We just completed trip number nine to Africa, visiting some new countries, and I want to offer a review of the experience, with a particular slant (as always) on senior travelers. We did Kenya (our third visit there), Tanzania, and Rwanda (first visits to each of the last two), and the experience taught us a lot even though it was far from our first African adventure. I’ll focus on the places we’d not visited, and which I’ve therefore not reviewed before, and start with a discussion of the countries overall.
Tanzania
Tanzania is the East African country just south of Kenya, and the Serengeti reserve borders on Kenya’s Masai Mara. The national language is Swahili, and the people are lovely though in some places less accustomed to seeing tourists than we’re used to. The country experiences what they call “short rains” that begin in early October, and the amount and frequency of rain varies somewhat even in the relatively small area in which our three camps were located. We didn’t have any days when rain actually impacted our adventures in Tanzania, but we did have occasional rain.
Getting to the tourist area around the Serengeti is a bit of a challenge. You can fly into Kilimanjaro Airport from Europe and from major cities in Africa, but almost all the domestic flights are out of Arusha, an hour or so away. If you come from another African country, you’ll often have to overnight before you can get a flight out (we did). Internal flights are also round-robins among as many as four different camps, so the time for a flight and the length will depend on the order they take the stops, which isn’t always the same. Don’t expect your predicted takeoff time to stay the same, or the length of the flight. That means leaving time for connections!
We spent five days in AndBeyond’s Klein’s Camp, five days in their Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, and five days in their Lake Manyara lodge. We like AndBeyond because the offer a nice and consistent experience. Some of their lodges rank in our top picks in Africa (Sandibi in Botswana and Phinda in South Africa, now joined by Klein’s Camp).
Klein’s Camp is located on a private reserve adjacent to the northeast border of the Serengeti, and it’s easy to get into the Serengeti from the camp. The camp’s own reserve is lovely, though, and there you can drive off-road and encounter few vehicles. The rooms are on a hillside in a hilly area, and so it’s generally cool there. The camp is not fenced, and so you do have to be careful about wildlife when in camp, even during daylight hours. We had a small herd of elephant actually come down the hill from behind our room, and they passed on either side, with the large matriarch actually coming down our path and crossing almost within touching distance (we got into our hut’s doorway for that experience; you don’t mess with elephants!)
The airstrip is a decent distance from the camp (the camp’s own airstrip was closed because the approach passed over the Masai Mara and Kenya complained). On the trip, we encountered our first concentration of tsetse flies, something we saw rarely in Kenya and never anywhere else. There were a lot on that airstrip road and some were encountered in other open-wood areas during our visit, to the point where you definitely will want some industrial-strength repellant. They don’t carry sleeping sickness in Tanzania, but they have a painful bite that will raise a pretty big lump. Spray your socks because they can bite through them. They like darker colored clothes, particularly blue, so be prepared.
Be prepared for cool weather in the morning and evening too. I learned to always bring a down sweater on trips to Africa, and Linda took a fleece, but it wasn’t enough and she had to buy a down jacket in the camp. Be sure to have a lightweight rain jacket too. You’ll probably pull off some layers if the day is sunny as things warm up.
The animal and bird life in Klein’s is impressive. We saw elephant, leopard, lion, wild dog, cape buffalo, and a lot of birds, including a couple that weren’t supposed to be in Tanzania at all; one was only the second sighting in the country. We found the reserve at least as good as the Serengeti park in terms of wildlife, and we spent most of our time there.
We were birding rather far from the normal tourist paths, and we encountered villages where tourists were unknown. One woman who smiled and waved to us at first, became frightened and ran when she saw my wife lift her camera. We were told they think a picture “steals their blood”. In another encounter, three children perhaps 8 or less were carrying wood when we came around a corner; they dropped their wood and ran into the woods. They call us “mzungu”, which is a Swahili/Bantu word meaning “roamer” or “wanderer” but in common usage in Tanzania means “white people”.
We liked this camp best of all the Tanzania camps we stayed in, but logistics (see above) for Tanzania overall can be complicated!
Our next stop was Ngorongoro, the iconic crater. This one had its ups and downs (no pun intended). We expected the crater to be more crowded with vehicles than it was; it’s a national park so anyone can come in from the outside. The experience wasn’t bad, but while the crater does have a nice concentration of game we didn’t find it as nice as Amboseli National Park in Kenya, and the crater area overall was very dusty, to the point where you had to protect your cameras and close the vehicle windows to avoid breathing in dirt when other vehicles passed you (which was often).
The AndBeyond lodge at the crater is lovely, with nice big rooms. There are three levels to the lodge—North and South Camps and Forest. I think that North Camp is the nicest, but all three are very good. You probably see more birds from your room in Forest, but there are plenty in all the camps, and zebra, wildebeest, and even some buffalo roam the grounds, mostly at night.
Our only problem with the lodge was that they had some large groups there, one with many undisciplined children who ran wild during meals and marred what would otherwise have been a nice mealtime.
We spent only one day in the crater itself, using the rest of the stay to visit Olduvai, Empakai, another large crater with a lovely lake at the bottom, and Gibbs Farms, where you can start on a nice little hike. You need to have a national park guide with an AK to watch over you on hikes, because of the risk of running into buffalo.
Our final stop was Lake Manyara, and this was probably our least-favorite camp of the three. The rooms are on stilts, not as much “in the treetops” as the material suggests, and they’re thin wood/thatch construction. There’s no air conditioning, and it happened to be hot during that part of the trip, which made sleeping (even with a ceiling fan) more problematic. If you came back between game drives, it was even hotter at mid-day.
The national park there is lovely, and we particularly enjoyed the tree-climbing lions, which we saw nearly every day we bothered to look. There are plenty of elephant too, though they’re a bit harder to see since there’s more woodland and you can’t drive off-road in the parks. The only disadvantage of the park overall is that there’s really only one long road with some side-roads, and the AndBeyond lodge is located a fairly long way (an hour and a half of steady going) from the entrance, which happens to be where most of the elephants and waterbirds are found. We had planned to go to the waterbird area on our first full day, but the road was blocked by a lion kill!
Bush babies frequent the camp area, making it one of the few places where you might get a decent look at one of these cute little primates. There are also vervet monkeys, one of whom jumped on our breakfast table to steal fruit and scared Linda half to death!
Overall, we liked Tanzania a lot, but the logistics were more complicated and we probably would go there only if we weren’t mixing in other countries.
Rwanda
Most people go to Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas, of which only about 400 remain on the planet. We were no exception. It’s a lovely, clean, country that’s filled with farms and fields except in the park areas, including Volcano National Park where the gorillas are found.
We stayed at Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, very close to the gorilla area. The lodge is lovely, but the stairs from the parking area to the main lodge are a challenge if you’re mobility-impaired. They plan to have an ATV path built by next year, but if you have problems with climbing stairs and paths, be sure it’s there before you book, or allow some time to make the trip. Some of the rooms are further uphill, so ask for a low room if you have issues.
Rwanda is pretty enlightened regarding assigning people to gorilla groups for viewing; they do it based on your likely ability. However, you can’t be sure that there aren’t a lot of less-capable hikers on a given day, or that your gorillas will stay where they are supposed to be. Our experience proved that!
We were assigned the Sabyinyo group, a band that’s usually among the most accessible. For it, you hike perhaps a mile and a half or two miles across fields to the edge of the park, then into the park to wherever the band happens to be. In our case, because of mobility issues, it took two hours to get to the gorillas. You’re allowed to spend only an hour with them, but our group was in a fairly open area and we saw a dozen different gorillas, including two big silverbacks and one three-month-old infant. We had great viewing and got great photos.
Five minutes from the scheduled end time of our viewing it started to rain, and it quickly turned into the worst downpour I’ve been out in. The trails turned to creeks, two guides fell, and Linda had to be carried by guides over some of the roughest spots. Both of us had walking issues for the next several days, and we decided not to try to do the trek again the next day since we’d had a good sighting.
The lesson here is simple. Unless you can walk for about five miles on muddy terrain with slopes here and there, and in rain or heat, this isn’t something you should be doing. Even the “easy” gorillas can be difficult enough that seniors may have problems, though one senior we met on the trip was climbing mountains! Know your limits here. We were pressed close to ours, but it was a truly inspiring sight and I’m glad we got to see them. We’d not try this again, though.
Gorilla permits have exploded in cost in Rwanda, and it’s the best place to see them. Make sure you understand how much it’s going to cost, and again be realistic in assessing your own capabilities. Even the easy gorillas can be hard on you.
What We Learned, Photographically, on This Trip
A lot, frankly. Linda broke the lens mount on her Nikon 1 30-110 lens by wedging it in between the seat and the side of the vehicle. Part of the problem was surely the wedging, but the fact that the monopod was attached probably generated additional leverage to break things. If you use a camera on a monopod, you need to be very careful if you stow it anywhere to make sure that you don’t apply too much leverage to the mount.
On my side, this was an opportunity for me to refine my D500 technique, and I discovered after considerable testing that the best “standard” setting for the camera’s focus mode was Group Area. In this mode you can pick up something large like a lion/leopard, and also track a bird in flight even against trees. I was able to get a great shot of a caracal, which is a small tufted-ear nocturnal cat, even though it was dark and the only illumination was a hand light by the tracker. ISO was 12,000 and the image was good even without noise reduction. This proves that the D500 is phenomenal in terms of high-ISO shooting, which was the deciding factor for me.
I think group area focus might have done better for me when trying to shoot small birds in cover early in the trip. I should have been able to get super shots at 500mm, but the contrast seemed a bit low and I think the single-focus dot crept off subject in many cased. Group focus locks on any of the four points shown in cross-pattern in the center, which is probably better. We’ll see.
I also noticed the big advantage that DSLR users have over those who rely on even the very good point-and-shoot style cameras. We traveled with someone using a Nikon P900, which has phenomenal zoom capabilities, but the problem is that it’s not easy to get on the bird/animal and get a shot, and a quick shot is pretty much out of the question. I was able to get some great shots quickly. In all, I was very happy with my D500 and Sigma 50-500 even as my only camera/lens combination. If you’re thinking about wildlife travel, particularly birds, I think that you might want to pay the price in dollars and inconvenience in size and get a mid-range DSLR (Nikon D5000 or D7000 family) and a nice Sigma zoom.