tanzania: katavi’s plains and mahale’s chimps

Comfortably, if you want the park rather than a highlight reel.

Katavi is large and thinly camped, so ground takes time: full-day drives with a picnic reach the far floodplains, and morning and afternoon drives work the Chada plain closer to camp.

The camp also runs guided walks, night drives and bush meals, and a night at its fly camp, three simple tents for up to six adults, can be added if it is booked ahead. Six tents in camp keeps the numbers low whatever the day holds.

What the extra night really buys is repetition: the same hippo pools and buffalo herds on different days and in different light, which is how you start to see behaviour rather than a list of animals.

It is a forest hike, not a drive with a short walk at the end.

The trek starts from camp on foot, with no vehicle in it anywhere: trackers go out early and the guides follow their signs uphill through humid rainforest until the group is found.

Expect anything from under an hour to four, occasionally more, on steep, root-crossed and often slippery ground, and the climbing is the hard part rather than the distance. You want to be comfortable walking uphill for a few hours in heat and humidity, which is not the same as being sporting.

One trek goes out each full day, in the morning. Grippy shoes, long sleeves and a small pack are the useful kit, and the guide hands out a mask before you get close.

They belong to the water.

The kayaks are glass-bottomed, so a paddle along the shore doubles as a look down at the fish, and the lake is home to the most varied array of cichlids in the world.

Snorkelling goes straight off the beach in warm, clear water. Swimming is usually done from a boat out in the deeper water, away from the crocodiles and hippos that keep to the shallows.

Beyond that there is:

• Catch-and-release fishing
• A sunset dhow
• Forest walks near camp for red colobus and other primates
• A visit to Katumbi village

Wifi reaches the rooms, though the bandwidth is thin, and mobile signal does not reach the place at all, which most people count as a gain.

Twelve is the floor, and it is not ours to bend.

Both camps take children from twelve, and the park authority bars anyone under twelve from visiting the chimpanzees at all, on the grounds that younger visitors are more likely to pass on an infection.

The camp at Mahale has no family rooms, though three of its eight bandas carry a mezzanine with an extra bed, and the camp in Katavi holds twelve adults across six tents. The first night near Arusha suits any age.

For a family with younger children we would say so plainly and propose a different shape of trip, rather than send you this far west and leave someone at camp on the one morning that matters.

August and September sit at the centre of it.

Both are months we rate highest for Katavi and for Mahale, and they are when the Katuma is at its lowest and the chimpanzees are usually furthest down the slopes, which makes for the shortest walks of the year.

July and October are the same window at its edges, October running hotter in Katavi than most people expect.

June is strong in Katavi and only fair at Mahale, where the forest is still wet from the long rains.

Both camps shut between mid March and the end of May, so the trip simply does not run then.

December is the one worth asking about: the Katavi camp closes again in mid November and reopens in mid December, and the light after the short rains is very good.

Everything west of Arusha flies, and only twice a week.

The shared charter leaves on Mondays and Thursdays for Katavi and on to Mahale, and it comes back on the same two days, which is exactly why the trip runs four nights and then three: Thursday to Monday is four, Monday to Thursday is three, and the timetable allows nothing in between.

Arusha to Katavi takes three to five hours depending on the calls it makes, then thirty to forty-five minutes by game drive from Ikuu airstrip. The Mahale leg lands at the park airstrip and finishes with a ninety-minute dhow along the shore, since no road reaches the camp.

Soft bags only, about 15 kilograms a person including hand luggage.