Safari!

Hi guys,
Sorry it's been so long since I've posted, but hopefully this huge one will make up for it.

Tanzania has among the highest proportion of national park land and conservation areas of any country in the world, and Alex and I were certainly not going to miss out on a chance to visit some of them while we're here.

On Friday, we embarked on a five-day, four-night camping safari to Lake Manyara national reserve, Serengeti national park, and Ngorongoro conservation area. (The reason we took our little holiday so early into our trip was to avoid the long rains, which usually start in mid-March but are expected to come early this season).

To say the whole experience was spectacular would be gross understatement.

Alex and I shared our Land Cruiser with Kareem, a backpacker from Sweden who is making his way through East Africa. In addition to the three of us, there was another truck from the same safari company doing the same itinerary as us, and we ended up hanging out with them during our trip as well; Gwen and Chris, a couple of Edmontonian engineers now living in Red Deer, and Kelly (Australian) and Na (Finnish), who work as nurses at King Faisel hospital in Saudi Arabia.

On our drive to Manyara, I was surprised by how quickly the landscape changed from the lush foothills to rolling plains and farmland, punctuated by lone hills and a few longer ridges.

Lake Manyara NR is one of the smallest parks in Tanzania, and about half of the protected area is over the lake itself, leaving only about 100km2 to visit, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in concentration of animals. The park is right up against the wall of the Great African Rift, and is unusual in that it is mostly groundwater forest—which is great for its wildlife population, who are mostly permanent residents.

As soon as we entered the park, we came upon a troop of olive baboons (the first of many sightings) at the side of the road. Only moments later, our breath was taken away by a herd of elephants feeding in the trees, including a baby elephant. Lake Manyara has one of the highest densities of elephants in the entire Northern safari circuit, and I'm pretty sure we saw all of them. We saw several families (and more young ones!). We also saw a bunch of enormous, solitary bull elephants—some right next to our truck. One in particular was grazing so close to us that we could smell the plants he was crushing under his feet. I could have counted his eyelashes. They were so beautiful: massive, dusty, and totally relaxed.

The baboons who welcomed us were only the tip of the monkey iceberg. Baboons are well adapted for almost all habitats here, and were everywhere, in the trees and on the ground, at Manyara and all the parks we visited. We saw a couple of blue monkeys at Manyara, but the true monkey highlight for me was the small and energetic vervet monkeys. They're fluffy grey with black faces and the males have bright blue balls. The babies and adolescents were really fun to watch, chasing each other around the trees.

We had our first views at Manyara of a lot of the grazers we'd get to know really well at the later parks: zebras, Thompson's and Grant's gazelles, warthogs, impalas, buffalo, wildebeest. We were also treated to giraffe sightings, which I know words will fail to do justice. We first saw them from a distance on the floodplains next to the lake, silhouetted against the hazy brown and blue and looking tall and thin and otherworldly. How could anything be that big? And when the move (both legs of one side moving together, giving them a swaying, teetering walk), they're so graceful and beautiful.

We even visited a our first hippo pool at Manyara. It was full of huge grey mounds that occasionally raised their faces, and we were even lucky enough to see a few teeth.

Despite our great luck at seeing everything, Lake Manyara is probably best-known as a birder's paradise, and it didn't disappoint here either. The algae in the lake attracts flamingoes en masse, and we saw thousands—it looked like someone had taken a pink crayon and drawn over the lake. We also saw Egyptian geese, black-headed plovers, several kinds of stork, pelicans, superb starlings (my new favourite bird along with lilac-breasted rollers—so colourful!), and probably a zillion others.

Part of Saturday, all Sunday, and part of Monday were spent at probably the most famous park in the world. Serengeti national park is right next to Ngorongoro conservation area, and animals move freely between the two, though people do not. Serengeti has no human residents, just campsites and lodges for tourists and scientists, while the Maasai are permitted to live their traditional lifestyles (they don't hunt or engage in agriculture) in Ngorongoro.

Both parks are part of the area covered by the famous Great Migration, one of the largest remaining animal migrations on earth—and we got to see it in action! The migration (more than 3 million wildebeest, buffalo, zebras, and gazelles participate every year) moves with the rains in a rough oval through Ngorongoro, Serengeti, and up to the Maasai Mera in Kenya. At this time of year, the migration is at Ngorongoro, and we got a great view of all the animals from the road—herds of animals all the way to the horizon in all directions. This is what North America must have looked like before the bison populations were decimated (though with fewer zebras).

As we passed into Serengeti proper in the afternoon, the density of animals thinned out and the land got flatter, becoming that archetypical East African grassland, dotted with acacias and kopjes. Kopjes are big outcroppings of igneous rock that seeped through cracks in the sedimentary rock millions of years ago, and were exposed by erosion. They're very important little ecosystems, as they hold water in the hollows in the rock, becoming oases in the dry season. Good-quality soil has also collected in the crevices, and the kopjes always have plenty of trees and plant life not on the flatland. Put together, this means that they're very popular for wildlife.

Our campsite was right in the middle of the Serengeti—if we left our shoes outside our tents, they'd be stolen by hyenas.

Our Sunday morning game drive was quite different than what we'd experienced in the other parks. Instead of being constantly surrounded by hordes of animals, at Serengeti we went longer between sightings...but what sightings they were!!! SO MANY LIONS!

The first encounter was four lionesses walking right down the road, beside our vehicles! One of them was almost too close to take a good picture—about a foot from truck. They were large and muscled, with huge heads and paws and golden eyes. The second encounter was two lionesses who'd climbed a tree to escape the wet ground, but the third one was the best. It was another female in a tree, this time very close to the side of the road. But reclining at the base of the tree was an enormous male lion! At first we could only see his dark mane, then he turned to give us his face, then he stood up and started to stretch and sharpen his claws against the trunk. Just perfect!

On that drive, we also saw more giraffes, visited another wonderful hippo pool (where a few were rolling around and showed us their neat-looking feet, well-adapted for both walking and swimming). We also saw rock hyraxes at the kopjes (they look sort of like marmots, but their closest relative is actually the elephant), lizards, a dikdik, bat-eared foxes, impalas, warthogs, topis, hartebeest, a big herd of buffalo, and many more birds.

Sunday's evening game drive was as spectacular or more. We saw a lot more of the same animals from the morning, but it was the big cats who owned the afternoon. We saw 3 females at the base of a tree right next to the road with their three cubs, chowing down on the remains of a warthog. The little ones were fighting over the skull, while the mothers rested and occasionally cleaned their young's faces with their tongues. Incredibly cute (though the warthog might disagree). We also saw several more lionesses in trees, a lion and lioness sleeping just feet from the side of the road...and a leopard!

I really had no expectations that we would ever see a leopard, as they're solitary, even more nocturnal than lions, and less common. But there one was, sleeping in a tree, near the water, in front of the most beautiful Serengeti landscape.

We went for one final drive in the Serengeti very early Monday morning, which was mostly notable for the excellent giraffe, hippo, and bird sightings. After brunch, we packed up and drove back through Ngorongoro.

The migration was even better on the way back; there seemed to be twice as many animals, and they were crossing back and forth across the road. We also had our best hyena sightings to date, including one whose face was still red with blood from lunch.

Our campsite that night was the best yet—right on the edge of Ngorongoro crater, with hot showers. We drove through the "crater" on Tuesday morning. Of course, Ngorongoro isn't a crater at all; it's actually an enormous caldera, the remains of an exploded volcano that formed along the Rift Valley fault. The crater hosts many ecosystems. It's mostly flat grass- and scrub-land (well-grazed), but there's also one large lake and several small ones, some forested areas, and several wetlands.

It has probably the highest density of predators of anywhere on Earth. What struck me most was how /full/ it seemed. You can see all the walls from any vantage point in the crater. It's about 120km in diameter, which doesn't seem big enough for everything that we saw, and they were all living side by side. We saw a lioness relaxing near the side of the road, not 50m from some (attentive but calm) Thompson's gazelles. There was also a small pack of hyenas roaming around and checking out herd of buffalo, who tolerated them until one crossed some invisible line. Then a couple of bulls stomped and threatened a bit, and the hyena loped off, unbothered.

I had made sure that I had low expectations going into the crater drive. I knew that there are a few animals here that it's either impossible or very difficult to see anywhere else, but I didn't want to get my hopes up just to be disappointed. This was an unnecessary precaution. In addition to hyenas, a lion, elephants, hippos, jackals, the usual grazers, hundreds of wonderful birds, etc, we were fortunate enough to see both a cheetah (relaxing in the long grass) AND either six or eight critically endangered black rhinos (two may have been repeats). To put that in perspective, there are only about 13 left in the crater. Once common in all of east and southern Africa, their populations were decimated by poaching in the 20th century: their horns were once worth more than gold, valued in Asia as an aphrodisiac and on the Arabian peninsula as material for a kind of special dagger. There are fewer than 500 in all of Kenya, and under a hundred in Tanzania. We all felt unbelievable fortunate to get a glimpse of the huge (and hugely dangerous) animals. They were far away, but with the binoculars we could see them quite well.

I wish you all could have been there to see it.

Upendo,
Robin