South Sudan is one of the last true frontiers of travel. At dawn in a Mundari cattle camp, thousands of long-horned Ankole cattle emerge from the smoke of dung fires — one of the most photographed scenes in Africa, in the world’s youngest country. We arrange every permit: government registration, travel permits and the photography permit are all included.
This 10-day private South Sudan tour covers Nimule National Park, Boma National Park charter flight, Boma National Park, Jonglei region, Jonglei, Nuer tribe settlement with your own guide, vehicle and security arrangements — no fixed group dates: departures run every day of the year, on your dates and at your pace. You stay in a hotel in Juba and a full-service expedition camp at the cattle camps (tents with cots, mobile showers and toilets, camp cook), moving by 4×4 with local translators.
From $5,200 USD per person — final price confirmed at booking. The tour is fully customizable: extra days, different hotels, or route changes are always possible.
10-day South Sudan itinerary
Met at Juba, capital of the youngest country in the world — South Sudan voted for independence in 2011 and has had a hard decade since. The White Nile runs through the middle of the city, and an evening walk along it is the gentlest possible introduction. Very few travellers come here; those who do come for the cattle camps, and they are right to.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
South to Nimule on the Ugandan border, where the Nile comes down in rapids through papyrus wetland. Hippos in numbers, Uganda kob, vervet monkeys and a great deal of birdlife. It is the most accessible park in the country and almost nobody goes.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
Back to Juba and onto a light aircraft east to Boma — 22,000 square kilometres of savanna on the Ethiopian border, with no roads, no lodges and no other visitors. You fly because there is no other way.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
Boma and the Sudd hold the second-largest land mammal migration on Earth after the Serengeti — around 1.2 million white-eared kob and tiang moving north and south with the rains. It was assumed to have been wiped out by twenty years of war; an aerial survey in 2007 found it intact, which is one of the great conservation surprises of the century. There are elephant and buffalo here too, and effectively no infrastructure.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
The specialities: white-eared kob in herds that take an hour to pass, mongalla gazelle, and the Nile lechwe — a swamp antelope found in the Sudd and almost nowhere else. If the seasonal wetlands are right, the shoebill: a prehistoric-looking grey bird a metre and a half tall that stands motionless for hours and then eats a lungfish whole.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
West into Jonglei to the Murle, a pastoralist people with a long and complicated history of conflict with their neighbours, and a culture organised around age-sets. A bush camp, and a very dark sky.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
The Nuer are the second-largest people in South Sudan and were the subject of the most famous ethnography ever written about Africa — Evans-Pritchard's study of a society that had no chiefs, no courts and no state, and worked anyway. They fish the Sudd with spears, keep cattle, and their forehead scars are six parallel cuts made at initiation.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
Back by air to Juba and straight out to a Mundari camp, arriving at the hour when the dung fires are lit and the whole place fills with white smoke and ash-covered cattle.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
A second morning, which is when you actually start to see it rather than photograph it: the ash-washing, the massage of the horns, the boy assigned to a single bull who will spend years with that animal. In the afternoon, time with the elders — the scarification patterns on the forehead mark the clan, and the practice is dying out with the young. Ask, and they will explain.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
A transfer to Juba airport for your flight out. End of our services.
