NATURAL HARMONY
Alex Preston sees his safari dreams come true in Tanzania, on a family trip to spot lions and leopards, hyenas and hippos far away from the tourist trail
Alex Preston enjoys the perfect safari in Tanzania: spectacular wildlife, enthralled children and not another tour group in sight
Africa always existed to me as a sunlit elsewhere, a counterpoint to the sometimes desolate existence of my childhood in a fading English seaside town. My father had spent his twenties and thirties in Africa, just as the continent was throwing off the shackles of colonialism, and the pleasures he enjoyed were still those of the colonist: the grass tennis courts of the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi; the woodpanelled bar at Wilson Airport; the grand houses and liveried staff of the estateowning English upperclasses.
I travelled to Kenya as a teenager and remember the power of discovering the place for myself. I’d always been mad about animals and birds, and during three weeks of roaming about, binocularmarks circling my eyes, I felt lost in a kind of happy dreamworld. We slept in tents and shacks, or under the stars; I was charged by a hippo on the shores of Lake Naivasha; and pelted with fruit by monkeys in the crater of Mount Suswa. It was a blissful time, barrelling wildly about a landscape that felt like it carried a special paternal blessing.
Now, at 11 and nine, my children were the perfect age for a safari. I wanted to fashion a trip that captured the magic of the place without pandering to colonial nostalgia; that reflected both my father’s Africa and my own recollections of exploring a landscape of amazing diversity, dense with extraordinary wildlife. More than anything, I wanted to avoid the horror stories I’d heard of Disneyfied safari experiences, with tourists in 4WDs queuing to see halftame animals before hurtling off to tick the next box on their list. I wanted that rarest and most valuable thing: authenticity.
Here, a fortuitous piece of the past reared its head. A friend recommended I search out Yellow Zebra Safaris – ‘The best safari company in the business.’ It is run by Julian CarterManning, with whom I’d been at school, and who has gathered together a selection of the top safari guides and camp managers in Africa. ‘What you need,’ he said, ‘is Tanzania in April.’ I left him with a list of demands – we wanted the wildebeest migration, big cats, luxury but not to feel overcossetted, unforgettable views and secret valleys, forgotten tribespeople and redintoothandclaw immersion in the natural world. Oh, and my son wanted to see painted wolves. ‘We can do all of that,’ he told me, ‘and a lot more.’
We travelled to Tanzania in midApril, theoretically the rainy
season, and at the very tail end of the wildebeest migration. ‘Everyone believes the herds move off early,’ Julian told us, ‘but they always stay south for longer than people think. You may get some rain, but really very little, it’s actually a plus.’ It’s wildflower season in April, so that everywhere we went, the grasslands were bright with purple and white hibiscus. Where earlier in the year everything is dry and dusty, we came to a place of rich and verdant lushness. People are yet to catch up with all this, though, so the reserves were empty when we were there, as if we had the whole of the Serengeti to ourselves.
We flew into Kilimanjaro Airport late. I always prefer to arrive in a new land in darkness, the world around a secret that only morning will reveal. Our hotel, the Arusha Coffee Lodge, was a collection of wellappointed cabins surrounded by nightscented flowers. We were up early for our flight out of Arusha’s small airstrip, just a few minutes down the road. Coastal Aviation runs a series of handsome Cessnas that seat a dozen or so people and jump from one landingstrip to the next across the country. We spent the whole flight with our noses pressed against the windows, looking out as the houses and farmsteads began to thin, then disappeared altogether, and there was just the occasional Maasai boma, the vast stretch of the savannah, the saline shimmer of the lakes, and, always brooding in the distance, the massif of the Ngorongoro volcano range.
We were met at Mwiba’s airstrip in a burly, canvasroofed 4WD, by our guide for the next few days, Saitoti Ole Kuwai. Julian had told me that Saitoti and Alex Walker (of whom more soon) were the best two game guides in Tanzania, possibly in the whole of Africa. He wasn’t wrong. We were driven through woods and scrub to the stunning Mwiba Lodge, perched on a rocky outcrop in its own 125,000acre private reserve. Drinks and cool towels awaited us in the glorious central dining area, whose decking looked down over a gorge through which a river tumbled. There were rock hyraxes sunning themselves on the stones by the river, kudu swinging their heads at a drinking hole, vervet monkeys yammering through the trees. There are other, more savage animals about the place, too, and we had to be escorted by a spearcarrying askari guard along the wooden walkways to our tent.
‘Tent’ isn’t really doing the thing justice, though. There was canvas involved, certainly, but the room itself was absurdly luxurious, with soft clouds of bedding and a bath looking out over the river. A verandah linked our tent to the one next door, which my children swiftly, joyfully, occupied. Khakis on, excitement at feverpitch, we set out that evening for a game drive. Another top tip from Julian – get yourself the best binoculars you can afford. I borrowed a pair of Leica’s Trinovid HD range before I left England and they gave the whole experience greater depth, more clarity, brought the