Blogs from Selous Game Reserve, Centre, Tanzania, Africa

We flew to Selous Game Reserve on Monday morning (2012-01-16), on another Caravan 208B 12 seater. Only one pilot, this time, who was somewhat concerned about weather reports about a rain storm heading for Selous from the Indian Ocean. Rain in Tanzania in January is almost unheard of, but since the "dry season" was supposed to have begun in mid-December, parts of Tanzania have had more rain than the whole of the last "big rains" season. That is probably because last March to May East Africa was still in a severe drought. Thankfully that seems to be ending, even for hardest hit Somalia. Unfortunately a big storm in Dar es Salaam in late December caused flooding that killed 14 people in the poorer neighbourhoods we visited (see the "coffee" blog entry). Luckily no rain came during ... read more

Day 7 - As Anton has just said to me the only word to describe Sand Rivers is WOW!!!! The place is absolutely stunning, with views over the river and amazing suite bedrooms, Sand Rivers quickly became our favourite place in Africa. We were met by our guide Emanuel after a quick final drive from Lake Manze with Adam and Daniel. We had been due to meet under a HUGE baobab tree but when we arrived a pride of lions had taken residence there - Manze really was the lion place for us. Emanuel was great - incredibly experienced and full of information so our 2 hour drive to Sand Rivers was great. The landscape around the area was very different to Manze; much rockier and lots more trees - leopard country if ever I saw ... read more

Day 3 - We flew from Ras Kutani back to the local departures lounge at Dar (the funniest airport lounge in the world!) and then after about half an hour waiting we flew in a slightly bigger plane this time - about 12 seats - into the Selous Game Reserve to start the safari element of our trip. When we landed we were met by our guide Adam and driver Daniel who were both really lovely. They asked if we wanted to go back to camp straight away or do a game drive which of course we opted to do (that's the Phillips safari conditioning in us!!). It was lovely seeing the area, it is so different to the Kruger where we have safaried so far, much less commercial and it's a real treat for us ... read more

With the usual 24-hour entry rule we planned for a game drive in the early morning and a second one in the late afternoon. With the camp only 10min from the gate, we didn’t have far to go to get started. But our joyful mood was dented, when we bumped into Katie and Kenny, who were scanning the forest with other people for dead animals - it turned out the monkeys we saw the previous evening weren’t drunk, they had been poisoned! We offered to help them search, but Katie assured us, they had enough people, so we were not needed. With the huge size of Selous in mind and a friend from work telling me of people getting lost, we hired a guide to come in the car with us. After endless paperwork and formularities ... read more

I have just (2 weeks ago) returned from my first real vacation in Africa, and what a great vacation it was. While the school-sponsored safari and trips around Dar were nice, nothing really compares to getting out and exploring a country for yourself. The set-up... most of my friends here were scattering around on various trips, either to the States for weddings, Zambia for elementary education conferences, or Zanzibar to learn how to SCUBA. As none of these applied to me, I floundered around a bit not really wanting my first Africa vacation to be solo, until kindly my friend Emma agreed to forgo a jaunt to Bangkok and take a random trip. We rented a car and drove, first south to Kilwa and then up to Selous, and back. Now, on my first inspection of ... read more

I have been to some of the great wild life areas of Africa like the Kruger National Park, the Okavango delta and many others. I had even visited the Serengeti plains, the Ngorongoro crater and Lake Manyara but I had never before been to Selous. Selous is a massive park, bigger even than Kruger and 2 years older. It is pronounced ‘se loos’ and was named after an English soldier, Frederick Courtney Selous, who was shot in the park during a skirmish with German soldiers in World War One. Just like many of my destinations of the past few months, I arrived in Selous quite by accident. I was speaking, on Skype, to my mother about my plans for the next few weeks. It turned out she would be in Tanzania (working for the breweries here) ... read more