Situated far off the beaten track in Tanzania’s largest national park, the Camp is a rare gem on the safari circuit. One of the very few owner-run camps in the area, I arrived at Mwagusi Safari Camp to find a charming, small, exclusive tented camp of 13 bandas, which snake along the sandy banks of the river.

Mwagusi Safari Camp offered me a unique and comfortable tented safari experience, with a hint of understated elegance. Almost all of the camp is built from natural materials such as grass thatch, timber, drift wood, stones and reeds, allowing it to be in perfect balance and harmony with its surroundings. This well-established camp was first started in 1987, I am told, and it is an expression of the unwavering love and passion of its owner, Chris Fox (pictured below right), for the Tanzanian bush, its wildlife and its people.

“This is the Africa you imagine when you shut your eyes,” Chris tells me as we sit around the campfire one evening. “It’s real, rugged, wild savannah. There are moments of great drama, great beauty. The first rains are very dramatic, and there is always different light, or something different happening – huge lion / buffalo confrontations, for example, where you watch a pride of lions take out a buffalo and at the same time, the buffalo is attacking the lions. You really feel like you’re ‘in’ nature. I don’t think there’s any other place I’ve seen where you can get up in the morning and suddenly there’s an elephant walking past.”

Chris was born and raised in Tanzania, and is passionate about Africa in general and Ruaha National Park in particular. His knowledge of Ruaha extends back to long holidays spent camping in this area before it even became a National Park, and his family helped to ensure that the land was gazetted and fully protected in 1964. When he was a boy, he and his family were often the only visitors. As an eight-year-old, he would go hunting on foot with his father in this secret, unheard-of paradise. Apart from schooldays spent in Devon, he has known the Ruaha all his life and his passion for it shines through in everything he says and does. “As children, we were very lucky,” he smiles. “We could camp wherever we wanted and we could do whatever we wanted – life was completely free. But it was a very different life – sometimes, my brother and I would disappear for the whole day!”

Chris is notorious for his profound knowledge and experience with the wildlife, people and the land of Ruaha. He is best known for his deep understanding of animal behaviour, especially with wild African elephants, and has formed astonishing relationships with these incredibly intelligent creatures. “It’s not something that you could do now, but I could put my hand in her mouth and she would lick my hand,” Chris says of one particular pachyderm.

Mwagusi Safari Camp is renowned for its high-calibre of local guides and their in-depth knowledge of the African bush. Local Tanzanians benefit from an in-house guide training programme aiming to provide top-class guides with excellent wildlife and bush knowledge, who have an ability to read animal behaviour – knowing when to sit patiently and watch a natural sequence of events unfold.

It is thought that Tanzania has lost half of its elephant population to ivory poachers since 2007. I am told that at the Selous Game Reserve, the epic herds for which it was once justly famous have been all but decimated. Perhaps as a result of this, Ruaha now holds the record for the largest concentration of elephants in the country, as well as huge herds of buffalo, tracked by a tenth of the world’s lion population. Such abundance is always encouraging, but with it comes the responsibility of protecting it, a difficult task in an under-utilised park of this size.

“We have good, healthy populations of wildlife right now,” Chris tells me, “but things can turn on a sixpence and so it’s a bit unpredictable. Everything is ebbing and flowing, either influenced by man or nature. Here, elephants are given the ability to roam freely. They will destroy a bit of habitat here and move on somewhere else, and the habitat will regenerate after they’ve flattened it – you know, the trees and bushes – and then the grazing animals will come and feed off what the elephants have left behind. So there is a balance. It’s not a balance in the way that we would like to see things, where we count numbers and expect those numbers to stay the same. You will have the crises and you’ll have the droughts and you’ll have things die off. But the more we try to interfere with it, the more we make a mess and we think we know better. But we don’t know better. I’ve spent a long time around elephants and they are highly intelligent, highly interactive and have incredible memories.”

Part of Tanzania National Parks’ plan is to encourage visitors to Ruaha, which will in turn swell the park’s coffers and help pay for anti-poaching efforts. In the past year, the United Nations has helped fund road upgrades (the network, compact as it is, works brilliantly) and also train rangers whose job, other than to occasionally accompany walking-safari guides, is to patrol the park. “We have Tanzanians who are passionate about conserving wildlife in Tanzania,” Chris tells me. “What we need to do is just preserve the land areas as National Park status. I think in the immediate future, wildlife conservancies will play a role where governments are still a bit immature [about this issue]. There comes a point where we as a human race have to say, we are one planet and we’ve got to fund those places whose governments can’t afford to sustain them. Otherwise, we’ll lose the land and the animals, and we will all pay the price.”

To the relatively few who know and love Ruaha, its appeal as a first-class wildlife sanctuary has never been in doubt. By rights, with its diverse ecosystem, healthy wildlife populations and reputation for excellent guiding, it should be rated right up there with the top game parks in Africa. But so far, its safari camps have been mostly pretty basic, and run on tight budgets with nothing in the pot for improvements. With Mwagusi Safari Camp paving the way for attracting the tourists who will, somewhat ironically, be sustaining the future of the Parks (albeit through their wallets), perhaps hope is not lost just yet.

For further information about Mwagusi Safari Camp, go to www.mwagusicamp.com. To donate to the Southern Tanzania Elephant Programme, go to www.stzelephants.org.

Our first encounter with Africa’s wildlife happened sooner than we anticipated. Coming into land on the tiny, undulating airstrip at the first camp we surprised a small herd of elephants that harrumphed off into the bushes. But an impala – a small, delicate antelope – was less lucky. Running beside the plane as it touched down it suddenly cut across in front and was caught a glancing blow by the propeller. Result – one dead impala and one unflyable plane.

We pushed the plane under the trees, sat on our bags and waited. In the blinding light, the air shimmered. Giraffes emerged from the bush, curiously examined the corpse, and passed silently on. Vultures circled lazily and we dozed in the sweltering heat – until the drone of our replacement aircraft disturbed our reverie.

Only a couple of hours late at Mwagusi Camp in Ruaha park – 22,000 square kilometres of savannah – we were greeted with cool, lavender-scented flannels, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and, possibly, the most spectacular bedroom I have stretched out in anywhere.

Our banda was an enormous thatched affair with low stone walls, dividing screens made from reeds, and a huge terrace overlooking the dried-up river bed. At the terrace’s far end was a separate reading area with hammock and sofa set among the boulders. Inside was an enormous bathroom, dressing area and separate bedroom in a zipped mosquito-proof tent containing the biggest bed I have ever seen. There was easily room for six – and it was all ours.

There has been a sharp rise in luxury game lodges in the past decade as holiday companies have discovered an untapped appetite for five-star living in hard-to-reach locations. The appeal of Mwagusi, we soon discovered, lay in its determination to provide an authentic wilderness experience without compromising on comfort.

Outside the banda, animals wander freely through the camp – at night guests are escorted everywhere – and we watched elephants digging for water in the river bed below our terrace, troops of baboons ambling past. An Agama lizard, with luminous orange head and turquoise tail, hunted dragonflies on the boulders in front of us.

Inside, it was the details that caught the eye – towel rails fashioned from driftwood, stone water baths for the birds, bunches of dried grasses, animal skulls, woven baskets, arched recesses in the reed screens for clothes, a big wooden trunk for our bags. You could almost define Mwagusi by what it is not – not mass tourism, not over-protected (tents are so much better than walls), not hedged about by the health and safety police.

Dinner on our first night was served down in the river bed, next to a roaring log fire, the riverbank hung with enough oil lanterns to light a small town. With toes in the sand, we ate tender beef in ginger, roast vegetables spiced with chilli and rosemary, fried aubergine, puréed pumpkin and new potatoes – indeed, there were never fewer than half a dozen delicately flavoured dishes cooked by the chef Meru at every meal.

We had been chatting noisily for perhaps an hour when there was a rustling by the bank and someone swung a torchbeam to reveal a bull elephant browsing the leaves not 30 yards away – having his dinner, too. He was a regular in camp and quite unfazed by the commotion. As the memsahib said later, intoxicated by the scents and sounds of the night: “It is the mixture of extreme peace and extreme danger that I find so compelling.” Twice during our four-night stay elephants blocked our way to the dining room and we had to be led on a wide detour to avoid them – which helped remind us, if it were necessary, who were the visitors in the park and who the hosts.

Next morning we were woken at 6am with tea, stepped out into the milky dawn, climbed into the open Land Cruiser and set off into the park. It was late January; the first rain had fallen and the thirsty earth had pushed up tender leaves and grasses of vivid green, which glowed against the murram tracks of burnt orange.

Some game parks are flat and featureless. Not Ruaha. Its boulder-strewn hills and tree-lined gullies yield magnificent vistas. We stopped the Land Cruiser on the lip of a valley and sat in silence watching the herds of elephant, giraffe and zebra drifting soundlessly across the landscape under the giant, bull-necked baobab trees. This is the greatest pleasure – to gaze on a scene unchanged for millennia, as if on the origins of life.

There were animals everywhere – families of elephants with young no more than a month old, jiggling their trunks uselessly as they struggled to master the 55,000 muscles that control it, giraffes regurgitating their cud from their four stomachs, the pin-tailed wydah birds which, uniquely, take four males to each female – to the memsahib’s unconscionable delight.

Our guide, Jofre, could spot a whisker at 200 yards. He also had that other essential quality, a good parkside manner – knowing what information to deliver, and how to gauge it for his audience. Mwagusi is one of the few owner-operated camps in Tanzania (by the charismatic Chris Fox, a native Tanzanian) and has established an apprenticeship scheme for staff which sees them working as water carriers, waiters, plumbers and stone masons before being identified as potential future guides.

Then they get a chance to track the big cats. On our second day we came upon a solitary lioness, seeking the rest of her pride. She uttered an impressive roar, sauntered a couple of hundred yards and lay down again to wait. Then Jofre took a call on his radio – cheetahs had been spotted on a kill. We drove swiftly to the spot where four sleek, long bodies were lying in a perfect cross, their heads bobbing as they pulled violently at a carcass. It was a mother and her three full grown cubs. Every few minutes one would sit up, its jaws smeared with blood, and look around warily for rival predators. Cheetahs are fast but not strong and must eat quickly before they are challenged for their kill.

We shared that scene with two other vehicles, the only time we encountered other tourists in four days. A key part of what draws people to Ruaha is its isolation. Being distant from the coast (and expensive to get to), it has a fraction of the visitors of the northern parks. When a queue of vans is passing through it feels less like a wilderness and more like a zoo.

On our final night we came upon a pride of six lions with their cubs waiting to ambush a group of approaching zebras. While the cubs frolicked and the adults prepared to pounce, a back-up vehicle delivered our drinks. As dusk fell, white wine in hand, we raised our glasses and toasted our extraordinary luck.

If you use Google as a measure of popularity, you wont be overly inspired to visit Ruaha National Park – there are only 126,000 results. By way of comparison, if you Google Serengeti, you’ll get an incredible 4 820 000 results.

Compare the tow in human terms and you’ll find that the Serengeti pulls in 150 000 people every year, compared to Ruaha’s 7 654. Suffice to say, it doesn’t take too much brain power to work out which park is more popular. But, after spending just two days in Ruaha, I can tell you that is park is my new favourite in Tanzania. The three biggest attraction in this country are Zanzibar, Serengeti and Kilimanjaro; they’re all easily accessible by plane are are all relatively closely clustered together – a quick hope in a small plane will take you from one to another.

Not so with Ruaha, which lies about 130km west of the town of Iringa and forms part of the southern safari circuit. The dirt road from Iringa to Ruaha is very good and takes about t wo-and-a-half to three hours to cover. If you’ve driven up from SA then another couple of hours along a drit road isn’t much in the greater scheme of things. The Trans-Tanzam highway (the main route through Tanzania and Zambia) passes along Iringa, so one is able to get pretty close to the park on perfect tarmac.

So why would you want to visit Ruaha? No, it doesn’t have a million wildebeest, but there are the giraffe-eating lion that move around in large prides of well over 20. If you’re camping, chances are good you’ll have the campsite all to yourself, as we did. We saw no other self-drive visitors during our stay, only those driven by tour operators – and they normally frequent the upmarket lodges within the park. We found this lack of people an attraction, especially considering the experience we’d had in some of Tanzania’s better-known attractions. Ruaha lies in a park of Tanzania that was used by trading caravans during the early part of the last century; continuous attacks by the Sendu people forced these caravans to head north in order to find alternative routes. But the time German East Africa came into being, the Wahehe tribe occupied the Ruaha area; they too were well-know for their fierce battle tactics, and once again this resulted in the area being given a wide berth. Perhaps the only good thing that came out of this last occupation was when the area was declared the Saba Game Reserve. In 1964 it was declared a National Park and today is the second biggest park in Tanzania, pipped only by the Selous.

Not a great deal has changed in the park since those days; just ask Chris Fox who apart from a few years of schooling in Devon, has spent his entire life here and now runs Mwagusi, one of the park’s best lodges. The area’s popularity hasn’t been helped by the drying up of the Great Ruaha River, which in turn had had an adverse effect on animal numbers such as the buffalo whose numbers are down from 32 000 to only a few thousand. “Buffalo used to be the primary food source for the lions and it was not uncommon to see up to five brought down in a day. Not so anymore and the lions are not targeting the giraffe, something that was previously very rare.” Comments Chris. The ivory trade of the ‘80’s decimated elephant numbers in Ruaha from 40 000 to only 9 000 and only recently has the population increased to some 12 000 ellies.

The park’s name is derived from the word Luvaha which means “great” in the Hehe language; crossing the Great Ruaha River at the bridge located at the park’s southern entrance gate gave me cause to wonder: was this the Great Ruaha River? This is the only official park entrance, although locals told me of a few hunters’ trails that allow access from the north-west, but these are hard to find. While I went in to pay our park fees the rest of our crew stood on the bridge, surveying this lifeline to the thousands of animals that occupy Ruaha. While this was once a perennial river, today it is dry for up to several months of the year due to activities further upstream.

It was still flowing while we were there, hence our choice to camp at once of the riverside sites not too far from the Msembe HQ. We were the only people at the site and park officials had kindly left us some complimentary wood. While driving into the campsite once of our tyres picked up a nail and as our compressor had given up the ghost I had to visit HQ for assistance once I’d made repairs. The staff were extremely helpful even though it was after home time and the workshop was locked. I gave them a little something as a token of my thanks, making them very happy.

When one thinks of Serengeti one thinks of vast open plains; when I think of Ruaha I think of granite koppies and dense vegetation. There are four distinct vegetation zones within the park: river valley, open grassland, Miombo woodland and undulating countryside where the baobabs dominate. The are around HQ is thick bush and elephants are plentiful, as there’s water close by.

As we made our way towards the popular Mwayembe Hill we drove through a rather nervous looking herd of buffalo – less than a mile down the track we discovered the source of their unhappiness: one of their kin had just been taken down by a lion. There were already several lion on the kill including several cubs. A few minutes later more arrived and soon we were surrounded by over 20 lions, a situation that makes one feel very small and helpless. For the next hour or so we just sat and observed as they slowly reduced this buffalo to a bloodied pile of hide and bones.

The park’s roads are in good condition and the unique signage system helped us to easily navigate our way about. One of the attractions at Ruaha are the wild dogs and lesser kudu, both of which we failed to see during our visit. I wish we’d had more time to spend in the park; due to its size it’s the kind of place you need a few days to explore.

Twenty percent of the park lies next to the Greater Ruaha River and it’s in the land adjacent to the river where one finds the biggest concentration of animals, which gives rise to one of the challenges facing Ruaha.

Legislation approved by government last year details plans to double the size of the four existing camps in Ruaha, and the construction of several new facilities. This might well turn the areas adjacent to the rivers into Serengeti pr Ngorongoro type parks. It will be a sad day when this mass tourism kicks in as roads will worsen (the Tanzanian government doesn’t invest in its park roads, they merely complain that there are too many vehicles on them). Only time will tell what happens at Ruaha.

However, let me conclude this piece with the following advice: pack your bags and head for Ruaha – right now it’s an undiscovered jewel in Tanzania’s wildlife crown, but it’s not going to stay that way for too long.