Chicari Camp

Location

Gorongosa sits at the southern end of the East African Rift Valley, in Mozambique’s Sofala Province, across something over four thousand square kilometres of valley floor: floodplain grassland, miombo and acacia woodland, fever-tree forest and palm savanna, with the granite massif of Mount Gorongosa rising to the north to feed the watershed. Lake Urema, the park’s hydrological heart, swells from roughly ten square kilometres in the dry season to around two hundred when the rains arrive. The wildlife at Chicari keeps the rhythm of that water.

The camp sits on Chicari Pan, a smaller waterhole that holds through the dry months. Canvas tents stand on raised walkways around it, every one facing the same view. In the peak dry season the pan draws buffalo, waterbuck, hippo and elephant at Very High density, and lion and wild dog at High likelihood, much of it readable from the deck without a vehicle. Two of the tents are treehide tents, set a little higher beneath a shared platform that lifts you above the same scene.

The park is run by ANAC, Mozambique’s conservation authority, alongside the Carr Foundation. The lion and wild dog recoveries have been tracked in peer-reviewed work, and the restoration project took the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Biodiversity Conservation in 2024. None of this is the camp’s own credential; it is the park’s, and Chicari sits inside it.

Getting here is part of the commitment. The park is a long drive from Beira on tarred road, or a charter flight to the Chitengo airstrip, which closes from December to April. The gates close at six in the evening, and late arrivals overnight in Beira or Chimoio. Chicari opens on the first of April and closes on the thirtieth of November; July is the month to come, when the mornings are coldest and the game most concentrated. Through the other four months the floodplain inundates, the airstrip shuts, and the camp comes down until April.

Rooms

Ten canvas tents, all facing the pan. The orientation is not a design choice; it is the only choice that makes sense when the animals you have come to watch come down to drink a short way from the deck. Eight are safari tents along raised wooden walkways at deck level; two are treehide tents set a little higher, sharing a deck beneath a raised platform that puts you a few metres above the same scene. The pair suits two couples travelling together, or a family with children of twelve and up.

Inside, the tents are kept deliberately plain. Each has a large double bed under mosquito netting, an open wardrobe, a standing fan, a coffee and tea station, and an en-suite with a flushing loo and a pressurised shower. The lighting is solar, as is the rest of the camp. There is no air conditioning: canvas, cross-ventilation and the fans carry the warmer months, and hot-water bottles arrive on the bed through June and July, when the Gorongosa mornings turn cold before the sun is properly up. There is no pool either. Sister camp Muzimu has one; Chicari is built around the fire and the water instead, and we read that absence as structural rather than incidental.

What is unusual here, for a camp at this price, is that none of it will exist five months from now. Four containers were shipped in to build the place; at the end of November the decks fold into storage crates, the sinks fold away, the walkways come apart, and the whole camp is lifted off the ground before the floodplain covers the site. In April it goes back, in the same place, on the same pan. Locally sourced timber and off-grid solar keep the footprint light, in step with the way the park manages its own recovery.

Sound carries through canvas in a way it does not through walls. That is rather the point, and the pan keeps no quiet hours.

Communal Areas

There is one shared building, set on the same pan-side line as the tents, with a fire at its heart. At twenty people, dinner is a single long table, white linen, the bar at one end. After dark the fire pulls people pan-side, and whatever has come down to drink that evening is out there in the dark beyond the deck.

Head Chef Eddy runs a kitchen built out of what the region grows. The greens come from the buffer-zone community gardens, the seafood up from the Beira coast, the coffee and honey from the park’s own community enterprises, so the cup at breakfast closes the same loop the room rate funds. The cooking is direct rather than ornate: a fillet under a Gorongosa coffee sauce, or a butternut soup at the end of a cold morning’s drive, gives a fair measure of the kitchen. South African wines and gin and tonics are included; champagne and premium spirits are not.

The day runs through that fire. Porridge over the embers before the morning drive, coffee at sunrise, high tea with whatever has come out of the oven, dinner beside the flames after dark. There is no restaurant, no pool and no spa, and at a camp this small there is little need of them. The only other shared structure is the viewing platform above the two treehide tents, the same view from a little higher and nothing more.

Activities

Drives go out twice a day, before dawn and again in the late afternoon, in open vehicles. The guides are local, named on the operator’s roster, Test Malunga, Chris Belo and Dadiva David Salomao among them, and trained through the same Gorongosa Safaris pipeline that funds the park. At twenty people the drives run at small-group pace, and because the camp sits on the pan, the morning drive does not so much commute to the wildlife as join it. A private guide and vehicle are available on request.

The clearest measure of what has happened here is the waterbuck. A pre-war census counted three and a half thousand; today the figure is close to sixty-seven thousand, the largest single-park population of the species on record, and Very High at the pan and Lake Urema right through the dry season. Lion sit at around two hundred today, up from roughly six at the end of the war, and run at High. Wild dog number one hundred and fifty to two hundred across two packs, reintroduced in 2018 and 2019 from KwaZulu-Natal and the Khamab Kalahari, also High, and in our experience they show at the pan with a regularity that is rare elsewhere in Africa. Elephant, buffalo and hippo gather at Very High through the dry months. Leopard remain Opportunistic, their reintroduction only a year or two old, and rhino are absent altogether. This is a Big Four park, not a Big Five one, and a traveller who counts safari by the Big Five will not find the fifth here.

Walking safaris also leave camp twice daily, guided, minimum age twelve, no more than four on foot at once. They work at a different scale to the drives: matabele ants, the spoor of last night’s hyena, the bushbuck a vehicle would have driven straight past. Boating and canoeing run only when the floodplain is high enough to carry them, April into early May, and not a day longer.

The conservation work is the other reason to come, and at Chicari it is not kept at arm’s length. The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory at Chitengo is open to visitors Monday to Friday: a working research station, directed by Dr Piotr Naskrecki, where more than a hundred species new to science have been recorded since it opened in 2014. On stays of five nights or more, the Pangolin Rescue Programme will walk you out with the reintegration team; the sightings are Opportunistic, but the walk itself is the thing. Buffer-zone community visits are included. The full-day Mount Gorongosa and coffee tour, up the granite massif that feeds the park’s water and through the coffee plots on its slopes, is the one excursion that costs extra.