Into the Serengeti

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Day 1


We crossed the border yesterday, a painful process in the sweltering heat which took about an hour and a half of completing paperwork and waiting in long lines on both the Kenyan and Tanzanian side in order for us to get our visas. Eventually we crossed and made our way into the new country that we're going to explore over the next week, and a couple of things became clear to me very quickly as we started out.


One, Tanzania is a much richer country than Kenya in terms of the landscape. Kenya was very brown and arid, and whilst Tanzania does have its dry spots, for the most part it is covered with lush green grass and trees heavy with fruits and flowers. There are fields full of vegetables, and large herds of cows and goats are very much in evidence. Agriculture contributes a lot to Tanzanian income, and although the country is not unaffected by poverty, the general standard of living seems to be somewhat better than that which I saw in Kenya.


The second thing that I noticed is that Tanzanians seem to be less open than Kenyans. Whilst travelling through Kenya, locals - not just children, adults as well - would smile and wave at our truck as we passed, but in Tanzania there isn't so much of this. Occasionally we'll get waved at, but for the most part we're looked at in a way that can range from mild curiosity to outright suspicion. But maybe it's just the sight of our truck - which is something of a vehicular behemoth, to be fair - rather than us ourselves, because the locals have always been friendly in our face to face dealings with them.



After a couple of hours of driving this morning, we reached the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and our first stop was at a viewpoint of the Ngorongoro Crater itself. We won't be going down into the Crater until Saturday, but the view of its green and brown plains with the big salt lake right in the middle was stunning. Our second stop was at Olduvai Gorge, also known as the Cradle of Mankind, which is famous for being the place where hominids who lived millions of years ago were found in the 1930s. There's a museum at the site, and we were given an informative talk by a tour guide. It was very interesting, but I was secretly thrilled to see a pigeon walking around there. I hadn't expected to see any pigeons at all in Africa, so I took a picture before we drove on to the Serengeti. It would have been rude not to.


The Serengeti itself is so different to the Masai Mara, which just seems to be a sea of long grass with the occasional tree or bush dotted about here and there. In stark contrast, the grass in the Serengeti is much shorter, and there are plenty of trees and pools, as well as rock formations that wouldn't look out of place in The Lion King. There is an abundance of wildlife in the Serengeti, countless zebras, gazelles and giraffes, but the sheer size of the savannah makes it difficult to spot the big cats. It seems that here, you just have to hope that you'll be lucky. One of the things that I loved best about the Serengeti were the thousands of white butterflies fluttering about. There's so many of them that at first I thought they were flower petals being blown on the breeze, and it took a while for me to realise what they actually were.


After a beautiful sunrise, we headed to our camp. The site is literally in the middle of the Serengeti, unfenced and protected from wildlife only by guards with guns. Just two days ago, a pack of lions chased a buffalo into the camp and killed it in front of the guests. This is the sort of place where you can't leave food in your tents, and you can't go to the toilet on your own. You have to take a torch with you wherever you go, because the light of the torch illuminates animals' eyes and lets you know if there are any nearby.


I spent the last hour before bed lying on my back in a circle with the Argentinians and the German girl I'm sharing a tent with, looking up at the stars, spotting the shooting ones, whilst the sounds of the Serengeti played all around us. It was the most surreal experience I've ever had, and one of the most perfect.


Day 2


I woke up this morning to find that I hadn't been eaten, trampled or otherwise mauled whilst asleep. It was a wonderful feeling. I didn't hear anything during the night, and slept surprisingly well, but some of the others said that they had heard hyenas calling to each other. Our next campsite is out of the Serengeti itself and closer to the Ngorongoro Crater, but still very much open to the animals. I don't think I'd want a pack of lions or anything too exciting coming in to say hello, but a giraffe or a few zebras would be nice.



On our game drive today, we managed to find the ever elusive leopard not once but twice. Leopards are notoriously difficult to see in the wild, so to come across two within an hour of each other was a real privilege. Both leopards had climbed up into solitary trees set back from the road and were well camouflaged by the leaves, so whoever spotted them first must be really eagle eyed. Vehicles in the Serengeti aren't allowed to leave the road, as opposed to the Masai Mara where the rangers use their discretion, so it wasn't even as if the leopards had been blatantly visible.



We have now seen all of the Big 5, which apparently is more than many people can say when they come on safari. We've been very lucky so far, and this continued once we arrived in our campsite for the night. Not five minutes after we finished putting our tents up, a big bull elephant wandered into the camp and started casually eating just a matter of feet away from us. I've become used to the animals paying our safari trucks minimal attention while we're on game drives, but I was expecting a little more of a reaction from this guy. Nothing. He didn't even look in our direction. I don't think he was oblivious to us being there; he just couldn't care less.




The day ended on a sad note for me with a phone call from home. My great-aunt passed away during the night. I'm feeling pretty upset about it, not to mention guilty that I'm going to miss her funeral and there's nothing at all I can do about that. I wasn't prepared for this. Why would I have been? I guess that I'm just living in the moment, in my own little travel bubble, and although I left home knowing that sometimes things would go wrong and there would be times when I felt sad, the death of a family member was never something that crossed my mind.


I have to try and find a balance now, where I can grieve for the loss of a person who I loved whilst still embracing and enjoying all of the things that I experience on this adventure. I know that my aunt wouldn't want me to miss out, and I've been told that, but I can't not grieve for her. I can't deny a natural healing process from running its course. I do have two comforts, though; one, that my aunt is no longer in pain, and two, that I was able to say goodbye to her and see her one last time two days before I left. Both of those things mean a lot.



Day 3


Today we drove the bumpy road down into Ngorongoro Crater, a caldera that was formed many years ago by a volcano erupting. Not long into the drive, we came across a male and a female lion lying side by side. Unlike the males we saw in the Masai Mara, this one was an adult as opposed to a juvenile, the first Mufasa-like lion we've seen so far. We couldn't believe it when he climbed on top of the lioness and started mating with her. Apparently they mate every fifteen to twenty minutes when the lioness is on heat (and this is true, because we waited a while and the lion got on top of his woman again after quarter an hour). It felt a bit wrong to video these two going at it, but, well, I did, and so did a lot of other people. Attenborough would, so that makes it all right.


The interaction between the lions was funny. During the, erm, intimate moment, the male lion got overexcited and bit the lioness on the neck. She snapped at him - and to be fair to him, he immediately backed off - and then she got up and sat down, staring off into the distance with her back to the male. She looked for all the world like she was sulking. The male lion stood behind her as though doing his best to tell her that he was sorry, but eventually he gave up and just lay down next to her. After a while, the lioness forgave him and they wandered off together, much to the alarm of a poor wildebeest who decided that they wouldn't notice him standing just feet away if he stayed perfectly still.


Our second lion experience was a couple of hours later. We came across a pack of ten or so lionesses with a juvenile male lion, and they were all just relaxing in the shade of the safari vehicles that had arrived before us. I don't know why they chose the trucks for shade, when there were plenty of trees around for them to shelter under, but they seemed happy and didn't even glance up at us. Some of them got up after a while and began stalking a warthog on the other side of a watering hole, but luckily for him, they decided he was too far away for them to bother trying. It was interesting to see them at least starting to put a hunt into motion though, each lioness sitting a short distance away from the lioness closest to her and just staring at the oblivious warthog as they calculated their next moves. It was another display of power and strength, and I have no doubt that Pumbaa would have been history if not for the water separating him from the lions.


In the afternoon we drove back to Arusha and set up our tents at a campsite called Snake Park. The place is run by a small, silver haired lady called Ma, and it seems like a backpackers' favourite, with signed t-shirts and money all over the walls and ceilings. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning, drinking and laughing and sharing a wonderful end to the best day of the trip so far, with the friends I've made along the way.

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