July 13-15: Saadani National Park

We left the Usambara Mountains and headed back to the coast to Saadani National Park.

We took a different way back than the way we came (up that steep escarpment if you recall) and it was an absolutely delightful and spectacular drive. The road was packed dirt, perfectly graded, and smooth driving – so nice when you encounter these roads unexpectedly. The road wound through the mountains, climbing and descending hillsides carved up into small farms with perfectly terraced gardens and traversing valley bottoms with rice patties and vegetable crops covering the floodplains. Everything was green and lush and so colorful. Often the backdrop included rugged mountain slopes with rocky outcrops. Unfortuntely, we were too mesmerized by the scenery and keeping an eye on the winding road with lots of blind corners to take any pictures or videos, so you will have to use your imagination.

Saadani National Park, encompassing 410 square miles, was officially declared a National Park in 2005 from the former Saadani game reserve. Saadani has been one of the most heavily contested Parks in Tanzania since the National Parks Authority designated the Park. Most of the local communities surrounding the Park, and formerly residing inside the Park, have fought the Parks Authority over the declaration and continue to dispute the authority of the government to declare the area as a National Park. However, apparently once the area was designated an official Park, the wildlife populations began to recover from overharvesting by both the big game hunters and poaching. Indeed, few visitors go to Saadani to see the wildlife, but rather to enjoy the miles of beaches and undeveloped coastline. Any wildlife observations are considered a bonus. As expected, we observed that the Park still has very low numbers of large mammals; we figured that it probably hasn’t been long enough for the populations to build. Indeed, we saw very few animals on our drives except in one location where the grass was short and the young shoots were sprouting from a not-so-long-ago prescribed burn. There, we saw lots of waterbuck, bohor reedbucks, impala and giraffe, but not much else. We did spend some time in the evening for sundowner at a small reservoir where we were rewarded with a troop of Angolan black and white colobus monkeys and a family unit of elephants, not to mention the beautiful malachite kingfisher. Overall, howover, the animals were quite shy still due to their long history of being hunted, so I only managed to get photos of a few animals (sorry, but they are rather grainy given the zoom I had to use):

The habitat in the Park is sufficient to support lots of grazing and browsing animals, so perhaps it is only a matter of time before the populations fully recover. It could be another 50 plus years or more before there could be numbers enough to fully occupied the available habitat. Interestingly, Saadani is the only National Park in Tanzania, and all of East Africa for that matter, that harbors both marine and terrestrial habitats. Moreover, Saadani is one of the few breeding site for endangered Green Sea Turtles and the only Tanzania Park to protect mangrove forest. The coastal forest in this unique park also harbors the rare Black and white Colobus Monkey but we didn’t see any. Here are a few shots of the varied habitats in Saadani from our drives:

Like many of the Parks in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa, the Parks do a terrible job of maintaining their roads. Many of the so-called “major” roads either turn into brush-encroached trails or are interrupted, without warning, by impassable barriers, such as washed out stream crossings. And even more frustrating are the road signs that direct you to a destination but there is no road; e.g., “Park headquarters ->” and you turn and look that direction and all you see is tall grass and bush- go figure? I am sure many, many years ago there might have been a track leading in that direction, but it has long since been rewilded, yet the Park keeps the signage to frustrate the self-drivers like us. Sorry, this is one of my pet peaves (Sherry, I can’t be a polyanna on this one, sorry). We encountered both of these situations on our drives:

On a positive note, we camped at the beachside public campsite. Actually, the campground was no longer in use and supposedly being repaired (all evidence to the contrary), so we were allowed to set up camp in front of the nearby Guesthouse. It was a beautiful setting right next to the beach, which we had almost to ourselves. There were a couple local fisherman using their nets in the near-shore waters on occasion and a few Park visitors to the adjacent Bandas, but we saw almost nobody on the beach. We took advantage of the situation and had a refreshing dip in the warm Indian Ocean waters each midday. Here’s our campsite and sunrise view:

OH, and let’s not forget the sandy beach covered with sand crabs at night, and the African civits and genets in our campsite at night (see the video for footage of the civit):

We took an evening boat ride on the Wami River on our last evening. We saw lots of hippos and crocs and several bird species, including the beautiful mangrove kingfisher, but the river didn’t have the character of other big rivers we have been on:

Here’s a composite video of our visit to Saadani National Park:

Saadani National Park composite (6 minutes)

Unfortunately this was Nancy’s last safari. We are off to Dar es Salaam for two nights and then she flies home – argh!

New Species:

1. Lichtenstein’s hartebeast
2. Bohor reedbuck
3. Blue-breasted bee-eater
4. Long-tailed cormorant
5. Dark chanting goshawk
6. Long-tailed fiscal
7. White-fronted plover
8. Caspian tern
9. Common sandpiper
10. Mangrove kingfisher