Serengeti, Tanzania

We may have found our favorite location on the trip. We were looking forward to seeing East Africa but had no concept of the vastness nor the quantity and variety of wildlife. This is a hard posting to write because there is so much I would like to share and describe but don't have the space (and you probably don't have the patience to read through my blather). The country is beautiful with wide green valleys dotted with acacia trees and the rocky, granite kopjes jutting up from the ground.


We flew a small, single engine plane from Kilimanjaro airport to the Serengeti Migration Camp. The one hour flight took us over the Great Rift Valley. Fantastic! We landed on a short dirt strip with zebra, wildebeest, and antelope on the end of the runway. We transferred to open top land cruisers for the 30 minute ride to the camp seeing herds of animals including elephants.


The tented camp is located on the Gambetti river. Many of you may have seen this river in documentaries of the migration where the crocodiles attack zebra, antelope and wildebeests as they cross the river. While tented, the camp was comfortable. We each had an individual large tent which made for some interesting walks to the main part of the camp.


Our front door.



Back porch



Bedroom



Lounge



Dining room.

During the first night we were up for hours listening to all the night sounds. Hyrax scrambled on the top of our tent while giraffes and elephants pulled at the trees. At one point, a lion made a kill in the camp. We heard a loud squeal followed by the huffing of the lion.

We spent the morning and afternoons on game drives through beautiful rugged country. We were continuously amazed about the large numbers of animals. In one day we saw 7 lions and uncounted numbers of herbivores. Our first close encounter with a lion was a large male sauntering through thick grass.



After seeing the lion we crested a hill and found hyenas feeding on a wildebeest: the lions kill. The hyenas stole the king's breakfast.



This big guy got tired of us and bared his teeth. It was mating season and the females would wake the male, they'd mate for a few minutes, roar and go back to napping. This process was repeated every 15 minutes or so until the female decided she was impregnated. This can last for weeks.



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I think one of my favorites, though, is the Masai giraffe.


Note the zebra at the base of the kopje. Wildebeest are the most numerous followed by zebra.

We saw many more herbivores, primates and carnivores but there isn't space sufficient to share all these photos.

One experience I want to share occurred the night before leaving. After dark you couldn't go anywhere in camp without a guide due to the animals. After supper, Paula and I were being escorted back to our tent. We reached the bottom of the hill and the guide put out his arm to stop us; a hippo feeding on grass about 15' in front of us in the dark. We skirted the hippo and continued down the trail with flashlights out and eyes peeled. We made it about 100' when the guide pulled up short and started back peddling - cape buffalo straddling the path. The guide moved us off to another tent and then made noises which got the buffalo to move a bit off the trail. We took a wide circuit through the brush and, just about the time we located the trail, two more cape buffalo. The guide, Charles, was obviously uneasy and shaken at this point. A cape buffalo and hippo behind us and two cape buffalo ahead. We abandon all hope of using the trail and started up a rocky hillside through the thorny acacia trees. Somehow, Charles located our tent in the dark, saw us to our door, bid us good night and quietly slipped away.



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Location:Serengeti Migration Camp