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Serengeti and Ngorongoro

Our trip to the Serengeti started at Dar es Salaam with a late night walk through the eerie streets. Then on the next day to Arusha by bus past Kilimanjaro.

In Arusha we settled in for a while, then started to go around the tour offices looking for a good safari tour. Arusha nestles under the shadow of the 14,980 ft volcano Mt Meru After a few places, we found a tour which looked pretty good using a Land Rover (Silver Spear Safaris). We would be sharing the land rover with an English guy, a Dutch couple and the driver/guide and young cook. The driver was a calm but humorous African man, self contained and capable looking. He inspired confidence. The cook was a young man, who would turn out to be a good laugh to be with.

The road was tarmac for a while, then turned to a dirt road towards Ngorongoro. The driver was keeping the speed up to about 40, and the ruts weren't too bad. A rucksack was shaken off the roof, and we stopped to pick it up. A tribeswoman came to ask for money to be photographed, but no-one wanted to. We drove past Lake Manyara but this was not part of our tour so we only saw it briefly.

As we drove up into the hills around Ngorongoro the driver told us there were leopards in this vicinity and they were active at this time. Suddenly he stopped the vehicle killing the lights, and out of the brush to the left walked a leopard, slowly walking across the road in front of us and heading up into the woods on the right of the road. It stopped briefly to look at us, then was on its way. It was very exciting to see our first big wild cat - a beautiful confident creature.

As we drove up through the hills we were surprised to see a few elephants on the bare hillsides. The guide said that this was part of the habitat they would travel through, though they were much sparser here than in the crater. Reaching the top of the crater we pitched our tents for the night, and ate a basic but good meal made by the cook. The Dutch couple were unimpressed by the hygiene of the cook but hey this was the African bush...

During the night I was woken by snorting outside the tent and then something trying to enter through the zip. I banged on the tent shouting a little to try and scare it off. But it persisted for a while. I didn't know what it was but it sounded pretty big. After a while it gave up - maybe it was a large baboon. We had seen some hanging out at one of the rest stops, where the English guy had enjoyed tormenting them - they got very upset and were pretty scary.

The next day we drove the steep road down the crater wall. It was not permitted to camp in the crater so a day visit was all that was allowed. Only Masaii could spend the night there with their cattle. The guide explained which part of the area they could use for cattle and where to put their huts and bomas.

Ngorongoro is one of the richest areas for wild life remaining in the world. Soon we were seeing many wild species - elephant, hippo, warthog, various types of antelope, monkeys, water buffalo and nasty looking crocodiles. The monkeys were tamish though they weren't supposed to be fed. They hung around the picnic areas showing off their multicolored private parts.

A drive into the forest had us driving alongside elephants which we could hear creating carnage amongst the branches and glimpse them through the branches. Occasionally we would come upon them walking down the dirt road before they veered off into the forest.

Looking up at the crater wall we could see a waterfall of cloud coming over the top edge descending down into the crater, which was kind of beautiful - or at least I was taken by it.

We were told that the water buffalo and hippo were the most dangerous animals. The buffalo were shortsighted and very bad tempered, charging with little provocation. We saw a particularly fine lioness lying on a fallen tree trunk, she looked at us without much interest, this was not her time to hunt. Earlier the previous evening we had been able to drive right up to a lion and lioness sitting together. They were a beautiful couple just enjoying the evening air it seemed. It was a special moment that had banished the fatigue of the journey and made queasy tummies seem unimportant.

Through the drives our respect for the guide grew as he told us stories about the landscape and fauna, and was able to spot beasts very quickly from a distance and head for them to satisfy our clicking lenses. It became a game seeing who could spot an animal first, three of us with our heads in the roof enclosure, the lucky ones with binoculars, the rest with the naked eye. We were told how people on safaris would come to spot the 'big five', and we wondered idly how many we would see. Our land rover seemed one of the more capable vehicles, as we crisscrossed the crater floor we saw there were maybe 20 vehicles in the area, usually spread out, but they would come together where an important animal was found such as a cheetah hunting. And at times like these you could start to feel quite sorry  for some of the animals surrounded by large clicking telephoto lens; sometimes they looked quite miserable to be the centre of such attention.

Leaving the crater we headed up into the Serengeti itself. Here the landscape was more open with sparse Acacia trees, and the occasional rock outcrop. Famed for the migration of the wildebeest, we weren't there at that time, and things weren't so frantic.

Our camp that night was in the wild of the savanna, tents in a clearing with no barrier to the animals. After the experience the night before I was a little nervous about needing a pee in the night and decided to go in full view of the clearing rather than in the dark where gawd knows what may lurk. Late that night we woke to hear lions roaring. The sounds came closer and were unnervingly loud. From being the passive beasts during the day they were now in full voice, and very close. We realized they were in our clearing, it sounded like a least four or five. We had been told to stay in the tents, but the tents seemed very flimsy, and a woman in a nearby tent was terrified and started to scream. The lions were in the clearing a good few minutes and she screamed and cried in fear for some time afterwards. The lions we had seen earlier had been docile, lazing around, but now was their hunting time and their power was very evident.

We had a couple of days in the park with a number of drives, early morning and sunset drives being favored by the guide. They were certainly very scenic. We had a number of chances to observe cheetahs hunting Thompsons gazelle, seeing a kill for one cheetah after several failures. A mother with two tiny cubs moved on from larger cats and we hoped the cubs would survive.

My favorites had to be the giraffes. In their native environment with the space of the plains they looked like giant prehistoric beasts striding through the long grass. The warthogs were the funniest - tough little cookies with a turn of speed. While there were all those larger carnivores, it was the hyena that won the most respect from me, capable of travelling vast distances for a meal, the solitary hyena we came across looked incredibly durable and a match for anything out there.

On our final day the last large animal we hadn't seen was the rhino. We asked if there was any chance of seeing one, but the driver said they were now rare in the park, and it was unlikely we would find one - but he would try. He searched and searched, flagging down other vehicles and asking their guides if they seen any in Swahili. Late on almost given up, we were about to leave, when far away in the plains he saw a spec. He thought it may be rhino, and through the lenses we would see the body and the horn. It was. It was so far away,  I felt glad. Out there in that space, it seemed it was safer from the poachers. The guide wasn't sure but he thought there may also be a baby. It was difficult to tell, but later when I enlarged the photo, I could see there was a smaller shape alongside the mother. Maybe this baby would have a better chance out there away from the tourists and those with more threatening intentions.

Some more photos from the Serengeti here