Safari

---

---

A Serengeti safari is must when you are in Tanzania. That’s at least what David Attenborough and Bernhard Grzimek make me believe when I saw their documentaries when I was young (back then in the good old days) and right they are. But let me start from the beginning.

We arrived after the visit with God in Arusha where we were greeted by a friend of our WorldVision guide. The WorldVision dude asked us a while ago if we want to do a Safari and we told him to give us some information but don’t book anything. In good African tradition he ignored that and organized the Safari for us anyway. Wasn’t that bad as the price seemed to be very good. Too good to be true actually and you know what they say about that. To cut a long story short. We did our ground work, checked out the tour operator, asked many times why it’s so cheap (USD 500 per person) and so on. We thought we had it all under control and agreed to start the safari the next day and paid a deposit. The next morning we got up and were greeted by a fully packed 4WD complete with driver, cook and the guy who sold us the tour. I gave him the final payment of USD 500 which resulted in some raised eyebrows. He thought we are going to pay USD 500 per day per person. Two hours later and after talking to his boss (which agreed with us that he tried to rip us off) we had our deposit back. Lesson learned. If seems too good to be true then most likely it is!

The rest of the day was spent looking for a new Safari and in the end we were successful and booked us into a 5 day Tarangeri, Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater Safari. This time everything worked fine. On the first day we were only three in the car and for the rest four which is just the right amount of people.

Tarangire National Park is just the right place to visit in the beginning. Visually quite stunning as the monotonous gray is broken by a vivid green strip of vegetation around a river which flows through it. There are more Elephants and Zebras as you want to see but that doesn’t matter on the first day when even a gazelle is exciting.

Serengeti was on the cards for the next two days and nights and is a different beast all together. Currently its dry season and that is plainly visible. Everything is gray and looks pretty much dead. It is a huge National Park and most of it seems to consist of burned down grass plains or not very alive grass plains waiting to be burned. There are just some patches which are green and in the beginning we thought the place is empty. Luckily our guide Abdulla was very good and knew the places where the animals hide and on our way to the camp ground we saw our first Lion, his Pride and a very dead warthog as lion lunch. We went on many more game drives and saw Leopards (4 + 2 cubs), Giraffes, Elephants (too many), Zebras (even more), Cheetahs (3), wildebeest, Warthogs, buffalos, baboons, Impalas and even a Wild cat which is the original wild form of our house pussy cat. It is quite strange to see these wild animals which are only known from TV and the Zoo in their natural habitat and what’s most surprising most of them don’t give a damn that there are 5 - 10 LandCruisers around them with tourist snapping away. They are all calm and collected and do whatever they do. In the case of all Predators that’s normally sleeping and eating for the rest. One of the most memorable moments was when Kellie spotted a Leopard high in a tree raiding a vulture’s nest and eating the young but very large baby vulture. Not even our guide who spends most of his time in the park and was working as camera man for 2 years has seen anything like that before.
Was glad that I took my SLR, the additional batteries and the extra large memory card. I must have taken around 800 pictures in 5 days. Will be fun to sort them out once I’m home. I will also offer the uncut slide show if anyone is interested 😉

The last National Park on the list was the Ngorongoro Crater which is visually quite stunning as it contains a white lake, green grass and trees and lots of animals but doesn’t compare to the Serengeti.

After 5 days of doing nothing than taking pictures and having a good time it was then time to say good bye to Leo, Remo, Adbulla (Driver) and Paolo (Cook).

One man which should also be mentioned here is Bernhard Grzimek which can be seen as the father of Serengeti. He was the head of the Frankfurt Zoologische Gesellschaft and was a main driving force in saving the Serengeti in the last century. Must have been an interesting character as he not only helped saving the Serengeti but also married the wife of his son after he dies in a plane crash (gotta watch those vultures when your flying)

---

Photos

Mummy is angry
Apparently she just wanted to check out if we are dangerous

spot the leopard
We were waiting for an hour for the leopard to do something but it didn’t. lazy!

spot the leopard.
Hard to see but it is currently just below the nest in the middle with its lunch a volture chick

cheetahs
The guide drove on an invisible road to get us those pictures

Doing what lions do best
nothing

Leopard doing potty
Not sure how she did it with 5 LandCruisers around

Wildebeest
Most of them buggered of to the Masai Mara a month or so before we arrived