I left Tampa about 9:30 am on January 8, 2009 for east Africa and arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania the evening of January 9, where I spent two days before going on the Rufiji River safari (Mountain Travel-Sobek). Dar is the capital of Tanzania and is located on the Indian Ocean. I rode around the city a little and visited Bongoyo Island, an uninhabited island and park several miles offshore. Our group consisted of 6 clients, 3 raftsmen, including the leader John Yost, and a local support team from Wild Footprints of 6 or 7 locals including Ryan, the manager. John had arranged for three 18 foot rubber rafts to be sent to Tanzania. Two rafts were rigged for oars and one for paddles. Each raft would carry 3 to 4 people plus an assortment of camping equipment and supplies. Most of us headed out on the morning of January 12 from Dar by van for Ryan’s hunting camp located on the Kilombero River just west of the Selous Game Reserve.
The Selous Game Reserve is Africa’s largest wilderness (a remnant of “Old Africa”) encompassing about 50,000square kilometers. The entire wilderness is bigger than Switzerland. The Selous is uninhabited by humans –thanks to sleeping sickness epidemics in the 1930’s and 40’s and is protected by laws today that prohibit human settlement. The Selous supports enormous numbers of wild animals including the big game of east Africa as well as a diverse assortment of smaller mammals, birds, and reptiles.
On January 14, we left our Ryan’s camp and began the raft trip downstream on the Kilombero river into the Selous. The trip along the Kilombero River was pure exploration because no one in our group had ever rafter this part of the river. We ended up paddling about 75 km along this river over 3 days and nights, but cut our paddle short one day because of the great numbers of hippos and hippo attacks. We were attacked by hippos 8 times during these 3 days. Generally the hippos came underwater and erupted under one of our rafts with great force. I was in the paddle raft when a hippo came up under the raft and knocked our steering paddler out of the raft and into the river. We managed to pull him in before the hippo bit him in two ! (I’ve heard that hippos kill more people in Africa than all other dangerous animals). Other hippo attacks knocked other people out of the rafts. The final attack knocked 3 people into the river and severely damaged the raft. The people were pulled onto other rafts and we managed to tow the damaged raft to a small island where John spent several hours trying to patch the raft so it could be paddled to shore. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, but the threat of death in jaws of an enraged hippo was real. That ended this section of the river paddle. We made it to the north shore but were isolated and unable to make contact by cell phone. Later that day a ranger patrol that had been monitoring our trip arrived and we were able to get our land support vehicles to pick us up and proceed to the Rufiji River for the second paddle (the Kilombero flows into the Rufiji River in the Selous).
We put into the Rufiji River just downstream of Pangani Falls, into a reach called Steigler’s George, where we ran several miles of white water before we reached the slow moving parts of the Rufiji. We spent the next several days paddling along the Rufiji River and ended up at a permanent river camp near the Selous’s eastern boundary.
January is summer in Tanzania and days are hot. Typically, we paddled from about 9 am till noon than had a long lunch break in the shade, and then paddled again for several hours in the later afternoon. Most days we went on game walks from our camps along the river in early morning and evening. Ryan led the walks and he was always armed with a double barreled elephant rifle. We also had opportunities to do some game drives at the permanent river camps where our vehicles were available.
We saw most of Africa’s big game, either from the rafts, on foot, or from land rovers drives. These included elephants, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, impala, eland, waterbucks, bushbucks, kudu, wildebeest, hartebeest, crocodiles, lion, hyena, hippo (by the hundreds most days) baboons, a jackal, and even wild dogs on one occasion. We had an encounter with an elephant on foot one evening as we returned to camp in near darkness. We had to rush off our path when this beast suddenly appeared; I ended up tangle and bleeding in a thorn bush but escaped. We saw many birds including goliath herons, yellow-billed storks, sacred ibis, spoonbills, Egyptian geese, vultures, eagles, kites, plovers, sandpipers, pigeons, kingfishers, bee-eaters, lilac-breasted rollers, hornbills, swallows, weavers, whydahs, etc.
Most nights from our small tents (similar to small backpack tent with no fly in order to get more breeze on warm African nights and to see the stars) we heard lions roaring, hippos snorting, occasional grunts of leopards, and “laughs” of hyenas. We usually had a fire at the camp, but these fires burned down early and left us a with the star-filled, black sky, the animal sounds, and the hope we would not be eaten or stomped.
On January 24 we drove from the Rufiji River camp back to Dar.
