Mkomazi Wilderness Retreat

Mkomazi National Park was, by the 1990s, a landscape reduced by overgrazing, fire and poaching, its wildlife thinned across the plains below the Pare and Usambara Mountains. The Axmann family, German farmers who had settled in Tanzania in 1992 to run an organic farm near Morogoro, watched the park's slow recovery over three decades of safaris through the region. Plans for a camp began in 2016. Construction started in 2019, and Mkomazi Wilderness Retreat opened in February 2023, set on Dindira Hill above the park's principal water source. Seven teak tents step down the slope, each raised on its own platform with a private bathroom and balcony facing the plains or Mount Kilimanjaro. Herds gather at the water below camp through the day. At night, you may hear lions or elephants at the same spot, audible from bed. Above the tents, an open-sided restaurant and bar share the same outlook, with a separate viewpoint kept quiet for guests. Mkomazi holds two black rhino reserves, Mbula and Kisima, and rare antelope such as gerenuk and beisa oryx alongside more than four hundred recorded bird species. Game drives, walking safaris and night drives run from camp, along with visits to the rhino sanctuaries. It remains a lightly visited park.