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Meet Brian, one of our travel experts for Tanzania.
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Brian has always nurtured his passion for travel in his spare time. He's traveled the world, visiting over 40 countries.
Over time, this passion grew to the point where he began to search for opportunities to work in the travel industry. He's been an African Specialist at Mango Safaris since early 2006.
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Aerial View of the River
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.
Photo copyright Nomad Tanzania.
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Overview
20 years ago we were the first to arrive in Katavi, at a time when virtually no body else had heard of it and fewer still had visited. Today, our camp, Chada Katavi lies hidden in the deep shade of acacia and tamarind trees on the edge of Chada plain.
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.
With just 6 large tents and a maximum capacity of 12 guests, the guides at Chada Katavi sometimes joke that they can guarantee "a million hectares of virgin African bush per person." It is a combination of this unique isolation and some incredible concentrations of game that makes Katavi such a dream ticket.
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.
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.
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