Tanzania and Zanzibar - Welcome to the Tanzania Odyssey blog

Tanzania blog with Tanzania Odyssey

2014-05-04T12:05:00.003Z

This blog is a collection of things we think are new and interesting in Tanzania and Zanzibar.

Many of these blogs are press articles concerning Tanzania or Zanzibar which we post on this blog as we find them. Please read on and feel free to post any comments you like.

For detailed information about Tanzania and Zanzibar please look at our site - www.tanzaniaodyssey.com

To view videos of the country and the various lodges please see our Video Console

Or for advice / quotes or anything else please call us in London on 44 (2) 7471 8780 or in the USA on (toll free) 1-866 356 4691

Wildebeest Migration crossing of the mara river - battle at the mara river

2009-11-05T09:00:00.000Z

Amazing video of Wildebeest crossing the Mara river and being attacked by crocodiles. See Battle at the Mara.
For more info about Tanzania safaris click here

Scientist Unlock Secrets behind Serengeti’s Wildebeest Migration

2009-08-03T11:10:00.001Z

"Once salt rises in park's Southern waters, animals migrate north". Something in the water in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park is spurring the world's most spectacular migration, according to a new study.

One of the spectacular and unique event of the year is the Serengeti wildebeest migration, which takes place between the months ofÂ November and July following year. This has been described by many as one of the greatest natural invent in the wildlife worldEach year a legion of nearly two million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles circulate through the park, settling in the verdant grasslands to give birth while the rivers flow and new wet season grasses grow in endless abundance. Then, as if. spooked, the herds suddenly begin to trek north in late May or early June, leaving behind an apparent paradise.

"When animals leave the south, there's still plenty of green forage," Ayron Strauch of Tufts

University said. "And plenty of water."
Strauch and Frances Chew, also of Tufts, now think they know what sparks the exodus: An invisÂ¬ible, rising tide of salts in the rivers from which the herds drink.

Late in the wet season, the plains in the southern part of the park appear healthy and full of nutritious food, but the rain has already begun to slacken. When Strauch and Chew sampled water from the Mbalageti and Seronera Rivers in the region, they found that concentrations of calcium, sodium and potassium salts soared to levels that could be dangerous to the animals' health.

"These nutrients are vital to life on the plains, to be sure," Strauch said. "But as base flow in the rivers decreases, concentrations of these nutrients sky-rocket to hundreds of times what animals might encounter in the plants they eat."

Strauch will present the research next month at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America.

Studies of farm animals have shown that elevated salts in the water supply can cause cardiovascular disease and kidney failure in adults and cripple females' ability to lactate. New-born animals that drink tainted water can suffer from impaired bone and nerve development, and have trouble gaining weight.

"Basically as soon as the water starts turning brackish, you start to see adverse effects," Strauch said.

The same may hold true for Serengeti's wild herds. Strauch and Chew reason that the spike in salt content in the southern waters acts as a signal that it's time to move north, before the harsh dry season sets in and food sources begin dwindling.

However, John Fryxall of the University of Guelph in Canada said declining nutrients in grasses may drive migration, rather than water quality

"These animals need the green flush of nutrients in early growth-stage grasses," he said. Grasses growing late in the wet season are too long and full of woody material that animals can't digest.

In addition, animals also have to compete with humans living nearby for water. Villages surrounding the park are swelling, thanks in part to tourism generated by the famous wildlife. Local inhabitants are increasingly diverting river water for irrigation and drinking.

"There is increasing demand for a finite water resource," Fryxall said. "Future changes in water quality will be important to pay attention to; worsening quality could impose additional mortality on the animals."

What's it like to witness "the Great Migration"?

Observing the animals on the Serengeti plains may bring to mind the decadence of a midnight buffet, the kind you find in Las Vegas or on cruise ships. A bonanza of feasting goes on: The greatest concentration of grazing animals on the planet, including wildebeests, zebras, gazelles and antelope, are there, munching on grass. As they feed, lions, hyenas and other predators feed on them, while vultures swoop in to clear the table, so to speak.

But the thought of all-you-can-eat buffets is likely your last thought of human civilization when you witness the Great Migration Every year, the grazing animals cross hundreds of miles, from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and back again, to eat fresh grass, watered by the rains. Once these animals start moving, you have the sense of something primal.
In short: You're seeing something that's been seen by very few humans before.

The animals' movement starts quickly and without any discernible warning. How do they know it's time to move, you may wonder. While everything looks normal and serene on these grasslands to you, wildebeests can sense a thunderstorm from 30 miles away. They follow the scent to get the best grass.

For people who like to count sheep before going to bed, the migrating animals represent an insomniacs dream it would take almost 35 sleepless days and nights to count one migrating animal per second. The line of animals would stretch back for miles, giving you plenty of time to add up those 3 million animals, the majority of which are wildebeests. Nothing, not massive lines for Black Friday sales or queues for a subway after a down-town sporting event, could prepare you for that many animals moving together at once. The line of animals may stretch back as far as 25 miles.

But your ability to count the running wildebeests and leaping gazelles may be hampered by the beating hooves hitting the ground in the race for fresh grass or the cacophony of grunts and snorts that fill the hot air.

While the grazing animals leave many of their natural predators behind in the Serengeti, the trip, which may cover as many as 1,000 miles, isn't without its dangers. When the wildebeests go leaping and splashing through rivers, you may spot a hungry crocodile emerge from below to snatch them. But the wildebeests will gain in numbers again in the early spring, during foaling season. Many in the group will give birth all at once, and their labour is quick. Look away for just a second and you may miss the foal making its entrance into the world. The tiny wildebeest will get its footing, and then the race for grass is on again.

After all the adventure, the grazing beasts wind up where they started, in the Serengeti, and nature's food chain buffet begins again.For more information about the Migration please see our main site Tanzania Odyssey or our Serengeti Wildebeest migration page, or click here for more information about Tanzania Safaris

Singita’s Sabora Tented Camp

2009-07-07T09:07:00.002Z

Singita’s Sabora Tented Camp in the Grumeti Reserves (Tanzania), has undergone a number of new developments to expand the accommodation offering. This will meet continued high demand by affluent travellers seeking a quintessential ‘Out of Africa’ Serengeti safari experience.

Singita Sabora is one of three distinct, luxurious lodges that form part of the Singita stable of iconic, low-impact, high-end lodges in East-Africa. Located in one of the most pristine wilderness locations on the Western corridor of the Serengeti, it is also the scene of Africa’s thrilling annual wildebeest migration.

Three luxurious, 1920’s-styled tented suites have been added to the six existing elegant tented suites, increasing guest capacity from 12 to 18 guests. Fitted from soft canvas and furnished with theatrical flair, complete with European finery and ethnic artefacts, the new tented suites are air-conditioned and offer all modern luxuries emulating the style of the existing suites. Meticulously designed, each is en-suite with a fully equipped bathroom, boasting newly designed open-air showers, period baths and larger viewing decks with panoramic, uninterrupted views of the Serengeti plains.

A second, spacious tented lounge has also been constructed to ensure that guests have abundant room to relax, recline and enjoy the well-equipped library and other facilities. Adjacent to the existing lounge, it is conveniently independently accessible, furnished with antique mahogany travel chests, Persian rugs and silk curtains reminiscent of a bygone era. With its own wrap-around deck, here sundowners can be sipped while gazing at game ambling by – almost within arms’ reach.

An integrated ‘health and fitness’ facility has been added at Singita Sabora. The new guest gymnasium is designed to provide guests with unobstructed vistas of the African wilderness while training. It is conveniently close to the well-equipped, intimate Spa and heated plunge pool with its ‘walk-in’ stairs. The pool deck has been extended to offer breathtaking views of the glorious sunrise, while providing abundant space to engage in poolside activities, or to enjoy a leisurely poolside brunch or dinner. In addition, an unfenced clay tennis court has been constructed on the western corner of the camp, where guests may engage in this age-old ‘gentleman’s game’ on one of the most comfortable surfaces imaginable.

The mild, temperate climate lends itself to lazy afternoons in the main camp with lavish tented dining room, where gourmet cuisine and exceptional wines can be savoured, or in the adjacent bar lounge, where sunset drinks are a stylish, cherished affair.

Exhilarating outdoor adventures and relaxing leisure pursuits augment the luxurious accommodation and world-class facilities and service offered here. Guests may indulge in superb game viewing or adventurous hot-air ballooning, or simply relax while reclining on a shaded daybed overlooking the plains – the charming ambience of this authentic olde world safari lodge will leave guests hard-pressed to depart.

More About Singita Grumeti Reserves

Singita Grumeti Reserves spans over 340 000 acres of untouched wilderness, offering a quintessential ‘Out of Africa’ experience. It comprises three spectacular lodges: the flagship Singita Sasakwa Lodge, Singita Sabora Tented Camp and Singita Faru Faru Lodge – each with its own unique charm and ambience, and set in a private concession almost the size of Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve.

The Singita Grumeti experience presents a fine, and tangible example of the new African eco-philanthropy that ‘gives back’ through tourism. Offering low-density tourism and a dense concentration of game, thus providing up-close, intimate experiences for guests, Singita Grumeti Reserves embraces the Singita philosophy of ‘touching the earth lightly’. This ethos underscores the approach of low impact and high value tourism, based on the philosophy that a minimal number of guests will have little impact on the land and its fauna and flora, thus benefiting the environment.

In addition to superb game viewing, other activities offered at Singita Grumeti include: archery, tennis, hot-air ballooning, horseback game viewing, a fully equipped spa and gym and a jogging track, as well as community tours to various projects initiated and supported by the Singita Grumeti Community and Wildlife Conservation Fund.

Recognised internationally as providing ‘the best safari experience in Africa’, the Singita product offering further includes six other iconic, low-impact, high-end lodges in three additional destinations: the Kruger National Park and Sabi Sand in South Africa, and in South Eastern Zimbabwe.

Multi-award winner of virtually every hotel and travel award both locally and globally, the focus of Singita is not only game viewing, cuisine, wine, high design and luxury, but also an uncompromising dedication to conservation and sustainability, which includes several significant community projects.

For more info about Tanzania Safari holidays and honeymoons click here

NORTH ISLAND OPENS TODAY

2009-07-01T11:01:00.001Z

NORTH ISLAND OPENS TODAY

After a six-week closure, we are pleased to announce that North Island OPENS TODAY! The intensive upliftment and improvement of the island is complete and ensures that our concept of signature barefoot luxury has been enhanced and improved for all our guests.

We have focused all our attention on the existing facilities and have ensured that the island remains the private sanctuary for which it has become so well known.

Our open, natural and raw approach to architecture with its Robinson Crusoe style, which dictates a significant level of upkeep, has been renovated and touched up on various areas in our existing 11 villas, main piazza, spa, gym, boutique, activities center, library and west beach bar. This includes thatch replacement, wood maintenance, painting of pools, touching up bathroom facilities and an element of soft refurbishing.

To further enhance our North Island wellness experience, we have added techno gym equipment to a completely revamped gym facility and Thai massage decks in each of our spa villas.

To coincide with our opening, we have equipped our helicopter pad with the necessary equipment and safety features that will now allow for night landings of registered helicopters.

With all this complete, as well as much time and effort given to our environmental upliftment, the Noah’s Ark Project, we are thrilled to open the island again – and welcome guests back to our 'home' – where they can once again enjoy the luxury of which we are proud to be a part.

for more info please see North island

Serengeti in June: The Great Migration

2009-06-25T09:41:00.002Z

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.

Tanzania: Mkomazi Receives Black Rhinos from Czech Republic

2009-06-22T09:45:00.001Z

Article from http://allafrica.com
6 June 2009 - Valentine Marc Nkwame

A pack of three Rhinoceroses from the Czech Republic arrived in Tanzania last weekend and were sent to the Mkomazi Rhino sanctuary in Kilimanjaro region.

The black Rhinos of Diceros Bicornis Michaeli species landed at the Kilimanjaro International Airport from Amsterdam aboard a large customized cargo craft, Boeing 747-400 BCF belonging to the Martinair Airline. They rode in three huge wooden crates.

"The rhino were crate-trained for two months to prepare them for the long flight inside the cages, it required a high level of skilled training to ensure that the animals rode comfortably," stated the retired Brigadier General Hashim Mbita the chairman of the Wildlife Trust Fund.

The animals were taken from the Dvur Kralove zoo, Czech Republic. The Zoo, which specializes in Africa fauna, is reported to be one of the most successful captive-breeding programmes for the Black Rhino in the world. Their rarest animal is the Northern white rhino.

The translocation of the three black 'Michael' Rhinos from Czech Republic cost over US $70,000 this was made possible through a fund-raiser previously done by the Suzuki Rhino Club of Netherlands. Ted and Catrina van Dam who head the Suzuki Rhino club have also been supporting the Mkomazi Rhino project

Two decades ago, Tanzania, with the help of other African Parks, governments, and conservationists, including the George Adamson Wildlife Trust had hatched a protected breeding program to boost the black rhino numbers in parks. They started the Mkomazi Rhino Sanctuary, occupying 43 square miles of the total 2,200 square miles of the new Mkomazi National Park in Same District, Kilimanjaro region. The sanctuary is protected by 24-hours patrol guards and an electrified, alarmed fence.

"At Mkomazi the newly brought Rhinos will be kept under special care and monitoring within the sanctuary before being released into the wild," explained the Director General for the Tanzania National Parks, Mr. Gerald Bigurube, adding that the animals must first learn to adopt to the local environment before being let out.

Which is just as well because, the first rhino refused to leave its crate, upon being let out at Mkomazi and it took a full hour of team effort to persuade the animal to enter the sanctuary.

Tanzania however shouldn't entirely feel like a new planet to the three newly received black rhinos because according to the Director General of TANAPA, the animals were among those taken from East Africa in the early sixties and sent to the Czech's zoo for their safety when their survivals here could not be guaranteed.

Ms Halima Mangi an Ecologist at Mkomazi said the new batch from Czech now brings up the total number of Rhinoceroses at Mkomazi National Park to Nine. "Rhinos had totally disappeared here in the 80s therefore this project, aimed at restoring the species, was started," she said.

The first four rhinos brought from South Africa, two males and two females were introduced to the sanctuary in 1997 with the second batch of four following in 2001. They started to reproduce in 2005 and by 2008 four new babies had been born, however two of these young ones and an older Rhino later died.

The priority at Mkomazi, according to Tony Fitzjohn the Field Director of George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust, is to increase the founder population to at least 15 rhinos from which a whole new population can be created. Dr Dana Holeckova, the Director of the Dvur Kralove Zoo had previously visited Mkomazi with Dr Hamish Currie of Back to Africa and agreed to donate 3 black rhino of Diceros bicornis michaeli species to its Rhino sanctuary.

Dr Peter Morkel, Berry White and Dvur Kralove rhino keepers played an important role in ensuring smooth and safe translocation of Rhinos while back here Tony Fitzjohn, Elisaria Nnko, Wilfred Ayo, Semu Pallangyo and Philbert Shindano handled all the necessary responsibilities.

Ground transportation was taken care of by Grumeti Reserves, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Save-the-Rhino society and again the Suzuki Rhino Club. Support also came from A & K.

NOTE NEW SUGGESTED TIP RATES FOR KILI CLIMBS

2009-06-18T10:39:00.000Z

New rates for porters and guides for Mt. Kilimanjaro (June 2008)
(published by TANAPA)

Porters: USD 10 per day
Cooks: USD 15 per day
Guides: USD 20 per day

TANAPA fights to improve and maintain Tanzanian Guides

2009-06-18T10:32:00.004Z

TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks Association) is ready to give financial and technical resources to build capacity for the guides in order to attract more visitors to the country, especially to the National Parks, after a three-day meeting organised by the management of the Serengeti National Parks with the Tanzania Tour Guides Association (TTGA), a body which is increasingly gaining importance in the industry.

The aim is to maintain local knowledge and local guides over the influx of foreign guides in Tanzania. Martin Laibooki, Serengeti chief park warden also said cultural attractions would be promoted for tourism within the vast park. These include the historical sites which have been sighted in recent years.

Tour guides at the meeting suggested improving the infrastucture of the Serengeti, so that northern and northwestern parts may be opened up to allow access to "undiscovered" impressive areas that are currently not easily visited due to bad roads.

Expedition Africa treks Tanzania

2009-06-15T13:04:00.006Z

Tanzania is the glorious landscape for a new US reality TV show on the History Channel, retracing New York newspaperman Henry Morton Stanley’s 19th century search for Scottish explorer David Livingstone.

The initial segment of the eight-part series drew a larger-than-average audience last week. An estimated 1.3 million viewers turned to the History Channel last week to watch Expedition Africa, which presents a fabulous view of Tanzania, although was slated for its lack of historical perspective.

In Expedition Africa, Burnett recruits four adventurers to follow the general route taken by Stanley, who set off from Zanzibar in 1869. It took the journalist nearly nine months to locate Livingstone, a famous anti-slavery campaigner who had gone missing after starting a trek in 1865 in search of the source of the Nile.

Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, greeting him with the famous words, “Dr Livingstone, I presume.”
The History Channel crew also gathers in Zanzibar for a 1,550km journey, mainly on foot, that they aim to complete in just 30 days. The quartet consists of a female anthropologist and former cheerleader for an American football team; a British thrill-seeker who specialises in televised tests of endurance; a guide who led a blind climber to the summit of Everest; and a former CNN war correspondent.

History Channel publicists suggest that the team will undertake the quest with only compass and maps to guide them. Much is made of the dangers they will supposedly face along the way, beginning with a dhow voyage from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo during which the adventurers are actually splashed by waves.

Burnett also strives to contrive challenges, sending the foursome over the Uluguru Mountains even though Stanley had walked around them. The the intrepid band, is accompanied by a full camera crew, a large contingent of Tanzanian porters and a pair of suitably colourful Maasai warriors - brought along to repel attacks by various predators.

“It’s imperialist nostalgia,” the US newspaper Variety said, “watching four white people hack through the bush with a support staff of natives.” It is reported that “the History Channel sometimes airs respected documentaries, but Expedition Africa has little of interest to say about Stanley, Livingstone or East Africa, neither then nor now.”

The Washington Post warned, “There is little history and even less reality in Expedition Africa. It is neither entertaining nor informing.”
But find some redeeming qualities in Burnett’s version of an African chronicle, including “gorgeous photography, head-spinning production techniques, and deep and abiding love of nature, adventure and the great world at large.” We at will be watching it for that alone! Alternatively, just check out Tanzania Odyssey website and book your own trip!

New Selous Accommodation with Serena Hotels

2009-06-15T12:28:00.002Z

News on the Tanzania safari circuit is that the charismatic Serena Hotel group has taken over the operations and management of two new luxury properties in Tanzania. Both properties, the Mivumo River Lodge and the Selous Wildlife Lodge are located within Africa’s largest game reserve and a proclaimed world heritage site, the Selous Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania.

Set to open on July 15th 2009, the Mivumo River Lodge comprises 12 superior rooms and 3 premium luxury suites decorated in an elegant African style of a bygone era incorporating local materials from the region. Each superior room consists of a luxurious bedroom and lounge with a private balcony offering an indoor bathroom, outdoor shower and an intimate plunge pool. To ensure privacy and exclusivity, the rooms are spread out and strategically located along the mighty Rufiji River, all with magnificent views of the breathtaking Stiegler’s gorge... we look forward to giving you some personal reviews soon!

The lodge also offers full aromatherapy spa treatments, and a variety of activities including game viewing river cruises, exclusive guided walks, bush picnics, private game drives and sundowner river cruises. To complement the Mivumo River Lodge is the Selous Wildlife Lodge, a luxury tented camp unit located on the Eastern bank of the Simbazi River, a tributary of the Rufiji, is set to open on 1st August 2009.

The camp comprises 12 tents, each of which enjoys outstanding views of untouched wilderness, with scatterings of enormous trees and lush, dense vegetation. It has a dining area and guest lounge overlooking the natural watering hole which is also lit in the evenings for night game viewings. The accommodation here is enhanced by a good outside viewing deck and swimming pool. We will update the videoes to each of these as soon as we can take them - keep checking the Tanzania Odyssey video links.

lion vs hyena

2009-05-12T16:10:00.003Z

Tanzania's Serengeti Plains

2009-05-12T14:11:00.002Z

When it comes to national parks, Serengeti is simply the best. So much space. So many animals. The park itself is enormous - at least as big as Holland - its oceans of grass rimmed by immense horizons that make for a heady sense of freedom.The skies are always full of raptors; eagles, vultures, hawks and harriers. But it is the animals that catch the eye - in particular the mass movement of wildebeest and zebras and the presence of the big cats that prey on them. The migration is the greatest wildlife show on earth and it happens every year. But to see it you need to be in the right place at the right time. In the Serengeti even a million wildebeest can vanish in a matter of days, leaving nothing but an emptiness of dust and stubble.Rain is the engine that drives the Serengeti ecosystems, nourishing the grass, replenishing the waterholes. For the wildebeest, life is an endless journey in search of grass and water. Their year begins in the south of the park where the calves are born between January and March. But in May when the rains end, the land dries fast and the herds move on. Away they march, a million strong, pouring into the Western Corridor or heading deeper into the park.Some are taken by the giant crocodiles of the Grumeti River. Others fall prey to the famous Serengeti lions. But by the end of July the survivors have passed through the northern woodlands and crossed into Kenya, where they remain in the Masai Mara reserve, their dry season refuge, until the onset of the rains lures them south again in October.Wherever the action is, the park is well served with comfortable camps and lodges. Ndutu lodge, in the south, is ideally placed for the calving season and game drives among the granite inselbergs of the Gol Kopjes. Kirawira and Grumeti River are luxury camps in the Western Corridor. Serengeti Serena and Sopa lodges lie in the heart of the park, and Kleins Camp and Migration Camp in the north.
Article writen by Brian Jackman

On Safari in Tanzania

2009-05-12T14:04:00.003Z

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

Bilila Lodge Kempinski

2009-05-04T12:05:00.004Z

Press release re Bilila Lodge Kempinski - April 2009

Bilila Lodge Kempinski, the most luxurious lodge in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, has unveiled a special opening offer – stay for three nights, pay for just two – to entice visitors to be among the first to stay in this idyllic new hideaway, which melds beautifully into the unspoilt Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The opening offer is valid from 1st June, the date that the hotel launches, till 30th September 2009, and rates start at 500 Euros for two people sharing per night inclusive of full board, 20% VAT and a 5% service charge.

As an added temptation, Bilila Lodge Kempinski’s sister hotel Zamani Zanzibar Kempinski is offering “seven nights for the price of five” over the same period, so that guests can enjoy the complete Tanzania package: the ultimate safari experience and a luxurious beach holiday on the exotic spice island of Zanzibar.

These two offers can be booked either on their own or together, but there are certain conditions attached, which are detailed below:

- Neither offer can be combined with other promotions of special offers, other than the ones stated here
- The offer is valid on new reservations only, with arrivals during the inclusive period, namely 1 June to 30 September 2009
- The offer is based on the room rate only and does not include extras, such as transfers from and to the airstrip, games drives etc.
- The offer is only valid on request and subject to availability.

With just 74 rooms (including two private villas), Bilila Lodge Kempinski perfectly combines the intimacy of a lodge and the facilities expected of a much larger hotel, such as several different dining options (indoor restaurant, poolside, moonlit barbecues in a traditional boma), an infinity pool overlooking the grasslands and a watering hole where wild animals come to drink, and an Anantara Spa.

Other public areas include a lounge, a bar, a wine cellar, a conference room accommodating up to 80 people, a library, a games room with full-size billiard table, a fitness centre, an art gallery and gift shops. All the guest rooms have luxury ensuite bathrooms, multimedia DVD players, over 50 satellite TV and radio channels, coffee/tea making facilities and a teak deck for relaxing while watching game (personal telescope included); suites have their own private plunge pool.

Due to strict building controls in the National Park, this will be the largest lodge ever built in the Serengeti, but, as expected of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Lodge has been built in keeping with the landscape.

Not only does the arc-shaped building follow the natural contours of the land, but as far as possible only local materials have been used in its construction to ensure that it blends into its surrounds. For example, over a million traditional “chelewa” brooms have been used to create the thatched roof and the stone for the walls was sourced from nearby Mugumu. The interiors also reflect the natural colours of the African landscape, with the work of local artists adding colourful highlights.

Bilila Lodge Kempinski is located in the Central North of the Serengeti National Park, in an untouched part of the Park where the hotel will have its own private game drives. The hotel is a 45-minute drive from the Seronera airstrip, which in turn is a 50-minute flight from Arusha, the nearest international airport, into which KLM currently flies on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Airlines such as SWISS, Emirates, British Airways, South African Airways and Qatar fly into either Nairobi or Dar-es-Salaam, from where connecting flights to Arusha can be picked up.

Game report from Ruaha (Feb 2009)

2009-02-16T17:21:00.004Z

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

Pemba, the great escape off Zanzibar

2009-01-31T12:11:00.003Z

reproduced from the Sunday Times 4 January 2009
by Lionel Shriver

The scent of cloves on the breeze, deserted white sand beaches, snorkelling off the coral reef ...

As Sartre would agree, for contemporary travellers hell is other tourists. As my greying, long-haired hotelier in Stone Town despaired, Zanzibar 15 years ago was “a paradise”, yet now mills with sandy, sunburnt Europeans in flip-flops, clutching bottled water.

Kindred riffraff hold up an unwelcome mirror, for other tourists are an embarrassing reminder of what we ourselves look like.

Thus real luxury tourism requires an extra layout of time, effort and dosh to ensure that you do not bring with you half the population of Dulwich. For stalwarts willing to hop three different planes, slump through two charmless layovers in grotty African airports with no AC, board a minivan and then catch a speedboat, paradise is still on offer.

A stomach-churning half-hour plane ride in a 20-seater from Stone Town’s airport, Pemba lies 50 miles northeast of Zanzibar. About half a million, mostly Muslim, Tanzanians inhabit this leafy, lumpy island, which is bursting with gargantuan papaya, jackfruit and mango trees, like the set of Jurassic Park. Locals survive by subsistence farming of cassava and plantains, as well as from harvesting Pemba’s one famous cash crop: cloves.

It was the clove connection that first attracted me. Maybe I betray my weakness for pumpkin pie, but when my companion on this trip first told me about an island permeated by the aroma of cloves, I had to go. Thus when a minivan picked us up at Pemba’s airport in Chake Chake, I strained out of the windows with petulant sniffs.

Yes, the tin-roofed houses of red clay and sticks were picturesque. Women in bright kangas and men on bicycles with baskets of fish were agreeable reminders that I had finally ventured further afield from my London flat than Borough High Street. But where was the perfume of cloves?

At last, as the van drew toward the southern port of Mkoani, mats spread with a spiky brown nubble lined every verge. In town, hilariously, swathes of cloves were spread to dry not only down the road’s meridian, but out on the tarmac, where cars and cycles crunched across the crop.

The van infused with the smell of hot whisky. Pay dirt. That jar of umber nails in my spice cabinet would never seem the same again. If nothing else, when I next mull wine I will wash them first.

The island has a few primitive hotels and diving hostels, but there’s really only one place to stay on Pemba.

Granted, it’s pricey. But even in its low-end hillside huts, £205pp per night includes meals and booze; for that price in New York City, you’d be lucky to get a single bed at the Y and a Nathan’s hot dog. Unless you’re clinging to youthful bohemian pretensions, which I long ago swapped for a hot shower and some assurance that nobody would steal my laptop, after all the bother getting there, you might as well spring for Fundu Lagoon

Fundu’s speedboat dropped us on the jetty. Thatched in coconut palm, tasteful tented accommodations lined a beach of the kind of fine, white sand used in hotel ashtrays, before a sea of such a surreal aqua that it looked Photoshopped.

At first glance, the vista resembled those mendacious panoramas in travel brochures that, in reality, prove upholstered in edge-to-edge beach towels, where vendors hawk bad, melting ice cream, and droves of paunchy fellow nationals in loud swimsuits wish you weren’t here, either.

Yet this lagoon’s coastline is pristinely underpopulated. Even in the height of the summer wedding season, with a mere 18 units, Fundu can grow only so crowded. Sporting three bars, an entertainment room, three lounges, two restaurants and five different places to kick off your shoes in your own encampment, it is one of the last beach resorts on earth where you can get away from other people.

From the first day, I countered sunstroke with sidestroke at sunset and, aside from the odd local fisherman poling a hollowed-log canoe called a mtumbwi, I had, it seemed, the Indian Ocean to myself.

Fundu’s amiable management is well aware that paradise is intrinsically dull, and tries to keep the programme moving. Barbecues on the beach (with a whole red snapper the size of a small whale) and Swahili dinners on the jetty (chopped cassava leaves, seafood in coconut milk) help to keep the tedium of overeating haute cuisine to a minimum.

Numerous diversions undercut the insidious enervation of hedonism. Though Fundu offers diving, including for beginners, the snorkelling on the coral reef off Misali island is sufficiently top-notch to skip the cumbersome gear. A morning’s speedboat plough through pods of spinner dolphins was well spent; these beguilingly undersized dolphins throw themselves into the air and twirl: maritime break dancing. Yet, in truth, the best entertainment at Fundu is a good book.

Two resident Balinese pros provide massages, but be prepared to strip down to ballooning disposable plastic nappies, the most humiliating garment I’ve worn in my life. Facials and body scrubs employ the better part of the pantry — turmeric and yogurt, mango and brown sugar, coffee and Dead Sea salt — all a bridge too far for me, having got over the urge to smear dinner all over my face by the age of three.

Fundu keeps a full-time local staff of 140, giving the resort a much higher than usual help-to-guest ratio: when a step splintered on the pathway, management didn’t leave a sign, but an entire employee. Unless they’re lucky enough to work for the resort, most Wapemba earn about £1.50 a day.

Yet if Fundu’s staff feel justly contemptuous of westerners who lavish £60 on a “banana-leaf body cocoon”, they keep the disdain under wraps. Supporting a school for villagers and planning to build a clinic as well, Fundu gives a huge boost to the island’s economy, and its employees seem to take pride in an operation more than one proclaimed “the best hotel in Africa”.

Far more stimulating than Fundu’s near-desperate provision of amusement is a dander through the mainland. A “spice tour” amounts to little more than a shuffle around an enterprising local’s back garden, but especially for cooks it’s interesting to see vanilla pods dangling on the branch, or cinnamon bark still on the tree.

Likewise, at the market in Chake Chake, the culinarily inclined should be sure to stock up on cardamom, cloves and black peppercorns for back home, all with five times the potency of their desiccated counterparts at your local supermarket.

When I first visited rural Africa in 1972, white people were a novelty. Villagers in the remote Kenyan highlands would reach out to touch my ash-blonde hair with amazement. Yet by the time I lived in Kenya, 20 years later, palefaces were just walking dollar signs, and every stroll collected 25 urchins with their hands out and a dozen hawkers foisting ungainly carved-elephant key chains.

Pemba is different. Folks actually say hello to be friendly, and not because they want your watch. On our stroll through Mkoani, the only local who half-heartedly tried to sell us anything was a vendor with fresh fish. Two white women on their own would have suffered more sexual harassment in Brighton. Wapemba have seen tourists before, but we still elicit bemused curiosity. While most interaction comprised a simple “Jambo! Habari?”, a few locals know enough English to converse.

One jovial gentleman informed us that Wapemba don’t, themselves, use cloves in cooking. The buds are medicinal, regarded as an aphrodisiac — or, as he put it with a wink, “good for home affairs”. But get to Pemba quick, because if the small children screaming down at us from one hillside are any guide (in unison, “GIVE US YOUR MO-O-NEY!”), the upcoming generation will be on the hustle.

Since my friend and I are incurably heterosexual, our last night’s romantic dinner for two on our private beach was sadly wasted: an enormous seafood grill, cosily lit with glowing paraffin lanterns. Within minutes those lanterns had drawn a billow of micro-midges — less like insects than bad weather.

We tried to be appreciative while flapping napkins over the lobster and prising crawling protein from our eyes. Alas, once the lanterns were out, the animate dust storm headed to our tent, readily penetrating the beds’ mosquito net-ting. While a shot of Raid felled the creatures, their raining dead bodies crumbled across the sheets all night.

But that was all right. We were in Africa, and great white hunters still have to bag trophies of some sort.

reproduced from the Sunday Times 4 January 2009

Safari in the Selous

2009-01-18T16:12:00.001Z

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.

Seeing the Serengeti on foot

2008-10-19T16:38:00.004Z

I first meet Richard Knocker on a grass airstrip in Ndutu in Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain where my twin prop has to circle low to clear out the giraffes before landing. He has the reputation of being among the best guides on the continent, which is the reason why I’m here. In an era in which the expert is everything – the yoga guru, the cult ski teacher, the personal travel concierge – I am intrigued that the guide may be becoming more important than the lodging, which has mostly dominated the high-end safari scene.

So here I am, on a six-day walking safari with Knocker in and around Loliondo, a 1,500-sq-mile block of wilderness east of Serengeti National Park in a remote pocket of northern Tanzania. Specifically, we spend most of our time in Piyaya, Masai ancestral lands visited by few outsiders and where there are no permanent commercial lodges. We move our camp twice, our light canvas tents and supplies transported separately by jeep. We wander into the landscape with just a guide, scout, and rifle. There’s also no curfew, meaning we can explore by 4x4 at night.

Knocker, I hope, is the man for the job. As soon as I meet him, it’s clear he’s got charisma. Tall and sun-battered, the 45-year-old Knocker reminds me of a better-looking John Cleese. Sometimes shy, he turns out to be witty and well read in politics, fiction, and popular science. Born in Kenya to English parents, he was educated in Britain. He has been guiding for almost 20 years.

Setting out into the bush, Knocker tells me about the gait of the giraffe. Unlike a horse, he explains, it moves its left legs together, then its right, in an almost comical two-step. I’m only half listening, staring at a hyena skulking through the undergrowth. Knocker is smiling. He’s perfectly at ease, bounding here and there as vultures, secretary birds, and Caspian plovers variously swoop in, all of which he points out with an irresistible enthusiasm.

As we walk out on to the plain, I am overwhelmed. At a guess we see more than 100,000 wildebeest in the first 45 minutes. This is the middle of the migration, when the Serengeti’s wildebeest population is passing through. We see lions satiated beside a kill. Hyenas are lazing close by, their heads dripping blood. Yet it’s not the animals that have gripped me, not at first, but the clouds skimming over the plain, their shadows creating a dramatic, menacing sense of pace, belittling everything beneath them. I have never felt more irrelevant.

That first night, we turn in early, tired from the long journey, under a carpet of bright stars. Yet I am unable to sleep. The ground rumbles with hoofed thunder as herds move around us. I hear cats, the screams of prey, and lost calves calling for their mothers. I am exposed. This is raw, immersive stuff and lying in my tent, I discover my torch is dead. It’s still pointing toward the hole where the zippers don’t quite meet. I take a sleeping pill. I’m in the wilderness with a man I just met who tells me that tomorrow we will go on a Moses walk. “You know, like the parting of the seas,” Knocker had said before we went to bed.

I’ve thought about that all night. I still have no idea what he means.

Trust is a fragile relationship. You can see it in the behaviour of the animals. When you approach in a vehicle, they generally don’t run; they haven’t developed fear of a steel cocoon. But approach on foot and even the biggest cats usually flee. Africa’s wildlife has lived alongside herders for thousands of years. The Masai spear lions as proof of valour. Wander onto a plain packed with grazing wildebeests and the animals gently shift to your left and right. It’s what Knocker meant when he referred to the Moses walk, the act of quietly moving through thousands of wildebeests and gazelles. There’s poetry to it — the stares of the heavy-headed wildebeests, the swirls of birds like tumbling schools of fish. It is intense, confounding, and good to do on the first day. It teaches you who you can trust and who trusts you.

That same morning Knocker takes me to the site of a kill near our camp.

It’s still early, before the day’s thermals have carried the vultures high into the sky. There is blood on the acacia where a lion has pulled a wildebeest into the shade, the red mixed with mud from the recent rains. Hyenas, the can-openers whose work is required before lesser predators are able to get their fill, have cracked the bones into splinters. Now a score of vultures is picking over the remains; they eat more meat in this ecosystem than land-based predators, devouring a quarter of their own body weight in minutes. There are vultures with their Elizabethan ruffs and plumped-up feathered thighs and marabou storks, which look like undertakers. Only the brain remains among the bones.

It doesn’t take long to see what Knocker is up to. He is showing me the pecking order in Africa. He is also encouraging me to understand the difference between being vulnerable, which is respectful of the wildlife, and being scared. It is why when we come up close beside an elephant three days in, Knocker stands beside me, speaking quietly, taking care to explain how the animal behaves. I’m grateful he still remembers how it feels to confront fear.

Johnny Lulu, our local scout, is carrying a .458 Winchester Magnum. He stands between me and the animal – a five- or six-ton bull elephant that eats as much as 650lb a day. Lulu is cool, serene. But his grey-green eyes are watching.

Not so long ago, on safari in another part of Tanzania, Lulu came across an elephant that began following the group’s scent. “I had no other choice. When I turned around, it was coming straight for us,” he recounts. “I knew what was happening, my family has hunted elephant for a long time. Flapping ears and a trunk on the ground, that’s a mock charge. But if an elephant comes at you with its ears back and trunk completely rolled, then it means it. And they move fast. So I did what I had to do. It dropped. It was hard, but essential. The other elephants, 12 in all, surrounded it and didn’t move.”

They say elephants mourn. I can believe it. Standing that close to a bull, with its slow and measured blink, does something to your head. “Lions have their own myth,” whispers Knocker, “but elephants up close, it’s something spiritual.” I am beginning to understand better what this is all about: To do this kind of safari, you have to completely trust the expertise of those you’re with.

Total surrender, I suppose. Only then will you start to connect.

As I relax, I begin to understand Knocker’s instinctive empathy for wildlife and the way he gauges an animal’s state of mind as we approach. “We should be privileged observers,” he says. And not just because the animals can be dangerous. They’re letting us into their territory.

I feel this most acutely during the lion walk. We’re lying low on rocky outcrop, a kopje, the mounds of granite that litter the plain and are often topped by fig trees. Opposite, some 50 yards away, is a lioness and her cub. I can see the colour of her eyes and, through binoculars, the pink of the cub’s nose. When we move too suddenly, they begin to pace with suspicion.

Knocker asks us to retire. To disturb their equilibrium is not our right. “What is crucial, what is fundamental to our approach,” he explains, “is lightness in everything we do.”

We walk for hours, Knocker allowing me to experience the bush at close quarters in a way that is simply impossible by vehicle. I hear whistling thorn, so called because the trees sing when the wind blows through small holes in their bulbous growths. I learn about the southern ground hornbill, “a pickaxe with a brain,” says Knocker, which is one of the leopard tortoise’s predators. I handle obsidian, or volcanic glass, used as tools by early bushmen, and I pick up blister beetles with zany exteriors that resemble Ziggy Stardust suits.

From a blue flower I squeeze water that works as eyedrops, and I observe coupled dung beetles rolling tennis balls of muck that they bury and use to feed their young. We spend 20 minutes examining a single milkweed. Watching a monarch butterfly lay her egg, we find a caterpillar on the same plant. “A whole life cycle on a single bush,” Knocker remarks.

This is a man as enthralled by minutiae as he is by the rare sight of a zorilla, the African skunk. He spots one on a night drive. Meanwhile I’m staring at a moving row of eyes, thousands of red pupils reflecting the lights from our Jeep. It’s the wildebeest, moving past like traffic leaving Manhattan on a Friday night. I breathe it in. Remember this, I say to myself: it will be among the most magnificent moments of your life.

By Sophy Roberts - The FT - October 18 2008

Picasa photos

2008-08-28T17:26:00.002Z

New this month - our techies have been creating albums in Google Picasa for most of the Tanzania Lodges. Please see http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/tanzaniaodyssey.com

Wildebeest Migration

2008-08-20T18:24:00.002Z

The annual migration of herds in Northern Tanzania and Kenya is one of the world's most spectacular wildlife events. Often referred to as the ‘Greatest Show on Earth', The Great Migration is a movement of approximately 1.5 million wildebeest and zebra throughout the Serengeti and Masai Mara ecosystems.

Despite the wealth of maps and illustrations showing the path of the migrating herds, as with anything in Nature, the actual day to day pattern is unpredictable. At Tanzania Odyssey we have studied and planned itineraries to fit in with the moving herds for over ten years, but cannot hope to say exactly where they will be next year! If your wish is to safari at the heart of The Great Migration, it is advisable to book a mobile tented safari that will ascertain camping grounds close to departure date.

In order to help illustrate where the migration is likely to be in any month please click on the link for the Wildebeest Migration Map which was created by tagging a number of wildebeest in 2004

The world's 10 sexiest hotel rooms?

2008-08-20T11:13:00.004Z

reprinted from the Sunday Times - August 17, 2008

2 BANDA 5 Beho Beho, Tanzania

You can’t help feeling for the honeymooners who come to Beho Beho. How, in the rest of their married lives, will they ever equal the lubricious thrill of staying here? You’re in a grand banda, a huge thatched cottage with polished flagstone floors, exquisite antique furniture, an open-air stone shower and a vast, crisp-linened, muslin-draped bed.

Best of all, the front is completely open, giving an enormous view over a valley where giraffes, impalas, lions and leopards roam. It’s an irresistibly sexy cocktail of drama, luxury and an edge of danger - in theory, there’s nothing to stop those leopards dropping in for a midnight snack.

In practice, they stay well clear, though the elephants sometimes parade past on their way for a drink from the swimming pool. There are just eight bandas: go for number five for that out-in-the-wilds feel. A four-night break starts at £2,319pp, full-board, with flights; 020 7471 8780, www.tanzaniaodyssey.com

Tanzania: Tips for First-Timers

2008-07-31T08:39:00.001Z

Tanzania: Tips for First-Timers
June 24, 2008

Fodor's editor Alexis Kelly had always dreamed of going to Africa— so as the editor of the first edition of Fodor's The Complete African Safari Planner, taking a trip to Tanzania seemed like a no-brainer. Here she shares her experience of visiting Africa for the first time, as well as some of the tips she learned while traveling.

Why Tanzania?
I picked Tanzania because it has great game, great parks, luxury accommodations, and beautiful beach destinations. Until recently it was also cheaper and less visited than its neighbor to the north. Since the violence that occurred in December in Kenya, Tanzania may be more expensive than Kenya, but it's safe, beautiful, and open for business. It's also home to some of the most coveted tourist destinations in the world: Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Zanzibar, the Rift Valley, Lake Victoria, Tanganyika, and Mt. Kilimanjaro.

What game did you see?
Lions and elephants and hippos, oh my! We saw it all (except for rhinos and leopards) and wanted more. You really never tire of seeing the animals. On one drive, we came upon three lionesses just milling about, so we stopped and watched them as they rested and played without paying attention to us. At one point our truck was surrounded on three sides by the lions, but I think it was the shade, not us, that interested them. Another time we came upon the revolting yet extremely fascinating sight of a male lion right after had he killed a giraffe. I loved watching the giraffes drinking, the weaver birds flying in mass unison, and the hippos lounging in the water. I also became obsessed with seeing baobab trees and termite mounds; both are a sight to be seen.

Where did you stay?
I stayed at some amazing places. The first was at the Souk in the Slipway complex (www.slipway.net) in Dar es Salaam. It was a great place for an overnight before we left for our first camp. The rooms were basic and clean, perfect for jet lag recovery. The Slipway has four restaurants, a supermarket, and a great craft market—we did most of our shopping there, on the first night! It's self-contained so you don't have to worry about wandering around Dar in a sleep deprived state. The next day we flew to the Selous Game Reserve, where we stayed at the Selous Safari Camp (www.selous.com). Talk about a once in a lifetime experience. We were feet from the shores of the lake that the camp borders. Our tent was right out of my dreams—canvas and mesh walls surrounded the raised platform where we slept. We showered under the open sky, washed our hands in brass basins from India, and slept on exquisite linens. The camp isn't fenced in, so there were animals everywhere. It was amazing.

Next we flew to Ruaha National Park for a few nights at Jongomero Camp, which is situated on the banks of the Jongomero Sand River. Also owned by the Selous Safari Camp, Jongomero has a sleepy feeling that immediately lulls you into a comfortable, relaxed state. The tents line the banks of the river. Though the river was dry while I was there, the riverbed is a busy thoroughfare for animals; hippos and elephants were always walking by the tent during the night to feed and cross the riverbed. The furniture is repurposed from the wood of old dhows (traditional fishing vessels) found in Dar es Salaam.

After Jongomero, we flew to Zanzibar for a little R&R. We stayed at Rus Nungwi (www.rasnungwi.com), a beach resort on the northern tip of Zanzibar. Ras Nungwi is a favorite among more active travelers, who might enjoy the diving, snorkeling, fishing, and kayaking on offer. The thatched cottages are cool and inviting, while the mosquito netting gives off a breezy casual feeling that pervades the gardens, lounge areas, and dhow tours.

The last stop was Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Zanzibar's main hub. We stayed at Beyt al Chai (www.stonetowninn.com), in Kelele Square across from the Zanzibar Serena Inn, around the corner from the dining and shopping near Forodhani Gardens and the Old Fort. The hotel, an old tea house, has thick walls and small shuttered windows, typical of the local architecture, to keep the rooms cool. Four-posted canopy beds draped in mosquito netting complete the cool atmosphere. A masai guide guards the door and escorts you where you'd like to go, though it felt fairly safe to walk to the gardens.

What would you do differently if you could take the trip again?
I would stay longer. Nine days is not long enough to feel settled or really get the feel of a place. I could have spent a whole week going out on game drives, boat safaris, or guided walks. The ideal trip length is really 2-3 weeks and you should plan three nights at each camp, if possible. You should also try to stay in different types of camps and terrain so you get the feel of different parts of the country. Where Selous Safari camp was lush and flat, Jongomero was dry and hilly.

I'd also bring more money to shop. I know that seems trivial, but I have kicked myself more than once for not buying that Tinga Tinga painting and beaded basket. The fact is that you might not get back to Africa again, so if you think you might want to purchase something—just do it. You might find something similar online, but never at the unbelievable prices that you'll find. Plus, the local people depend heavily on tourist dollars.

When is the best time to go to?
There are two rainy seasons: the short rains (mvuli) October through December; and the long rains (masika) from late February to early May. Given the influence of global warming, these rains are not as regular or intense as they once were. It's best to avoid the two rainy seasons because many roads become impassable. High season is January to the end of September, but prices are much higher during this time. Make sure you find out in advance when the lodge or destination of your choice is closed as many are open only during the dry season. The coast is always pretty hot and humid, particularly during the rains, but is much cooler and more pleasant the rest of the year. The hottest time is December just before the long rains. In high-altitude areas, such as Ngorongoro highlands and Mt. Kilimanjaro, temperatures can fall below freezing.

What was essential during your trip?
Malaria is the biggest health threat in Tanzania, so travelers need to be vigilant about taking anti-malarials and applying the bug spray. You also need to drink a lot of water, but be wary of where it comes from; try to always drink bottled water and ensure that the bottle seal is unbroken. It's also imperative to use strong sunscreen: remember you are just below the Equator where the sun is at its hottest. And wear a brimmed hat to shade your face and neck from the sun. Also bring along a small notebook so that you can jot down all the names you hear and questions you might have that you can ask back at camp. And don't forget comfortable walking shoes.

Any advice for people going on their first safari?
I'd advise people to organize their trip through an operator so that things like airport pickups, transfers between lodges, etc are all taken care of... leaving more time for you to relax and enjoy. I've worked with Tanzania Odyssey www.tanzaniaodyssey.com) and Micato (www.micato.com) and both are extremely professional and helpful.

Also make sure you ask about any extras charges so that you're not surprised with extra fees. For example, most game drives are included in the per person, per night rate, but not always. National parks charge a daily rate, so make sure to check to see if the park fees are included. If you'll be staying at different camps, ask if your transfers between camps are included. If you like to have a cocktail or two, ask what alcohol is included in your rate. These could all be extra charges you were not expecting.

Tanzania Safari: the park that time forgot

2008-03-22T12:17:00.006Z

Ruaha National Park in Tanzania is Africa the way it once was. Brian Jackman wonders why he took so long to discover it.

The shadow of our 12-seater bush plane flits over the hot dry heart of Tanzania as we bounce through the midday thermals. But the landscape changes as we draw closer to Msembe airstrip. On its final approach the plane banks sharply, revealing a range of broken hills.

Poachers wreaked havoc on Ruaha elephants during the 1980s - but now the park has the largest elephant population in East Africa
Below the wingtips zebras stampede across a yellow plain. Farther off I can see a mighty sand river bordered by flat-topped acacias, and solemn giraffes standing like markers measuring the yawning distance.

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This is my first sight of Ruaha, and already one question is running through my head. Why did I wait so long? There is a rawness here I have never seen before. It's the real thing, the unexpurgated Africa of long ago, and I can't wait to explore it.

Waiting to greet me is Chris Fox, a barefoot figure in faded khaki shirt and shorts. Chris is the owner of Mwagusi, the best lodge in the park. "Straight to camp or the scenic route?" he asks. I choose the second option and head for Kimilamatonge Hill, a landmark I will get to know well in the days to come.

It is late September, deep in the dry season. The blue skies are hazy with the smoke of bush fires. The combretum thickets are in flower, and kudu - the males with handsome corkscrew horns - are nibbling at the flame-red blossoms.

Eventually we reach camp: eight spacious bandas on the banks of the bone-dry Mwagusi River. Each one has a high-peaked roof of makuti thatch, giving them the air of Noah's arks left stranded among the rocks, although Noah never lived in such comfort. There are hot showers, a same-day laundry service and a hammock on the veranda where I can chill with a glass of mango juice and watch elephants digging for water in the riverbed.

At lunch I meet a fellow guest, an American called Ed who says he's been all over Africa but doesn't bother to go anywhere else now because nowhere is better than Ruaha. "I've been here only two days and already I have seen three cheetahs, two leopards and God knows how many lions," he says.

Over much of Africa lions are declining, but not in Ruaha. Chris Fox knows of 185 within 20 miles of the camp, and he's not spinning a yarn. I know this because one night five nomadic males pay us a visit. For the next two hours they roar and roar.

They are hell-bent on a pride take-over and their message to the resident males is clear: bring it on. Next morning I find their tracks outside my door - each paw print as big as my outstretched hand.

Ed is right. There is nowhere better, and with each passing day, following its red ochre game trails among the smouldering purple hills, I can feel the Ruaha getting under my skin. Unlike the Serengeti plains, there is nothing gentle about it.

Its beauty is of an altogether harsher kind. The parched plains are littered with granite boulders, and wherever you look grotesque baobabs as old as London stretch their bare branches against the sky as if begging for rain.

By chance my visit has coincided with the arrival of John "Steve" Stephenson, the Ruaha's first game warden. Now in his 80s and living in Dorset, he has come back to see how the park has fared since he helped to establish it in 1962.

Together with Chris we visit the palm grove beside the Mwagusi where he arrived in his beaten-up old Land Rover to set up the park's first HQ. We poke around in the grass, but apart from an overgrown slab of concrete no trace of the original buildings remains. "It's as if those days had never been," he says. But he is overjoyed when we find a lioness suckling two cubs where he used to stroll.

I asked Steve if the park had changed. "There was lots more water in the Ruaha river," he said. "But once you get into the bush it's as wild as ever." Back at camp a bush dinner has been prepared with tables set out in the sandy riverbed.

As we eat under the stars our meal is interrupted by a line of chanting figures coming out of the darkness, each one carrying a lantern that swings in time to the rhythm of their song. Without any prompting, the camp staff are putting on a show to welcome Steve back to the park he put on the map half a century ago.

Next morning we set off on a game drive before the dawn. Elephants cross the road in front of us, led by a matriarch with ragged ears, and as we pass through a grove of baobabs Chris points out a tree with pegs hammered into its bloated trunk by generations of honey-hunters.

On we go, looking for lions along the sand rivers, and with every mile I find myself slipping deeper under Ruaha's spell. In September the landscape is everywhere painted in the muted colours of the dry season, but at this hour everything glows like amber. It's the same in the evening, in the golden hour before sundown when we spot three cats in the grass: a mother cheetah and her two cubs.

Over so much of Africa our covenant with the wild has been broken beyond repair. But not here. Not yet. These Ruaha cheetahs no longer run at the sight of a vehicle. The youngsters are almost full-grown and lie apart from their mother, calling to her with un-cat-like chirrups. When at last she rejoins them they rub against each other in an orgy of affection, then jump down into the riverbed and pose for our cameras on a fallen tree trunk.

By now I have realised how lucky I am to have Chris Fox as my guide. Like so many men who grow up in the wild, he oozes charisma. Over a bush breakfast on the banks of the Mwagusi he tells me about the female leopard that sometimes sleeps on his bedroom floor, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Apart from schooldays spent in Devon, he has known the Ruaha all his life and his passion for it shines through in everything he says.

When he was a boy he and his family were often the only visitors. He remembers how, as an eight-year-old, he would go hunting on foot with his father in this secret, unheard-of paradise.

"Those were the days when a character known as Old Man Scotty used to hunt crocodiles in the Great Ruaha River," he recalls. "Scotty used an aluminium boat he'd converted from the fuselage of a crashed light aircraft and hunted at night by torchlight, shooting the crocs between the eyes with the same.22 he turned on himself when hunting was banned."

Even after Ruaha was given national park status in 1964 it continued to be overlooked, and in the mid-1970s its very survival was put at risk by a rice-growing scheme on the Usangu plains - the main catchment area for the Great Ruaha River.

Today the river is so starved of water that it ceases to flow for four months of the year, with disastrous effects for the vast buffalo herds that were the main prey for Ruaha's lions. "What a sight it was," says Chris, "to see 1,000 buffaloes, a wall of horns confronting a determined pride.

Often they would bring down five in a single raid. Then the river dried up. The buffs crashed, from 32,000 to 2,000, and those ancient confrontations are history." Then came the 1980s, the dark decade when the ivory poachers moved in and the elephant population fell from 40,000 to just 9,000.

Every dry season the park went up in smoke as the poachers set their bush fires, and on moonlit nights the woodlands echoed to the sound of gunfire and the whooping of hyenas drawn to the carcasses. At its peak, ivory poaching accounted for 1,500 elephants every year, and rumour has it that the railway built by the Chinese was paid for with the blood of Ruaha's elephants.

"I thought I would never see an end to the killing," Fox confesses. But he did. In 1987 a new warden arrived, vowing he would stop the poaching.

"I listened politely but didn't believe him," says Fox. "After all, Ruaha was the punishment posting, Tanzania's most neglected park. But he was true to his word. As the year progressed he drove out the poachers and in 1988 the ivory trade ban ended the killing."

Now, two decades on, things are looking up. Ruaha's elephant population has risen to 30,000 - the largest in East Africa - and when the adjoining Usangu game reserve is added, Ruaha will become second only to Kafue in Zambia as the biggest national park in the whole continent.

Visitors, too, are increasing. Twenty years ago Ruaha attracted little more than 350 tourists a year. Today that number has risen to 6,000 - but not enough to satisfy the Tanzanians.

A new national tourism policy drafted last year contains radical proposals that could change the face of Ruaha forever. These plans would double the size of the park's four existing camps and encourage new ones, bringing mass tourism to what has hitherto been a pristine wilderness.

You might wonder how such an increase could possibly spoil a park twice the size of Belgium. But while the Ruaha looks big on a map, its prime game-viewing circuits are confined to little more than 60 miles of tracks beside the Mwagusi and Ruaha Rivers.

Beyond this stunningly beautiful core area, much of the park consists of monotonous miombo - the crackling-dry woodland of southern Tanzania - where game is sparse and tsetse flies can make life a misery. Far better, urge conservationists, to establish new low-volume, high-yield camps in the Usangu wetlands for the lucrative top-end tourist market.

If ever a park depended upon responsible tourism it is Ruaha. Until now, remoteness has proved its salvation. To fly there from Dar es Salaam still takes the best part of three hours, so it can never hope to compete with easy-to-reach destinations such as the Serengeti or Masai Mara.

These thoughts cast a shadow across my stay, but are set aside next morning when we go out early to look for leopards.

When you have been away from Africa for a long time the eye hungers for the sight of a leopard. Why this should be so is hard to describe, but big cat junkies will know the feeling. It is not just that exquisitely dappled coat, or the leopard's secretive lifestyle. There is something else. Even the unseen presence of this elegant carnivore injects every game drive with an extra frisson of excitement.

So picture the scene at dawn: the baobabs casting long shadows across the road and a big male leopard stalking guinea fowl in the backlit grass. Chris recognises him at once. "His mother is the one that visits my bedroom," he whispers.

As we appear the hunt is aborted. Exit guinea fowl in a clatter of wings; tail held in a graceful curve, the leopard strolls nonchalantly towards us. As he walks past our vehicle I can barely resist this insane desire to reach out and stroke him. Then, with not so much as a backward glance, he is gone, melting into the boundless thickets of the park that time forgot.

Essentials
Brian Jackman travelled with Audley Travel, other safari specialists that feature Ruaha include Tanzania Odyssey (020 7471 8780, tanzania odyssey) .
A four-night stay at Mwagusi in Ruaha, combined with three nights at Beho Beho in the Selous Game Reserve and three nights beside the Indian Ocean at Ras Kutani Beach Lodge, costs from £4,525 per person on a full-board basis, including economy-class flights with BA and all internal flights and transfers.

reprinted from the Telegraph 8 Feb 2008

For more information about the Tanzania please see our main site Tanzania Odyssey. For more information about Zanzibar click here, or for more information about Tanzania Safaris follow this link

Grumeti Reserves - Sasakwa Lodge

2007-11-03T13:14:00.000Z

Grumeti Reserves - Sasakwa Lodge

Lodges have come a long way since the early days of safaris, says Lisa Grainger as she selects the best high life amid the wildlife.

Looking through the grainy snaps of my grandparents on safari always makes me smile - and not just because of my grandmother's leopard-print culottes and ostrich-skin handbag. It's the absence of comfort: the luggage roped to Land Rovers, the fold-up stools by a fire, the tin mugs, the warm beer, the sausages on sticks.

But then, safari camps in the 1950s were nothing like the African super-camps that have opened in the past year. For a start, they're not really camps. They're boutique hotels in the bush, often featuring spas, interior-designed suites, Michelin-star chefs to cook fresh ingredients flown in by private jet, and butlers to deliver it.

It's not just in South Africa (progenitor of bush glamour) that this sort of safari has evolved. Three months ago in Zambia, two bush houses were opened to accommodate travellers who demand total privacy. In Tanzania, helicopter pads have been built alongside airstrips. In Namibia last year, top American astronomers were flown in to present after-dinner star-talks in the desert. Here are a few of the newest, most exclusive camps on the continent. Prices quoted are per person, per night, on a fully inclusive basis, excluding flights.

Grumeti Reserves, Tanzania

Luxury taken to the utmost. There are just three camps, sleeping a maximum of 56 guests, on this new game reserve and only these visitors have access to the 350,000 acres of grassy plains bordering the Serengeti, the helipad, the 16 polo and thoroughbred horses, the spa, tennis courts, crocquet lawn and the libraries.

Sasakwa Lodge, on the edge of an escarpment, was built in the style of a colonial home - think glossy wooden parquet floors, antiques, grand art, Persian silk carpets and silver, and a private infinity pool with every room. Sabora camp, on the plains, is glam camping taken to extremes. Tents are lined with raw silk, scattered with Persian rugs, and decorated with essentials like wind-up gramophones and silver handmirrors. Beds and baths are adorned with rose petals flown in daily with the seafood.

Reserves of luxury - reproduced from the Telegraph - 21/06/2006 by Lisa Grainger