tanzania: the crater to mahale’s chimpanzees

That depends on the month, and the camp is built to follow them.

It comes down and goes up again three times a year:

• A southern site near Ndutu from about 10 December to the end of March for the calving
• A western site through the middle of the year
• The northern Serengeti from about 10 July to 20 November

So the camp is placed where the herds usually are, which is the whole point of a mobile camp rather than a fixed lodge. What nobody can fix is the animals, whose movement follows the rain and varies from year to year.

The northern months place the camp near the Mara River, and crossings are likeliest from late July into October, but one is a wait of hours or days and never a certainty.

You go down early.

The camp sits on the north-western rim, and the Seneto road drops you onto the floor ahead of most of the traffic. The descent gate shuts at four in the afternoon and the gates themselves at six, so the day is built around an early start and a picnic below.

The floor gathers lion, spotted hyena, elephant, buffalo, zebra and wildebeest into a small area, which is exactly why it draws crowds, and it is crowded all year rather than only in high season.

Black rhino live down there and are easily seen, though usually as a distant shape across the grass rather than one close up. Counts of them vary widely, from twenty-six in one count to fifty-five in another. Binoculars matter more than a long lens.

By shared charter, on a Monday or a Thursday. Those are the only two days the western service runs.

It flies from Arusha and the Serengeti to Mahale in about four hours, calling at Katavi on the way, so the Serengeti nights are built to finish on one of them.

No road reaches that shore at all, so the last hour and a half is by boat from the airstrip, running down the lake to the beach in front of camp. Everything before that is driven, up through the conservation area to the crater rim and on to wherever the mobile camp is standing that month.

The charter allows about 15 kilograms each, soft bags only and hand luggage counted in, so anything bulky waits for you in Arusha.

Different in almost every way.

There is no vehicle in it: you walk from camp into rainforest that climbs straight up off the beach, and the animals are found by trackers reading signs rather than by driving to a sighting.

Once the group is found the park authority's rules take over. Its viewing regulations:

• Hold the party to six people and one guide
• Keep you ten metres off
• Cap the visit at an hour
• Require the mask your guide hands out once you are inside fifty metres

Tracking also stops three hours from the first sighting, even if that hour has not been used up.

One trek goes out each full day, and four nights here give you more than one attempt, which counts, because the walk might be under an hour or most of a morning depending on where the group slept.

Two wardrobes, and they barely overlap.

The rim camp gives five to twenty-three degrees from July to September, with mist most mornings and the temperature dropping away sharply after sunset, so a fleece, a windproof shell, gloves and a hat all earn their place. The cottages have indoor heating for a reason.

Mahale runs nineteen to twenty-seven degrees over the same months and is humid with it, so light long sleeves, quick-drying trousers, shoes with grip for wet forest trails and something to swim in.

Add neutral colours for the game drives and binoculars for the crater floor. The real constraint is the western charter, about 15 kilograms a person in soft bags, so pack for that and leave the rest in Arusha.

July to October, without much argument.

Every stop on this route carries our top rating in those months, the herds are usually in the northern Serengeti then, the crater is clear, and the chimpanzees sit lowest on the Mahale slopes, with August and September the best of it. That is also when the twice-weekly western flights fill up, so we book them early.

February is the other case worth hearing: the calving is on the short-grass plains near Ndutu, where the mobile camp stands from December to the end of March, and we rate the crater as highly in February as in the dry months. The trade is Mahale, wetter underfoot with the chimpanzees higher up.

March, April and May do not work here, since the lake camp shuts from mid March.