Mwagusi Press

"....in search of 'vanished freedom', far from the camera clicking crowds"

"The Selous may be one of the greatest, least visited reserves in Africa, but the Ruaha National Park must run it very close....Whisper it's name very, very quietly, and only to those you know and trust. It is wild, unsophisticated, little visited.....It is on no one's route to anywhere. You come only because you love the Ruaha. The place to stay is Chris Fox's Mwagusi Safari Camp...Mwagusi has that sense of intimacy, of quiet, of being surrounded by bush, which are all the hallmarks of the camps I love best.

His little tented camp is pitched beside the almost empty Ruaha river bed and there, through our tent we could watch the giraffe, the zebra, the baboons come down to the sandy river to play as we drank our morning tea or had our afternoon siesta.

One amazing night we lay scarcely able to move as a lordly leopard gave a text-book rendition of its' sawing cough along the river bed outside our tent for two or three hours.

By day you have adventures with Fox - he finds you cheetah (we watched three cocky adolescents up to no good, for something like an hour and a half), lion prowling, rows of palm trees filled with nesting white-backed vultures, pairs of jackals hunting, impala, roan and sable antelope. If you want to walk he gets a game scout to come along and you can climb up hills to find where the black eagles nest, you can walk along river beds tracking lion, have a sun-set amble along the river bed or walk along the rift valley escarpment.

After the sun goes down everybody gathers round the camp-fire as the gossip of the day is exchanged. Tales are told, the exploits grow wilder as the drink is passed round and you do not really want to be anywhere else in the world."
Lucia van der Post, Weekend FT

"Ruaha is totally unspoilt, packed with game yet devoid of the myriad mini-buses that are so distracting and destructive in the more popular parks further north. On our games drives we would hardly ever see another vehicle, just hundreds and hundreds of animals...lion, giraffe, greater and lesser kudu, elephant, African hunting dogs, warthog and buffalo - one evening 3000 or more came to drink at the river, an amazing sight and one that was impossible to capture on film because of the sheer magnitude of it"
The Bush Drum

"People write comments in the guest books such as...'Ruaha has the finest African scenery seen at its' very best. It has been a great privilege for us to witness wildlife unaffected by human intervention in such a setting' and 'This place is superb, I have travelled and lived all over the world, but nothing exceeds the enjoyment I have derived from my stay here. The sites have been indescribable.'"
Anne Outwater's Safari Guide