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 Dinka cattle camp, Dinka camp, Toposa region, Toposa tribe pastoralists, Toposa full day, bush camp 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.
Straight out to a Dinka camp. The Dinka are the largest people in South Sudan and among the tallest in the world, and their entire economy, poetry and idea of themselves is built around cattle. A young man is given a bull, takes its name, composes songs about it, and shapes its horns by hand as it grows.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
A morning in the camp — the ash, the horns, the songs — and then to Bor, capital of Jonglei, where the war began in 1983 and where much of the worst of it happened. The elders here have long memories and they will talk.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
East by light aircraft to the Toposa, in the far south-east near the Ethiopian and Kenyan borders — a cattle-raiding people, heavily beaded, and among the least contacted groups in the country. The women's beadwork is the most elaborate in South Sudan and it encodes age, status and marriage.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
A full day with the Toposa: the cattle camp, the sorghum, a market where the trade is in goats and beads and sorghum and nothing you would recognise, and in the evening the warrior dance — men leaping straight up from standing, which is exactly as impressive as it sounds.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
Into the Lopit Mountains, where villages sit on hilltops for defence and have done for centuries — you climb to reach them. The Lopit still smelt iron in clay furnaces, one of very few places in Africa where the technique survives, and they will show you.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
The Jiye are a small, isolated agropastoralist group in Eastern Equatoria that almost no outsider has visited. Scarification, cattle, sorghum — and a degree of surprise at your presence that is, by this point in the trip, unusual.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
Back across the country to Juba and out again to the Mundari on the Nile, for the last camp.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
The day starts before dawn. The men wash themselves and the cattle in cow urine — it turns their hair orange and works as an antiseptic — and rub the animals down with white ash from the dung fires, which protects against flies and gives the camp its unearthly look. A cow horn is blown; a man sings to his favourite bull. This is not a performance and it is not put on for you. It is one of the most extraordinary things you will ever be allowed to stand in the middle of, and your guide will tell you when to put the camera down.
Overnight: hotel in Juba / tented bush camp.
A transfer to Juba airport for your flight out. End of our services.
