Selous_Katie's VirtualTourist Home Page

The Selous is gigantic, but living there, you never get a feel for just HOW big it actually is. You get to know intimately a small section of it, you become familiar with some of the animals even! Our camp is often visited by a grumpy old elephant that we call Tusky, but is also known as Jino (one tooth in Swahili). Many a night we've sat awake in our box (see photo!) and listened to a herd of elephants a metre outside the window. You feel scared to breathe! I think in general elephants are very cautious animals, but you have to respect them because of their sheer size! Seeing an elephant from a game drive vehicle is a quite different experience from seeing them as close as that. I think that's why the Selous is so great, it's one of the few places where you can walk and see wildlife, we've often been walking in our forest and bumped into elephants (among other things!)

Living here definately has it's advantages... it just puts you in a good mood to wake up, open the door and step out into the bush. Hippos honking, birds singing, sun shining. We spend hours on our deck (see photo) watching the hippos, birds and any other animals that happen to come and drink. Recently a whole herd of elephant crossed over the river up stream - I've never heard so much noise! I though they were panicking about something - turns out that they were LAUGHING and splashing each other with water. I guess when you're that big, crocodiles aren't an issue!

So, what are we doing living in the Selous? We're running a camp! At the moment it's a nice little campsite, with one SUPER EXCELLENT mud hut - Yes, a mud hut. So much of Tanzania is TOO expensive, and we're on a bit of a mission to try and change that - we don't see why people can't visit Tanzania on a budget without having to enjoy the pungent smells of the long drop toilets! So we've built nice rustic toilets, tiled them up and run water pipes to them. That worked well. So now we're building Mud Huts and attaching en-suite bathrooms to them! So far so good! I'm hoping to get some photos of the Hut soon to post up here. This season we also want to open a bar and a mini shop (bread, pasta, tent pegs, soap.. essentials basically) AND best of all, we'll be doing boat safaris! I can't wait! We've been so busy this off season fixing our car (the roads tend to try and kill it) and improving is as a game drive car - without the canvas roof on it everyone goes a nice lobster colour!