Nyerere

You are in a boat and nobody is talking. A pod of forty hippos slides past. A crocodile leaves a sandbank without a ripple. A fish eagle drops from a dead tree, hits the water, and rises with a bream in its talons. It all happens within metres of you, at eye level. The Rufiji moves wide and dark between borassus palms, and in the afternoon heat the elephants come down to drink.

Nyerere, formerly the Selous Game Reserve, is the largest protected area in Africa. At 50,000 square kilometres it is bigger than Switzerland. The photographic zone in the north, reached by a handful of camps, gets fewer than 1,500 visitors a year. The Maasai Mara in Kenya gets over 100,000. In practice that means a great deal of space and very few engines.

Because Nyerere is a game reserve and not a national park, the rules are looser. We can walk. We can drive off-road to follow a calling predator. We can take a boat. At night we can fly-camp on a remote sandbar, in light mosquito-net tents, cooking over coals and falling asleep to the sound of the Rufiji moving past.

At a Glance

Nyerere