Charlotte Uhlenbroek: On living in the wild

Last May and June I stayed with eight celebrities and a television production team at the Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa working on a new BBC television show called Safari School. I had spent a lot of time in equatorial Africa but I hadn't been to South Africa before and I don't think anyone's ever made a wildlife show like this.

The idea is that the celebrities have to learn how to become game rangers. Every day they have to undertake tasks set by their instructors, Graham and Andrew, who are very experienced rangers, and at the end of each week the two worst trainees face a head-to-head challenge to remain in Africa.

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So each week, one of them has to go home until the fourth week when we lose one every day. When it gets down to the final two, each one has to take a group of top conservationists on a game drive which might include changing a tyre or having to face down a charging elephant. The conservationists then decide the winner by judging who has learnt the most in four weeks of training and delivered the most convincing performance as a ranger. It's a pretty intimidating challenge and a month's training isn't long if you've come out from Britain as a complete rookie.

I can't tell you who wins, but the celebrities involved are Brooke Kinsella (EastEnders), Jeremy Sheffield (Holby City, Wedding Date), Paul Usher (Brookside, The Bill), Blair McDonough (Neighbours, The Vegemite Tales), Carrie Grant (Fame Academy vocal coach), Claire King (Emmerdale, Bad Girls), the Olympic athlete Jamie Baulch and the broadcaster Jan Leeming.

As host, it was my job to set the scene about Shamwari, provide a bit more detail about the rangers' job and talk about issues such as poaching. I also interviewed the celebrities at the end of each day and was the one who had to say "pack your bags" to the losers of the head-to-head challenges. I was genuinely sad to see each of them go. They were all fascinating and it was amazing to witness their journeys. They didn't just learn a lot about wildlife, Shamwari and all the conservation issues, they found out an awful lot about themselves as well.

As someone who studies animal behaviour, I am, of course, interested in people. In a sense, I studied our celebrities in a similar way. I noticed how, quite quickly, they exhibited an awful lot of physical contact. They were intensely bonding. There is a parallel with the chimp community.

Shamwari is a 49,000-acre private game reserve in the Eastern Cape, between Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown. It was established by Adrian Gardiner in 1992 as a way of conserving a vanishing way of life. The area had been teeming with wildlife - big cats, elephants and rhinos - but much was wiped out by settlers during the 19th century. What was left was poor farm land. Adrian has brought back the eco-system and provided a positive example of how responsible tourism can work. This isn't a blanket approval of game reserves but Shamwari has done it well (in fact, it has won the World's Leading Conservation Company and Game Reserve award for five consecutive years). Now Shamwari's five-star lodges are helping to protect some of the world's most endangered species.

The celebrities stayed in a self-contained lodge (two to a room), which was very comfortable, but we took away some of the luxuries, such as televisions - and we made them spend one night in the bush. I do think this is a fantastic way of bringing a slightly different audience to wildlife programmes - all our celebrities have their own fans and this introduces them to issues such as conservation in an easily digestible way.

I first went to Africa when I was 10 days old. My father, who is Dutch, and my mother, who is English, were working in Ghana and I was born when they were on leave in England. I lived in Ghana until I was five, so it is the place where I became aware of the world and it still feel likes home. I remember quite vividly my parents saying that we were moving to Nepal and that was the first time I realised that there was anywhere else you could go. I was used to running around barefoot, without many clothes and having a very free existence.

My love of animals and wildlife as a child led to me studying zoology and psychology at Bristol University. I was really interested in the crossover between animal and human behaviour. After my PhD, I spent six months in Burundi helping Jane Goodall (primatologist and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute) set up a conservation project for chimpanzees. Then I went to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, which was Jane's long-term study site, in the north-west corner of the country on the border with Burundi and on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.

I was desperate to learn about the way in which chimps communicate, but the chimps in Burundi were scared of people and would run away, which made any kind of behavioural study difficult. In Gombe the chimps were more habituated because Jane had been there since 1960 and they were used to being followed through the forests. They would sit under the trees while I tape-recorded their calls. We were careful not to interact with the chimps - they just got used to these strange bipeds tagging along with them sometimes.

Where the chimps go, you go and, as they can travel 12 kilometres in a day through really rough terrain, it can be hard work. You have to keep up even if that means running through dense foliage with all the equipment. You basically do what they do which occasionally means snacking on the same fruits in the forest. You get into the rhythm of their lives, which is lovely.

I love Kenya and the whole of east Africa but Tanzania is my favourite because that's my stomping ground. I worked in the forest for four years, I speak Swahili and I go back regularly so I'm very at home there. Tanzania has some of the best wildlife in the world and some beautiful wildlife parks, the best two being the Serengeti National Park and the Selous Game Reserve. Selous, in the south-west, is three times larger than the Serengeti and twice the size of Belgium. It was founded by the German colonial administration in 1905 and later expanded to include elephant migration routes. You really get a sense of wilderness in these reserves.

As for the people, the Tanzanians are just some of the nicest I've ever come across. I worked really closely with the researchers there and they became my second family. They derive a lot of pleasure from spending time with people and families. When I worked in Gombe, I would periodically come back to England to write up some of my research. Then, when I returned, the Tanzanians would tell me off for being too abrupt. I'd say good morning to them and then launch into a series of instructions for the day about who should follow which chimp. They'd say, "Charlotte, slow down. We don't live at that pace. How are you? How are your family?" In Gombe, you might spend half an hour talking to the staff about their goats and their family (though not necessarily in that order) before getting down to the day's programme of work.

Tanzania is the result of the union between Tanganyika on the mainland and Zanzibar in 1964. As well as its wildlife, what makes it special is that, at its independence from Britain in 1961, it had Julius Nyerere as its prime minister. He was an extraordinary man with much the same qualities as Nelson Mandela. He had a very genuine socialist ideology and lived a simple life. Although he was fallible economically, he united the country socially and today there is very little conflict between its tribes. Another aspect of his legacy is that Tanzania has a really good standard of education and one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. Tanzanians call him "Mwalimu", which means teacher. He's a kind of founding father and a hero of mine.

Another part of Africa that I've come to know and love is the Congo. It's tropical rainforest, as opposed to savannah, and it can be quite uncomfortable, but it's a real adventure. You're going into the heart of darkness: you won't get a signal on your mobile phone and you'll have leaches crawling up your legs every time you wade through a stream. There are sweat bees that buzz around your eyes and get in your ears and up your nose - they drive you insane. You get parasites called chiggers burrowing into your feet. You're a long way from creature comforts and I love that sense of trying to survive with almost nothing. It's good to be stripped of all your normal accessories. You learn something about yourself. Then, when you come back into the civilised world, you can have a glass of chilled wine and it just tastes fantastic. You appreciate everything so much after you've been through a little hardship and denial.

I can cope with walking for 12 hours and wading through swamps barefoot but you do have to be careful and look after yourself. At night in the jungle, we would set up a bush shower made from a few stones we'd put down on the ground and bags filled with water from a nearby river. Then, under torchlight, you would inspect yourself for ticks, which get absolutely everywhere. One morning, I woke up and had a tick on the inside of my eyelid and it was just horrible. I asked one of the Ba'aka people we were working with how I could get rid of it, thinking that he might have some special kind of poultice of leaves and stuff. He reached across, grabbed my eyelid with his fingers and just yanked it out. It was a shock but obviously he'd done it before and I just had to say to myself, "Okay, that's how you deal with it."

I have been called the new David Attenborough, which I take as a huge compliment, but I'm not unique. There are some pretty hardcore researchers out there and many of them are women. I like to be busy and I love travelling but last year I took my foot off the accelerator because I was spending so much time on the road that I found that my brain was constantly trying to catch up with my body. I didn't want to get to the point where I became too exhausted to fully appreciate where I was. I want to get a dog and spend a bit more time at home with my partner. But having said that, I've always had itchy feet. Somebody will come up with a campaign and I'll be off again.

'Safari School' starts tomorrow on BBC2 at 6.30pm and runs every weekday for four weeks. For more information about Shamwari Game Reserve go to shamwari.com

My favourite view

In the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia, there is an escarpment, which plummets vertically for one kilometre. In the plains below are extraordinary table-top mountains that rise up steeply and seem to have had their tops sawn off. The scenes as you go through the small towns and villages are almost biblical. You see the shepherds herding their sheep, people with flowing white robes leading donkeys and Coptic paintings in the churches. This is the land of King Solomon - it has a very special feel.

My dream beach

In Gombe, Tanzania, I lived in a corrugated iron hut with a thatched roof on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. The lake was 15 paces from my front door and the beautiful beach is 770km long. The water was crystal clear and at night the stars were so bright that you could see Venus reflected on the surface. As I bathed, I could see civet cats, genets and white-tailed mongooses wandering along the shore while, in the forest behind my hut, I could hear chimps and bush babies calling. It is magical - I go back whenever I can.

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