Mchenja Camp
A lovely camp with superb food - they have the most amazing lemon curd cake (which I made sure I got the recipe for before leaving!) - and lots of game to see. A few niggles though:
- I burn easily and foolishly presumed all jeeps had canopies. Unfortunately the Norman Carr jeeps don't and there wasn't anything they could do about it (Robin Pope camps will put a canopy on if you request it). Not a problem if you don't mind the Africa sun so this was really a personal hiccough - I ended up using a sarong as a sort of tent over my hat!
- In fifteen years of coming to Africa the Norman Carr jeeps were the worst I've ever been in for game viewing, which is after all the reason you are there. If you're in the front row you're fine but the seats behind are almost at the same height. As a result if you're in the third row all you can see in front of you are heads. This is a bit better in the second row (fewer heads to look around). In addition, as you can't see the guide properly it is very hard to hear what he is saying and which direction he's pointing in which rather spoiled it. When I mentioned the difficulty in seeing and hearing to both our guide and the camp manager I was met with blank stares. I'm fairly tall at 5'8" and admittedly my 6'1" husband had less of a problem, but even he had trouble hearing. This could be easily rectified with a 3 inch cushion pad on the second row and a 6 inch cushion pad on the third row - make sure if you're at a Norman Carr camp you take a cushion from your room if you're not very tall!
- The bathroom is outside, which isn't really a problem normally and adds to the authentic feel, but for some reason we had lots of flies during the day and insects at night swarming around the door, the toilet and sink. This made going to the toilet (especially in the middle of the night) a bit unpleasant. This may have just been our tent, which was lovely otherwise, and it's never been a problem before (Nkwali was also outside, albeit mostly under the tent roof, and was absolutely fine), but it was huge relief to have an indoor loo at our next camp.
Mchenja was really nice, we did see loads of game (including mating lions) and I think our niggles were probably just particular to us, but in hindsight we would have rather gone to one of the other Robin Pope camps nearby - Tena Tena or Nsefu.
