We went out to Ruaha National Park for a couple days vacation with a few others from the water group. Ruaha is about 3 hours drive from Iringa on reasonable dirt roads but most visitors arrive by small plane. This is the wet season which means things are very green and the grasses are 3 to 4 feet high. The elephant population is growing well there and now number about 17,000. This is a great time of year for them with the grasses and plenty of water and mud holes. In the dry season they eat brush and bark of baobab trees.
We stayed at Mwagusi which is a first class safari camp with thatched roof bandas with a wall tent pitched underneath them to give some semblance of camping in the bush but with extreme comfort. We arrived in time for lunch, retired in our hammock until tea at 4 and went on safari at 4:30 driving through the park in open bench land cruisers looking for wildlife. There are elephants, giraffes, impala, and zebra everywhere and hopefully you will also see lion or leopard. We are often within 20 feet of the animals and it is fun to sit and watch them go about their business because they are so used to the vehicles that they pay little attention. After 2 hours we return to camp to relax and meet around a campfire for drinks and have dinner. In the dry season they have dinner in the sand river bed or in the bush but now we ate in the open wall dining areas because there are more insects and a little water in the river bed.
That night we returned to the banda and discovered that we had a 3 foot snake in the bathroom that must have just eaten something like a mouse. The bathroom area is very nice but is open to the outside and we also had a small scorpion in the sink. Sue was not too happy about the snake, although I thought it would have been gone by morning, so I grabbed the lantern and found some help for removal (we are not supposed to leave the banda at night but I didn’t want to blow our emergency whistle for just a snake in the bathroom). They came and used a tool to grab and remove the snake. They said it was harmless but seemed to keep their distance from it anyway.
The next morning we started our drive at 6:30 and saw a leopard in a tree shortly after leaving camp. She had been in the tree overnight hoping to pounce on unsuspecting prey and I took video as she watched us and jumped down from the tree. It is a treat to see a leopard and she was pretty comfortable with us. We saw her again in the evening safari and she actually walked 10 yards behind our vehicle. The morning safari lasts 6 hours and we have breakfast out in the bush. We saw a couple groups of lions also and were very close. They do a lot of hunting at night and lay around a lot during the day so you can drive right up to them and they hardly blink. The tall grasses are a bad time for them because it is hard to see prey and coordinate their hunts.
That afternoon we lay around resting like the lions and heard a rumbling that sounded like a heavy rain. I was watching the river bed which had just a trickle of water and all of a sudden there was a wall of water coming down the river bed. There had been a lot of rain up on the high escarpment which had collected water that reached us 6 to 8 hours later and filled the entire river bed with raging water. This is why they don’t eat in the river bed in the wet season. It took only a few minutes to get to full bore and had only started to taper by the next morning. We didn’t get rain were we were at all.
Another safari that afternoon and our last day we went for a bird walk at 6:45 but we had to stay on the road because the park has closed walking safaris because of the high grasses and risk of unexpected animal encounters. The most interesting thing was seeing the termite tunnels which can stretch 50 meters from the main hill and can go as far as 100 meters down to reach the water table. The ants can capture termites and make them slave laborers in the ant nests. It was fun to be in Mwagusi but it is a pretty extravagant $1000 weekend (and that is with the in country rate) and we will not go again while we are here unless someone were to come out to see us.
Our Banda "Tent". Camping in the BWCA will never be the same.
Twiga chewing her cud.
The leopard.
Young male lion wondering what we are doing.
Grassland with acacia trees. Acacia have sharp thorns and gave me quite a gash in my head earlier at Mtera.
Elephants enjoying the shade of a baobab tree in the heat of the day. Baobab look like fat upside down tree trunks and some of them can be two thousand years old.
We stayed at Mwagusi which is a first class safari camp with thatched roof bandas with a wall tent pitched underneath them to give some semblance of camping in the bush but with extreme comfort. We arrived in time for lunch, retired in our hammock until tea at 4 and went on safari at 4:30 driving through the park in open bench land cruisers looking for wildlife. There are elephants, giraffes, impala, and zebra everywhere and hopefully you will also see lion or leopard. We are often within 20 feet of the animals and it is fun to sit and watch them go about their business because they are so used to the vehicles that they pay little attention. After 2 hours we return to camp to relax and meet around a campfire for drinks and have dinner. In the dry season they have dinner in the sand river bed or in the bush but now we ate in the open wall dining areas because there are more insects and a little water in the river bed.
That night we returned to the banda and discovered that we had a 3 foot snake in the bathroom that must have just eaten something like a mouse. The bathroom area is very nice but is open to the outside and we also had a small scorpion in the sink. Sue was not too happy about the snake, although I thought it would have been gone by morning, so I grabbed the lantern and found some help for removal (we are not supposed to leave the banda at night but I didn’t want to blow our emergency whistle for just a snake in the bathroom). They came and used a tool to grab and remove the snake. They said it was harmless but seemed to keep their distance from it anyway.
The next morning we started our drive at 6:30 and saw a leopard in a tree shortly after leaving camp. She had been in the tree overnight hoping to pounce on unsuspecting prey and I took video as she watched us and jumped down from the tree. It is a treat to see a leopard and she was pretty comfortable with us. We saw her again in the evening safari and she actually walked 10 yards behind our vehicle. The morning safari lasts 6 hours and we have breakfast out in the bush. We saw a couple groups of lions also and were very close. They do a lot of hunting at night and lay around a lot during the day so you can drive right up to them and they hardly blink. The tall grasses are a bad time for them because it is hard to see prey and coordinate their hunts.
That afternoon we lay around resting like the lions and heard a rumbling that sounded like a heavy rain. I was watching the river bed which had just a trickle of water and all of a sudden there was a wall of water coming down the river bed. There had been a lot of rain up on the high escarpment which had collected water that reached us 6 to 8 hours later and filled the entire river bed with raging water. This is why they don’t eat in the river bed in the wet season. It took only a few minutes to get to full bore and had only started to taper by the next morning. We didn’t get rain were we were at all.
Another safari that afternoon and our last day we went for a bird walk at 6:45 but we had to stay on the road because the park has closed walking safaris because of the high grasses and risk of unexpected animal encounters. The most interesting thing was seeing the termite tunnels which can stretch 50 meters from the main hill and can go as far as 100 meters down to reach the water table. The ants can capture termites and make them slave laborers in the ant nests. It was fun to be in Mwagusi but it is a pretty extravagant $1000 weekend (and that is with the in country rate) and we will not go again while we are here unless someone were to come out to see us.
Our Banda "Tent". Camping in the BWCA will never be the same.
Twiga chewing her cud.
The leopard.
Young male lion wondering what we are doing.
Grassland with acacia trees. Acacia have sharp thorns and gave me quite a gash in my head earlier at Mtera.
Elephants enjoying the shade of a baobab tree in the heat of the day. Baobab look like fat upside down tree trunks and some of them can be two thousand years old.
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