds and are often spotted in
our area or more often than not, within the camp itself. The best sighting of last month had to be our resident cranky rogue
bull Kingo return to Jongomero with 20 of his friends in tow. After spending most of the day in the camp and putting on a
great show in front of the main area, Kingo who was very well behaved led them all away again.
The buffalos have moved away from the area but with a bit of effort, herds of up to a few hundred can still be seen in the
open areas further North of Jongomero.
General game as always is still in good supply, most drives come back with frequent sightings of most other species. Giraffe
are still bountiful and one drive returned last week with having seen over a hundred! Greater kudus, probably the most
handsome of all antelope are still being seen almost daily together with Zebras, Waterbuck, Bushbuck, hippos, Dik-Diks,
Duikers, Mongoose, Crocs, Jackals, Bat-Eared Foxes and of course, the ubiquitous Impala whom have just calved and their
tiny youngsters can be seen bounding round all over.
As well as all the big stuff, as always time must be devoted to the no less important smaller little things which scamper
around contributing to Ruaha uniqueness. It has been a long wait for the environmentally vital dung beetles and evidence
for this could be seen by the huge piles of dung covering the park. Within a couple of weeks it has all been cleaned up by
these industrious little workers as they squabble over the fresh dung and fashion it into elegant balls to roll away and
hopefully attract a mate on the way. A horrible job but some one has to do it! Dung beetles return vast quantities of
nutrients back into the soil making them one of Africa’s most important, indispensable little creatures. Velvet mites look as
if they are covered in pure red velvet and if there ever was a visually stunning “bug”, this is it. Never seen in the dry, these
animals are mostly underground where they feed on subterranean termites, as soon as the first rains fall, literally billions
emerge from the soil to mate, in some areas the whole ground can take on an almost red sheen and to walk without
standing on one is almost impossible. They then disappear as quick as they appear and we must wait for this time next year
to see them again. Some extraordinary species of snake have began also to make an appearance, the most notable of course
being the African Rock Python and several youngsters have been found near the camp. Mother has not as yet made an
appearance but a 15 foot Python was spotted by friends of ours in another area of the park!
The elephant shrews are up to their usual tricks and several are seen in the camp each night and on occasion keep up the
odd guest with their constant leg drumming to attract mates. However many of them are now accompanied by a few tiny
babies in tow.
As usual, another good couple of months game wise and without doubt my favorite time of year to be in the African bush.
Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year, and all the best for a good year ahead! Andrew Mollinaro

Safari in the Selous

In the green floodplain of the Luwego River, three crested francolins strutted to and fro. For a few moments, these birds became the most important things in my life and I watched their every move, breathless with tension.

Beyond the francolins lay the reason why I could hear my own heart pounding. The twitching ears and curved white horns of 30 buffaloes moved among the tall elephant grass. They grazed serenely, unaware of the human beings sneaking up on them.

But if those francolins saw us and sounded the alarm, the game would be up. How the half-ton beasts would then react to our presence was impossible to predict.

It seemed incredible that they had not spotted us. The buffaloes were so close that I could hear them tearing at the grass and pawing the ground.

My nose could even faintly detect their musty stench. If I could smell them, how could they not smell me?

The answer was that Anton Turner, my guide, had expertly kept us downwind of the herd. Minutes earlier, while still a safe distance away from the buffaloes, Anton had given a whispered briefing. “Buffalo have a reputation for being dangerous because of how they behave when they’re wounded. In this situation, 99 per cent of the time, they’ll just run if they see us. But if we are charged, you’re not going to be able to outrun them. Just lie down and keep as flat as you can. Then the buffalo might run around you. And make sure you stay behind my gun.”

Anton was carrying a Remington rifle loaded with six heavy-calibre rounds. It could take every one of those bullets to bring down a buffalo – and the herd was at least 30 strong.

Thankfully, there was no time to think about the manifold possibilities of disaster. Within moments, I was staring at the francolins and rapidly concluding that we were not going to fool them and the buffaloes at the same time.

Sure enough, the birds saw us. With high-pitched cries of alarm, they darted into the air; even the hiss of their beating wings seemed as loud as thunder. I braced for the reaction of the buffaloes, my heart beating faster still. Would they charge us or run away?

Astonishingly, they did neither. Their menacing horns and giant heads, with moist, flaring nostrils, carried on moving in the high grass, only 50 feet or so ahead. Nothing changed. The herd continued grazing sedately.

Anton led us closer still. Walking silently through long grass, I discovered, is impossible. You brush past green blades, stir up dead leaves and crunch on twigs. Each sound we made seemed cacophonous.

We were only about 30 feet away from the nearest buffalo and still they had not seen us. By now, I could make out the full outline of their jet-black bodies with flicking tails. I could see sweat glistening on muscles rippling beneath their hides.

Then, finally, the inevitable happened. A twig cracked and the herd saw us. The buffaloes raised their heads with sudden snorts and jerks of alarm and stared towards us. We stood stock still – and so did they.

This staring match lasted a matter of seconds, but seemed to crawl by like minutes. A few buffaloes edged curiously towards us, their horns held high. Would they charge?

Then, as if reacting to a silent signal, they broke and fled as one. The next few moments passed in a blur of movement and extreme, heart-pounding tension. The buffaloes stampeded away to my left, hooves pounding and nostrils flaring.

Then, as if from nowhere, another unmistakable animal appeared only 50 feet away. Without any warning, a fully grown lioness stood in front of me. She turned and leapt over a small stream, presenting an unforgettable mid-air silhouette of raw power, and then bounded away. In a split second, the lioness disappeared into the undergrowth, while the buffaloes fled across the floodplain.

My next thoughts had all the urgency that fear brings. We had not been the only ones stalking the buffaloes. Unseen by us, the lioness must have been hunting the herd.

If so, she would not have been alone. What about the rest of the pride? Anton soon found the reason for the lioness’s presence. A disembowelled warthog, with its purple intestines bulging onto the ground, lay exactly where the lioness had materialised. She had been guarding a kill. And she had, it seemed, been alone.

This episode taught me more about wildlife – and packed in far more emotional intensity – than any number of previous safaris. The unique exhilaration of tracking big game on foot while in your own expanse of African wilderness is the experience offered by the Selous Project in southern Tanzania.

Anton, a former British Army officer who co-founded the project, takes you on long treks across Selous Game Reserve, searching for elephants, buffaloes and lions. Instead of being driven around in a white Land Rover in the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara, where you are likely to share your pride of lions with a dozen other vehicles, you spend most of your time on foot, enjoying an intense, individual encounter with true wilderness.

Selous Game Reserve is little known outside Tanzania, yet it covers 21,000 square miles – an area bigger than Switzerland – making it the largest wildlife sanctuary in the world. The Selous Project’s concession embraces 300,000 acres of rugged bush along the Luwego and Lukula rivers. Until last year, this was a hunting area. All the neighbouring concessions are still used for this purpose.

But Anton and his partners in Great Plains Conservation, a company specialising in ecotourism, are trying a new model to replace hunting. The idea is for small groups of visitors to stalk big game on foot – and shoot the animals with cameras, not guns. Only eight guests can stay in the concession at any given time. So these safaris are high-value, low-volume and low-impact affairs. In this way, all the advantages of the hunting model are replicated while the crucial downside is removed: no animals are killed.

“We track the animals and get as close to them as we can. The only things we’re not doing are selecting a trophy and pulling the trigger,” explained Anton. These words carry particular authority because he was once a professional hunter. After leaving the Army as a captain, he led hunting expeditions across Tanzania.

But Anton, 37, has resolved never to hunt again. “I never want to shoot another lion,” he said. “I’ve been through the hunting business and, as a form of interaction with the environment, hunting is very pure. But I’m not sure that hunting has delivered the conservation gains it once did.”

The case for hunting rests on two pillars: money and conservation. With clients willing to pay huge sums to shoot big game, hunting provides a powerful incentive for conserving wildlife. But Anton believes this is changing. The rising cost of licences and fees has made Tanzania an expensive destination for those who shoot big game. “Hunting today is a model that is under pressure,” he said. “The government wants more money out of it, so it has raised block fees and trophy fees to the point where Tanzania is becoming uncompetitive compared to elsewhere in Africa.”

And the more the client pays, the more he demands. In theory, strict quotas limit the number of animals each hunting area is allowed to kill. In practice, these rules are impossible to enforce. The authorities will never know how many lions or elephants have been shot in a remote concession.

It is down to hunting companies to play by the rules. But their clients are often determined to shoot whatever species they want. Those from Russia and the Arab world have particularly bad reputations.

If that client wants a lion trophy, he will go home with one, no matter what. If the quota has been used up, this will not prevent an unscrupulous client from shooting the next male lion he sees. And if he comes across a more handsome specimen on a later outing, he will probably shoot that lion as well.

This behaviour destroys the conservation argument for hunting.

Instead, the future of conservation may lie in photographic safaris, where small groups of visitors spend most of their time on foot with minimal impact on the environment. “The acid test of all this is conservation. The big, long-term objective is to make sure this area is still wild in 50 years’ time,” said Anton.

His camp beside the Luwego has only four tents, equipped with twin beds and en suite bathrooms. These have elaborate bucket showers, topped up with hot water at your command. Meals are served in the main tent – which Anton, in true military fashion, called “the mess” – where golden lanterns light up rugs spread across the ground, in the style of an Arab sheikh’s retreat.

On most expeditions, Anton’s chief tracker, Abadiba Karibai, leads the way. If he ever leaves the wilderness, Abadiba could write a book on the secrets of a long and healthy life. At 72, he has been tracking big game since 1961 – and he looks like an exceptionally fit 55-year-old.

When we stalked the buffaloes, Abadiba was at the head of our column carrying a grey sock stuffed with ash. Every now and then he checked the direction of the wind by shaking the sock and releasing a puff of ash. In this way, he kept us downwind of the buffaloes’ nostrils.

Abadiba has survived being charged by lions no fewer than five times. Twice, he was armed only with a bow and arrow – and once he managed to fight off three lions with this flimsy weapon. “I shot one lion with an arrow. Then I had one lion here on my left and one on my right,” Abadiba told me. “They were too close to shoot. So I pushed an arrow into the mouth of one lion. After that, they both ran.”

Despite the reassurance offered by Abadiba and Anton, their expeditions are not for the faint-hearted. Approaching big game on foot will always be risky, and it demands a degree of physical robustness. If a river stands between you and the buffaloes, you simply wade through it, hoping that no crocodiles lurk nearby.

A typical stay in Anton’s Lukula concession will probably involve leaving the main camp for a three-day walk, staying in “fly camps” and marching for three hours at a time through rugged bush, under the intense rays of the African sun.

As Selous Game Reserve is so vast, the animals are widely dispersed. On foot, you cover less ground and, inevitably, see less wildlife, one of the disadvantages of this kind of safari. The lioness beside the herd of buffalo was the only big cat I saw in a week. In the Maasai Mara, you may share your lions with dozens of onlookers, but you will probably see them more.

And all kinds of logistical cock-ups are possible on three-day expeditions. On the first day of our walk the vehicle taking us to the starting point broke down. At nightfall, we had not reached the first fly camp. We could not contact the people at the camp because the radios had failed. A second vehicle that would have taken us to the camp also broke down.

So we ended up sleeping on a canvas tarpaulin spread on the bare earth. A large fire, carefully stoked all night, served as our protection from lions. This was a cock-up, pure and simple. But it also left us sleeping under the stars in the middle of a great wilderness.

As such, it was a perfect African experience.