Hippo hooray

SUSAN Kurosawa enjoys an up-close safari in Tanzania's Katavi National Park, where visitors can view majestic animals from their very own tents.

Making a splash ... hippos cool off in mud / Susan Kurosawa

ONE of the collective nouns to describe hippos is bloat. What an endearing term it seems, summoning images of jolly hippos lying down after a too-good Sunday lunch, loosening their stays and sighing deeply.

It doesn't seem such a cosy notion when we stand at Lake Chada downwind from the biggest bloat of hippos imaginable. The smell is unearthly, the noises a rumble of snorts and roars, and the animals are writhing in mud and (how to make this picturesque?) passing wind with the ferocity of jet engines. Even the red-beaked oxpeckers grooming the hippos' backs occasionally appear to be blown off by these blasts.

That I am metres from this smelly mob, giggling with Silvanos, a guide from nearby Chada-Katavi safari camp, as he cracks open cold drinks, is proof I have developed wildlife fever. I am so mad about this remote national park in southwest Tanzania, so addicted to game drives and intrigued by all we see, that it's going to take more than a few hundred windy hippos to turn me off.

On the floor of the Rukwa Valley, Katavi National Park covers more than 4470sqkm; from its high escarpments, fast rivers run through thick forest to cover vast floodplains across which run East Africa's greatest herds of buffalo.

Chada-Katavi is a simple camp - albeit with Egyptian cotton sheets on the beds and richly patterned scatter rugs - without the luxuries of running water and flushing toilets. There are six bottle-green canvas tents spread through miombo woodland, acacias and pod-heavy tamarind trees overlooking the grassy Chada floodplain.

This October, it is horribly dry and hot, and our promised safari walks are cancelled when temperatures nudge towards 40C. Between game drives - early morning and late afternoon, when the animals congregate at waterholes - we lie in our tent, grateful for every whisker of breeze.

The air smells of sun-dried linen: laundry is included in the tariff and, as the baggage limit on charter flights is 12kg a person, this is a blessing. The laundry men expertly press our outfits with charcoal-heated irons: there is liberation in just one change. Jungle green or khaki shirt and shorts today? Certainly not blue or black, the preferred colours of the stinging tsetse fly, which inhabits this region with gusto.

Despite the stuffiness, we sleep well at night, which is more than can be said for the locals. An elephant visits late one evening, walking under our tent's front canopy and brushing against the mesh-covered windows. The night sounds are cotton-padded, my ears play tricks. I race out to the bathroom annexe just after dawn, my heart beating wildly. I scream at two shadows: it's the men bringing canisters of hot water for my bucket shower. We all giggle. Exquisite relief.

A baby hippo prances past like a chorus-line dancer one morning as my partner and I sit outside our tent with early coffees. Vervet monkeys slide down the tent's sloping roof and skylark in the branches above. It seems perfectly natural for a giraffe to be at breakfast, watching us eat, fluttering impossibly lush eyelashes worthy of a cosmetics makeover.

There are many safari camps in East Africa that are grander and more luxurious, but Chada-Katavi's utter charm is its tiny scale and magnet-like attraction for game. There's no perimeter fence in front of the tents and each day brings wonderful surprises. Sometimes the African contingent of Noah's Ark just comes to us: more elephants, a dazzle of zebras with their matronly rumps and swinging gait, a swirl of swallows that catch the sun and shine silver, like a veil of sequins.

My partner is deep in Ernest Hemingway's The Green Hills and just a few steps from breaking out a khaki bush shirt with epaulettes and bullet loops and drinking whisky from a tin cup.

Outside the mess tent, there's the chirring of unknown insects, tiny finches leaning bottoms-up into a feeder trough, glossy starlings and brilliant orange butterflies doing a merry dance in a sky the colour of Wedgwood. A typical lunch is coronation chicken, avocado salad and garlic potatoes. Sliced fruit for dessert is drizzled with acacia honey produced in the nearby village.

In the bush kitchen, head chef Estomih and his assistant Elieta produce food that surpasses expectations for such a faraway environment. The larder, says Estomih, has to be always locked against scavenging monkeys and knowing hyenas. His staff walk to and from the kitchen corral, ultra-smart in their pressed uniforms, serving us with great good humour, keeping pre-dinner drinks and glasses of wine generously topped up.

By each evening's campfire - known as the bush television in this corner of the country, where even mobile phones don't work - there are samosas and dishes of warmed cashews passed around as we exchange stories with fellow guests of that day's sightings. A squadron of bats zoom overhead and the deep-black night is full of scratching and skittering.

I sit with Silvanos, who is from the city of Arusha in northern Tanzania, near MtKilimanjaro, and he confesses how much he misses his wife and little son. ``We called him Reg. It is a good, strong name,'' he tells me, and flexes his muscles.

Silvanos's dream is to run a camp of his own. Chada-Katavi's manager, Kenya-raised Mara, and the relief manager, Ed, born in Tanzania, are British-educated and white. They are thoroughly attuned to the bush and couldn't be more charming to guests, but I hope it won't be long before men such as Silvanos and his fellow rangers (the wide-smiling Rafael, in particular) are in charge of such camps. "It will happen, give it time, mamma,'' says Silvanos, who is reluctant to continue with the topic.

In the library tent, I read books with names such as African Camp Fires (1913), reference tomes on trees and reptiles, and accounts of the scandalous lives of Kenya's Happy Valley set in the 1920s (and the unsolved death of Lord Erroll). I familiarise myself with the colour plates in Birds of Southern Africa -- crested barbet, magpie shrike, red-necked francolin, yellow-throated sand grouse -- but no amount of study on these hot afternoons can compete with Silvanos's commentary on game drives.

He reveals he can tell the age of a baby elephant by the height at which it can pass under its mother's belly. I learn from him about various mating rituals and breeding cycles, and he teaches me that the trick of spotting game is to turn each section of landscape into a grid pattern: searching across in lines, up and down; look, there's a shiver of movement, the toss of a lion's mane all but hidden in the tawny undergrowth.

Lilac-breasted rollers wheel above us, around the top of white-barked star chestnut trees. My bird-spotter's checklist comes to life: the rare blue swallow, black-browed albatross, green sand piper, ground hornbill, the African snipe, with a bill so long it looks like a drilling instrument.

The dust is stirred by the streak of a dwarf mongoose and a feathery flurry of quick-footed guinea fowl.

One day we see 19 lions: "And not one of them twice,'' Silvanos assures me. Our open-topped vehicle is so close to the pride that I look straight into their measuring eyes. When the male yawns, his mouth is as deep and treacherous as a canyon. In the cool of dusk, two of the females go out to hunt. "If you gave Mrs Lion a menu, she would choose buffalo,'' Silvanos says.

But today the lionesses are unlucky: skittish impala scamper off, the waterbuck are too alert and the cape buffalo (Katavi has herds of thousands) have moved on. The lionesses lie down in the red oat grass, as still as statues, just waiting for their takeaways.

My safari checklist has assumed its own bloat status: page after page of antelope (roan, sable, topi, eland), the hint of an elusive leopard, side-striped jackals and skulking hyenas, and an over-abundance of stalking lions and sleeping crocodiles. (Silvanos says that in a series of "croc caves'' deep in the riverbanks, the creatures store fat in their tails and can last six months without eating.)

Things get mock-competitive between good mates Silvanos and Rafael on our last day as their two vehicles set off from camp for the morning game drive.

"Today, my friends,'' says Rafael, addressing his two guests on board, "because it is a fact I am the best guide here at Chada-Katavi, we will see a leopard, a cheetah and approximately 100 lions.''

Silvanos all but collapses laughing.

"And today,'' he booms in a voice that makes us all sit up, "because it is a fact that I am the very best guide here at Chada-Katavi, I will be showing my friends from Australia a penguin, a white polar bear and a lost kangaroo.''

The vehicles bump off into the churned-up dust and our collective laughter rises high into the golden morning.

Susan Kurosawa was a guest of the Classic Safari Company and Emirates airline.