Wild dogs at the huge Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. PHOTO | ANDREAS FOX
When thinking about Tanzania’s wildlife areas,
most people focus on the Serengeti and Ngorogoro — the wide open,
quintessential grassland savanna, and places with lots of tourists.
In
the south, however, there are some lesser-known but far larger and
wilder parks — the Selous and Ruaha. I have always been keen to explore
them, especially after reading Peter Matthiessen’s Sand Rivers.
The
Selous Game Reserve is named after Captain Frederick Courtney Selous,
the famous big-game hunter and British military man who was killed by a
German sniper in World War I. His simple grave can be found near where
he died, in an area of the reserve known as “Beho Beho”.
At
55,000 square-kilometres, the Selous is one of the world’s largest
protected areas, and it is a Unesco World Heritage Site. It is unfenced,
and the entire ecosystem extends into northern Mozambique.
Its
vastness means it’s a hugely significant stronghold for a number of
species. There are more lions here than across the whole of Kenya. The
endangered African wild dog needs huge tracts of land to establish a
viable population, and the Selous features the largest.
You
can therefore imagine my delight when I was invited to run a training
session for a team of guides at a lodge there. I flew from Nairobi to
Dar es Salaam, and the next day I was on a domestic flight bound for one
of the many dirt airstrips in the reserve. The lodges tend to close in
April and May for the long rains, as no planes or vehicles can get in or
out.
The extended El Nino, however,
was writing the script this year, so conditions were apparently “touch
and go”. Our hair-raising landing took us steeply through thick cloud,
touching down in puddles of mud and onto a skidding halt.
I
was staying at Azura Selous, a lodge in the north-western sector, on
the banks of the great Ruaha River. Azura’s 11 huge rooms are a
combination of canvas and stone, and they are spread along hundreds of
metres of river frontage. All come with a plunge pool, outdoor shower
and air-conditioning.
A favourite
with honeymooners, the lodge does really well with its personal touch;
it ensures, for example, that no two dinners are ever eaten in the same
place, be it by the pool, the riverbed or out in the bush.
The
river is stuffed full of hippos and their paths criss-cross the lodge
grounds. They provide a daily drama with regular scraps between bulls,
and there was even a new calf born into one of the local families while I
was there. Needless to say, there are askaris that accompany guests to
and from their rooms after dark.
The
Selous is in the northern extent of a huge vegetation zone known as
miombo woodland that extends into Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and
Mozambique. It really feels wild. The scale of the place, thicker bush
and the lack of tourists, means that animals can be harder to find and
are skittish at times.
But we did
see lions regularly as well as the resident pack of wild dog, plus a
leopard and a large numbers of herbivores. What struck me the most,
however, was the distinct lack of elephants. I saw one large bull on a
few occasions, a regular gentle giant around the camp. There were also
tracks and droppings for others, but in low numbers.
There
is a dark reason for this. The Selous-Niassa ecosystem has been a major
ivory poaching hotspot. What was one of the largest populations with a
high of 106,000 in the 1970s, was decimated to around 8,200 in 2014 —
the majority killed in the past four years alone. The black rhinos are
all but gone, too. The guides told me of only one sighting, five years
ago.
RENEWABLE LEASES
Poaching
levels seem to have stabilised, I’ve been told. Cynically, it could be
that the remaining elephant population is so spread out that poachers
are struggling to find them. Apparently Ruaha is in the crosshairs now.
Management
of this vast area is a challenge. A tiny proportion of the reserve,
mainly to the north of the Ruaha and Rufiji Rivers, is open to
photographic tourism. The rest is divided into large ‘blocks’, managed
as wilderness or leased to hunting operators.
I
am told the trend now is that many hunting blocks are being converted
to photographic ones each time leases are up for renewal. Even more
controversial than hunting, a section in the south was also recently
hived off for uranium mine operations.
As
I flew out the other day, the weather was much finer and only then did I
truly get to appreciate how vast and wild this place really is. Despite
the challenges, the Selous still remains a wilderness where there are
areas rarely, if ever, accessed by people.
It’s great knowing that such places still exist.
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