Largest Park in Africa: Selous

From a European perspective, you are looking at a wildlife sanctuary larger than Switzerland. In African terms, it is about the same size as the Kruger, Hwange and Serengeti national parks combined.

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The Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania is the largest in Africa. It supports an enormous number of animals, including the rare African wild dog and black rhino. It is, in short, the ultimate African wilderness and its very name exudes an air of mystery for lovers of the African bush. However, only one per cent of tourists to Tanzania visit it each year.

In January 1917, Captain Frederick Courtney Selous, the prototypal Great White Hunter and writer of popular African hunting yarns, was killed by German fire in the so-called 'Battle for the Bundu', an obscure World War I campaign fought in the remote southern wilderness of what at the time was then German East Africa. A year later, the writer P.H. Lamb trekked to the site where the captain had fallen and was buried. This is what he reported: 'It is a wild inhospitable district, the haunt of a great variety of big game, including elephants, giraffes and rhinos. Not more than four miles away is a warm salt spring running down into a salt lake, where hippos, wild ducks, egrets and numerous other wild fowls abound. But despite these alleviations it can hardly be called a fascinating part of the world, and the object of most people who have seen it will be to avoid it carefully in the future.'

The opening sentences of Lamb's description could have been written yesterday. The hot spring and lake are largely unchanged and the grassy shores support an abundance of waterbirds, hippo, elephant and giraffe. The Beho Beho Hills, which overlook Selous's grave, are one of the few places in East Africa that support a viable and naturally occurring black rhino population, albeit one greatly diminished in number. Hindsight does, however, lend a wry irony to Lamb's final prediction, since the former battlefield, far from being carefully avoided today, lies within the main circuit followed by tourists in southern Tanzania's prestigious Selous Game Reserve.

As well as being Africa's largest game reserve, the Selous is one of the oldest, having assumed its present shape and name in 1922 when the British administration amalgamated several smaller reserves that had been set aside by the Germans before the war. Oddly, nobody seems to agree on the actual extent of the Selous; even the most credible official sources provide figures as divergent as 45000 and 50000 square kilometres. Either way, the scale of this reserve - a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982 - is impressive. From a European perspective, you are looking at a wildlife sanctuary larger than Switzerland. In African terms, it is about the same size as the Kruger, Hwange and Serengeti national parks combined.

Of greater significance than the actual size of the reserve is its location at the core of the greater Selous-Niassa ecosystem. Because of an abundance of tsetse flies, the Selous was never heavily populated and the reserve now lies in a 155 000-square-kilometre tract of practically uninhabited miombo woodland divided between southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Three-quarters of this area - the largest chunk of comparably untrammelled bush left in Africa - has some form of official protection. Within Tanzania, the Mikumi and Udzungwa Mountains national parks border the north-western and western Selous, as does the vast Kilombero Game Protected Area. To the south of the Selous, and linked to it by a well-established, protected game corridor, lies Mozambique's 23 400-square-kilometre Niassa Game Reserve.

One measure of the stature of this great African wilderness is the volume of game harboured within it. The elephant population, currently estimated at 65 000 for the entire ecosystem, is the largest in the world. The Tanzanian part of the ecosystem supports an estimated 120 000 to 150 000 buffalo, the largest tally on the continent, while the reserve's 40 000 hippo and 4 000 lion populations must also rank as among Africa's largest.

From a tourist's perspective, the game park's vast area requires further qualification. The roughly 85 per cent of the reserve that lies to the south of the Rufiji, Tanzania's largest river, is given over to privately-leased hunting concessions and is off limits to casual tourism. A proportion of the northern sector is also set aside for hunting concessions, with the remainder - no more than 10 per cent of the total area - forming what, to all intents and purposes, is the Selous Tourist Reserve. All of the lodges that lie within this public sector are concentrated in a 1 000-square-kilometre block immediately north of the Rufiji, and most tourist activities take place within this restricted area. Put plainly, while there are good reasons aplenty for visiting the Selous, the reserve's vast extent is something of a red herring.

The public part of the Selous is wonderfully atmospheric, a dense tract of miombo wilderness abutting the meandering Rufiji River and an associated labyrinth of lakes and narrow connecting streams. The extent of these wetlands is most apparent when viewed from the air. Arriving by light aircraft, as most visitors do, it is exhilarating to sweep above the palm-fringed channels teeming with hippo and to see the immense herds of elephant and giraffe grazing alongside each other.

An excellent introduction to the Selous is an afternoon boat trip along the Rufiji. Dentist-eye views of the river's gigantic crocs are guaranteed, as are conferences of harrumphing hippos, and you'd be unlucky not to be entertained by herds of elephant, buffalo or giraffe ambling down to drink. A memorable aspect of the boat trip is the profuse birdlife. Characteristic waterbirds include yellow-billed storks, white-crowned and spur-winged plovers, various small waders, pied and malachite kingfishers, and African skimmers. Seasonal breeding colonies of carmine and white-throated bee-eaters swirl around the mud banks, and trumpeter hornbills and purple-crested turacos flap between the riparian trees.

Game drives are usually rewarding, especially towards the end of the dry season, when various large mammals concentrate around the lakes and river. Frequently seen ungulates include impala, common waterbuck, bushbuck, wildebeest, eland, greater kudu, buffalo and common zebra. A notable feature of the northern sector is the large herds of giraffe - up to 50-head - that come down to drink at the lakes during the heat of the day.

The lions of Selous, unusually diurnal and typically sporting darker coats and less decorative manes than their counterparts elsewhere in East Africa, are much in evidence. The reserve is also, perhaps, the best place in Africa to see African wild dogs and three separate packs live to the north of the Rufiji. The Selous-Niassa ecosystem is also of particular significance for two antelope species, the sable and puku, both of which are classified as Low Risk Conservation Dependent by the IUCN.

In 1980, Selous's estimated herd of 3 000 black rhino was the largest confined within any East African sanctuary. It probably still is, with the critical difference that the most optimistic current estimates place the population at fewer than 150.

The poaching that pushed the reserve's rhinos so close to the brink also took a heavy toll on its legendary elephant population. In 1976, Selous was estimated to harbour 110 000 elephants. The 1981 census indicated a relatively small numerical drop, to 100 000, but the next 10 years saw elephants being poached at a rate of roughly 20 per day, with the estimate dropping to 55 000 in 1986 and 25 000 in 1989. In 1988, fearing that the elephants might be eliminated entirely, the Tanzania government launched the Selous Conservation Programme with support from several prominent international conservation agencies. By involving bordering communities in conservation activities and raising funds for better policing, and aided by the controversial CITES ban on ivory in the early 1990s, poaching was soon brought under control. The most recent aerial survey in 1998 placed the elephant population within the game reserve at around 55 000 - a dramatic recovery, though the large tuskers that once characterised the region are today conspicuously absent.

One factor in stemming the poaching has been the utilisation of almost 90 per cent of the reserve for low-volume trophy hunting. Whatever one might feel about those individuals who are prepared to pay vast sums of money to put a bullet in a lion or elephant, the hunting concessions are by all accounts well monitored, and their benefits are clear. Firstly, the lessors have a strong interest in driving poachers off their concessions and thus play an important role in policing remote parts of the reserve. Secondly, the revenues derived from the hunting concessions and their patrons form an important source of funding for anti-poaching patrols and for reserve management.

Historically, the main obstacle to attracting large-scale tourism to the Selous has been that it lies in the same country as the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, probably the most famous of all African reserves, and the lynchpins of Tanzania's popular northern safari circuit. Ironically, the Selous together with Ruaha, Udzungwa and Mikumi national parks form a self-standing southern safari circuit that would most likely be the cornerstone of a national tourist industry were it situated in any other but a handful of African countries. As it is, fewer than 5 000 tourists annually make it to the Selous (about one per cent of tourist arrivals to Tanzania), making it one of the most under-utilised safari destinations of comparable quality that I've visited.

The benefit to visitors is that Tanzania's southern reserves, the Selous in particular, retain a much wilder and less 'packaged' feel than their northern counterparts, as can be seen in the respective styles of their lodges. Whereas the northern circuit is dominated by large impersonal hotels that evidently aim to shut out the bush the moment you enter them, the Selous boasts a select handful of low-key, eco-friendly lodges whose combined bed capacity amounts to little more than 100 clients.

Furthermore, because the Selous is not subject to the restrictive regulations that govern Tanzania's national parks, visitors are offered a more integrated bush experience than the more usual regime of repeated game drives. Apart from the boat trips mentioned earlier, guided game walks are very likely to reveal elephant or buffalo - even lion - while overnight fly-camping excursions entail sleeping beneath a mosquito net on the shore of a lake teeming with hippos and crocs.

Judging by the number of repeat visitors we met in the Selous (and with apologies to Mr Lamb), the object of a significant proportion of people who have experienced this unique wilderness seems to be to return at the first opportunity.

Getting there:

Most international flights to Tanzania, including the thrice-weekly Air Tanzania service from Johannesburg, land at Dar es Salaam. By road, it takes at least six hours to reach the Selous from Dar es Salaam. Most road travellers take the surfaced Tanzam Highway for about 200 kilometres to Morogoro, from where the rough 140-kilometre Matombo road leads to the western entrance gate. Most visitors prefer to fly to the reserve, using Coastal Travel's daily scheduled flight from Dar es Salaam.

Entry requirements:
Visitors to Tanzania require a valid passport and may be asked to produce a yellow fever vaccination certificate. Visas, required by most nationalities, can be obtained on arrival without fuss.

Health
Malaria is present throughout the year and rampant in the rainy season. Take a course of malaria prophylactics and cover up at night. Tsetse flies, which are prolific in thick woodland, are a nuisance rather than a health risk - dousing yourself with insect repellent and wearing long trousers will reduce, but not eliminate, the bites.

Cost
The Tanzania shilling currently trades at around 900 to the US dollar. Selous is geared towards high-cost, low-volume tourism (all lodges quote accommodation, services and drink prices in US dollars) and there is no budget camping-safari industry equivalent to that in Tanzania's northern safari circuit.

When to visit
The cool, dry season from April to September is ideal, with good game-viewing along the main tourist circuit. The rainy season coincides with the European winter, which makes for better birding. Most lodges close over April and May.

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