Chada Katavi
Katavi National Park, Tanzania
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CHADA KATAVI -
KATAVI NATIONAL PARK, TANZANIA
We’ve kept Chada Katavi the way it began - small and intimate with just six East African safari tents. Each of them is spacious and comfortable with wide-open fronts giving you panoramic views of the plain and animal life that constantly comes and goes.
From the air you have to be looking carefully to spot the tents (we’ve made sure of this) and they blend totally into their surroundings. So much so in fact, that you often don't have to leave your tent veranda to see game of all kinds. Elephant are frequent visitors, attracted to the same shady fruit trees as us, and vast herds of buffalo graze on the flood plain.
Chada Katavi is stylish and wonderfully comfortable, but we share all the resources here with Katavi's animals and so we’ve ensured that our footprint remains light.
We are delighted to welcome children of 12 and over at Chada Katavi.
Camp is open year round except between 02 February and 30 May 2012 when the camp closes for maintenance.
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Chada Katavi's tents, just 6 of them, are raised up on wooden platforms on the edge of the Chada Plain. They have wide-open fronts and lots of shade net windows to let in the passing breeze.
The en-suite bathrooms are at the side, also on platforms, and have eco-flush loos, an urn of cool water to refresh yourself. Safari style bucket showers are the best thing here, tried and tested and we can think of no better way to wash off the Katavi dust under one of these.
Water is a valuable resource here, especially during the dryer months, and we share it with a great many other animals - we take this very seriously here and "bucket showers" help us to do that.
In a clearing you'll find the dining tent and a library, both are comfortable little spaces to while away the hours when you're not out in the midst of a safari adventure. An evening drink around the campfire is the essence of safari, helping to round off a day of excitement out in the wild.
Activities
There's walking and then there's real walking; bush walking in a good pair of boots where you want to keep going on and on. Katavi makes you feel like this, it might be something to do with the endless plains around you and vast open skies. Not to mention what you might see whilst you're out there.
With your guide, and an armed scout, along for the ride, you could find yourself watching elephants from up close marveling at how, despite their size, they can move so quietly; or be meandering along the river line seeing all the different birds around the pools, and crocs and hippos who are a big feature of Katavi life. Animals who would often take flight at the sound of a vehicle, won't even know you're there and that's what makes walking out here such an incredible experience.
Walk out to your flycamp where you can spend a night out under the stars. You'll sleep in a mosquito netted tent, small but with enough room for a bedroll kitted out with soft mattress, sheets and a feather pillow. We don't scrimp on the dining either; you'll sit down to a three-course candlelit meal and a glass of chilled wine. But we think these are only the peripheral things, the backdrop to the main event. The whole point about flycamping is being out there at night, lying on your back looking up at the night sky through the roof of your netted tent; listening to the animal sounds, so different from those you hear during the day.
We don't want to sound too dramatic, but we can't imagine your life not being changed in even the smallest of ways after something like this.
Katavi National Park
Katavi National Park in the far west of Tanzania is somewhere that even today, few people have been lucky enough to visit. Perhaps because of this, it feels untouched, almost like travelling back in time.
The park centers on a series of wide flood plains, blond with waist high grass in the early dry season, green and flooded like a mini Okavango after the rains.
Connecting the main flood plains – Ngolema, Katisunga, Katavi and Chada - is a network of fragile seasonal rivers. It is these rivers that form the focus of the game viewing for which Katavi is renowned during the dry season.
Water rapidly becomes a limited resource in Katavi during the dry so animals of all kinds are drawn to the Katuma, Kavu and Kapapa Rivers.
Hippo in their thousands cram the remaining pools, crocodiles retire to caves in the mud walls of the river banks, buffalo and elephant are drawn to the rivers to drink.
The lion, hyenas and other predators know this. In the late dry season, there are few places that offer such a raw and wild experience as Katavi.
Katavi has two vastly different faces. Our dry season, which runs from June through to end October, gets more and more intense as the temperatures rise. As the season progresses, the river - life blood to so many of its animals - starts to dry up; the pools and watering holes fill up with pods of hippo almost stacking up on top of each other to try and get into the water. The savanna grass is golden and the sunsets are dusty, the heat shimmers like a mirage over the plain.
The rains usually come mid November and go through until early June. Katavi then undergoes a complete transformation. Almost as soon as the first rains hit the ground, everything goes green; long green and lush grasses sprout from what was just dry and cracked earth. The rivers flow again, the pools overflow and there is space for all. It's a birders paradise as all the migratory birds flock back. Grass as high as an elephants eye, but there is still so much to see.
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