Podcast: Fabia from Chem Chem Lodges
Inside the slow safari philosophy, the wildlife corridor and the community programmes that make Chem Chem Lodges one of Tanzania's most purposeful places to stay.
The Slow Safari, the Wildlife Corridor and Why Tanzania Deserves More of Your Time
Not many safari lodge founders arrive in Africa having actively disliked their first safari. Fabia, the Swiss co-founder of Chem Chem Lodges in Tanzania, is one of them. She found it too scheduled, too curated, too much like sitting in traffic while someone narrated the digestive systems of animals at her. That experience, combined with a proposal from her French partner Nicola to take on a derelict hunting concession in northern Tanzania, produced something that has quietly become one of the most talked-about properties in East Africa. Shaun Stanley sat down with Fabia for the Stanley Safaris podcast, and what followed was one of the most honest and energising conversations about what safari can, and should, actually be.
Chem Chem Lodges now operates three properties in northern Tanzania, employs two hundred and fifty people and manages a wildlife corridor that the Tanzanian government has adopted as the national blueprint for corridor recovery. None of that was planned. It happened because two people with no background in hospitality, no experience in conservation and no particular expertise in Africa decided to commit fully and never compromise.
The Safari She Hated, and the One She Built
Fabia’s early safari experience reads like a checklist of everything Chem Chem is not. A rigid schedule, a shared vehicle with strangers, a guide who treated every sighting as a lecture, and food that failed to match the setting. She came from a background in investment banking, accustomed to protecting her time fiercely, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars to sit in a car while someone else decided where she went and what she saw did not appeal. What she loved, and had always loved growing up in Switzerland, was nature on its own terms: hiking, stillness, the kind of connection that requires you to slow down rather than drive past.
When Africa came back into the picture through Nicola’s vision for a conservation project in Tanzania, Fabia’s interest was not in replicating what she had experienced before. It was in building something that felt the way she had always wanted a safari to feel: unhurried, flexible, genuinely connected to the landscape rather than moving efficiently through it. She had no hospitality training and no template to copy. What she had was her own experience as a guest, a clear sense of what was missing and the willingness to build around that instead.
A Desolate Concession, a Long-Term Vision
When Fabia and Nicola arrived at their concession in northern Tanzania in 2005, what they found was closer to a dust bowl than a wildlife sanctuary. Sixty thousand cattle grazed illegally across the land. Animals were being poached regularly. The vegetation was stripped, and the corridors that had once connected the ecosystem to Tarangire National Park had all but disappeared. Forty years earlier, the villages surrounding the concession had elephants. By the time Chem Chem arrived, that felt like a story from another era. There was no master plan, no conservation blueprint, no external funding. Just a conviction, born partly from naivety and partly from the kind of stubbornness that eventually looks like vision, that it was possible to bring it back.
Twenty years later, the concession borders Tarangire National Park and forms a critical link in the broader ecosystem connecting Tarangire to Lake Manyara, the crater highlands and the Serengeti. No elephants have been poached within the concession since hunting stopped in 2013. Chem Chem has built the first Joint Monitoring and Protection Centre in Tanzania, a software-integrated system gathering real-time data across the entire area, now being rolled out in the Serengeti and in partnership with the Grumeti Fund and other major conservation investors. What began as a personal project on paper is now the government’s model for how corridor recovery should work across the country.
Ten Villages and the Business of Empowerment
The land Chem Chem operates on belongs to a confederation of ten villages. The relationship with those communities is not a box to be ticked or a fee to be paid. It is an ongoing negotiation, a long-term investment and, by Fabia’s own account, one that will never be finished. The Chem Chem approach to community focuses on two pillars: education and economic empowerment. For younger children, this means conservation education programmes and small day trips into the concession. For secondary school students, it means something more unusual: a four-day trip to see their own country, visiting the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti in Chem Chem’s own vehicles, camping and staying in local hostels. These are places the tourists arrive from overseas to see, but that most Tanzanian children from the surrounding villages will never experience. Fabia’s view is that this is profoundly unfair, and correcting it is part of the work.
For adults, the economic empowerment programme has trained nearly three thousand people across four business areas suited to the local economy: beekeeping, poultry, sunflower farming and vegetable production. Participants learn to save money, write a business plan, open a bank account and access a community loan fund. Of the three thousand trained, two thousand nine hundred have opened their own businesses successfully. Average monthly incomes have risen by one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty percent. The programme is now in its second iteration, with the one hundred most motivated participants from the first round moving into microcredit at a larger scale. A parallel programme for young people aged sixteen to eighteen teaches business skills designed to travel with them, opening pathways that do not depend on agriculture in an already land-pressured area. These are not handouts. They are tools, and the distinction matters enormously to Fabia.
Three Properties, One Philosophy
Chem Chem Lodge sits on the escarpment above Lake Manyara, looking out across the Rift Valley towards the crater highlands. Surrounded by unusual islands of palm trees in the middle of the Tanzanian interior, it is the calmest of the three properties and works particularly well as a place to decompress after the intensity of the Serengeti. Guided walks, a silent nature walk followed by a tea ceremony and the option to run with a Maasai guide in the early morning give the camp a distinctly active, grounded feel. It is where the Slow Safari philosophy is most visible: days shaped entirely around the guest, not the other way around.
Cross the corridor, and you reach Little Chem Chem and Forest Chem Chem, both bordering Tarangire National Park and set amongst baobab woodland that feels ancient in a way that is difficult to describe until you are standing in it. These two properties offer more traditional game viewing, and the wildlife here has been habituated over two decades to the presence of vehicles and people moving quietly. The big tusker elephants Chem Chem is famous for moving through in numbers you rarely encounter elsewhere. Little Chem Chem overlooks Lake Burunge and sits only twenty minutes by light aircraft from Arusha, making it one of the fastest immersions into genuine wilderness available in northern Tanzania. Forest Chem Chem is exclusive use, available to a single group at a time, built for families or close friends who want the bush to feel, however briefly, entirely their own.
What the Slow Safari Actually Means
When Fabia started talking about the Slow Safari, people laughed. Now it is a phrase that appears across the industry, often without the substance behind it. Her version is specific: it is about returning the guest’s time to them. No fixed wake-up calls, no mandatory activities, no guide performing authority over a vehicle full of strangers. If you want to wake at sunrise for a walk with the Maasai, that is available. If you want to spend two hours sitting beside a waterhole at midday, watching whatever comes down to drink, that is available too. The schedule is yours, not the camp’s. And the guide’s role shifts accordingly, from lecturer to companion, from someone who fills the silence to someone who knows when silence is the point.
Fabia’s deeper argument is that nature, experienced at the pace it actually moves at, does something to people that no amount of ticking boxes achieves. She is not anti-excitement and she is not suggesting that watching a hundred elephants around a waterhole is anything less than extraordinary. She is suggesting that rushing to the next thing before you have absorbed the current one is a habit imported from a world that safari is meant to offer relief from. The British word for vacation is holiday, she points out, a holy day. She thinks the industry would benefit from remembering that.
Frequently Asked Questions
Chem Chem’s defining difference is its philosophy before it is its product. Every element of the guest experience is built around flexibility and genuine connection, not a fixed programme designed to keep people busy. There is no mandatory wake-up time, no shared vehicle with strangers, no pressure to be anywhere at any particular moment. The three properties each have a distinct character, from the escarpment calm of Chem Chem Lodge above Lake Manyara to the baobab wilderness of Little Chem Chem and the exclusive privacy of Forest Chem Chem bordering Tarangire. What sits underneath all three is the same: a concession that Fabia and her partner Nicola transformed over twenty years from degraded land into a functioning wildlife corridor, and a community programme that has measurably changed lives in the surrounding villages. When you stay at Chem Chem, you are part of that story.
The honest answer is that it depends on what you want from your time in Tanzania, and it is a conversation worth having before you book. Chem Chem Lodge is ideal if you want a quieter, more contemplative experience, particularly as a wind-down after the Serengeti or Ngorongoro, with walking, guided hikes and a pace that genuinely slows you down. Little Chem Chem and Forest Chem Chem are closer to Tarangire and offer more classic game viewing, excellent elephant encounters and the baobab landscape that northern Tanzania is known for. Little Chem Chem works well at the start of an itinerary, a quick flight from Arusha and immediately into the wilderness. Forest Chem Chem is our recommendation for families, groups of friends or couples who want complete privacy. We often suggest combining two of the three properties within a single visit. At Stanley Safaris, we know all three well and will match you to the right one.
Yes, and we do so as often as the itinerary supports it. Chem Chem sits naturally within a northern Tanzania circuit and pairs extremely well with the Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Lake Natron. Shaun has stayed at the properties himself and Ingrid, our Director of African Safaris, has as well. The feedback from guests we have sent to Chem Chem is consistently exceptional, not just for the wildlife and the settings, but for the quality of hosting and the sense that the camp genuinely cares about the experience each person has. If you are planning a Tanzania safari and want to include something that goes beyond the standard circuit, get in touch and we will show you how Chem Chem fits.
Final Thoughts from Shaun
I remember sitting with Fabia under the baobab tree at Forest Chem Chem and hearing her talk about the boarding school safari for the first time. I knew immediately that I was talking to someone who had built something from a completely honest place. No borrowed ideas, no industry template, just a clear and personal sense of what was wrong with the existing model and the stubbornness to do it differently. That conversation stayed with me, and every guest I have sent to Chem Chem since has come back saying something similar: that it felt different, lighter, more real.
Tanzania is a country we include in a lot of itineraries, and the northern circuit is well-trodden for good reason. But Chem Chem is the part of a Tanzania trip that guests find hardest to explain when they get home. Not because nothing happened, but because what happened was harder to photograph than a lion at sunset. It was slower and quieter and, in the end, more lasting. If that is the kind of safari you are looking for, Chem Chem is exactly where we would send you.
Experience the Slow Safari for Yourself
Chem Chem Lodges is one of the first properties we recommend to guests heading to Tanzania. Tell us when you want to go and we will take care of the rest.
