Electing a Serengeti Highway Auction

September 28, 2010September 28, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

richmond+lowassa — Will this man if elected determine the highway route?

The imminent election of a formerly disgraced Tanzanian politician may determine the route of the controversial Serengeti Highway.

Tanzania’s disgraced former Prime Minister launched his political comeback yesterday by vowing to push through the Serengeti highway despite environmental objections.

But in typical Tanzania PoliSpeak, Lowassa left open which route he supports. I think the man is on track to become the final power broker for how the highway is built and that he’s essentially going to put the route up for international auction.

As with everything in Tanzanian politics, a lot of reading between the lines is necessary. There is a possibility that Edward Lowassa is just a loose canon trying to avenge his disgrace, being carefully rehabilitated by power elites, or just blowing populist hot air.

Lowassa’s flamboyant political rally in Mto-wa-Mbu, specifically where the highway is scheduled to begin, came only one month before the national election on October 31. He is running on a small, opposition party ticket (Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo, “Chadema”) which currently has only 6 of the 295-seats in Parliament and no national officials.

(Chadema may be the biggest threat to the ruling autocracy in Tanzania, although it’s hard to see enough victories in Parliament to impact the balance of power.)

Lowassa cannot run on the ruling party ticket, because he was thrown out in 2008. At the time he was the second most powerful man in Tanzania, its prime minister, but he got mired in one too many scandals.

He resigned as Prime Minister on February 7, 2008, after being implicated in a corrupt deal with the Houston energy firm, Richmond Development, where it was widely speculated he received enormous kickbacks for electrical services that were never delivered.

His resignation and that of other implicated ministers which immediately followed saved him from any formal investigation into the extent of criminality.

Making the Serengeti Highway a primary campaign position allies him with his former friend and now President, Jakaya Kikwete, who is also the man who forced his resignation in 2008.

But unlike Kikwete, he hasn’t specified which route — north through the Serengeti or south outside animal reserves — he favors. And listening to him yesterday at his rally, you’d think the issue wasn’t whether to lay the tarmac north or south, but whether to build a highway for the common man or preserve lions for tourists to see.

“Environmental activism should change. [Activists] should not be more concerned by the welfare of the animals than that of our people who need development,” Lowassa shouted to the cheering crowd.

Lowassa began his career as the area’s police boss, and he remains very popular locally so is likely to win. His opponent is an evangelical minister whose main campaign issue is that the election, scheduled for October 31, should not be held on the Sabbath.

Lowassa is playing both ends of the field. He can win the election and still embrace either the northern or southern route.

And then, he will become the most prominent politician whose constituency is closest to the actual highway area. He will become crucial in any negotiations down the line.

I think this is what Lowassa is doing, sneaking his way into an issue that not even the ruling elite can control, one that is certain to ensure his political rehabilitation on the national level.

He’ll give Kikwete an acceptable path towards changing his own position, which is that the northern route is the best one, while ingratiating himself into the political elite once again.

Lowassa will be up for the highest bid. That’s the nature of the guy. So NGOs, start the fund-raising, because Lowassa’s victory will be a sure sign that the highway’s route is up for auction.

Call your zoo NOW!

September 8, 2010September 8, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

1_ConferenceSlide — American zoos could help stop the Serengeti highway.

Call your zoo director now and tell him to “Support AZA’s resolution opposing the northern route for the Serengeti highway.”

Towards the end of this week, zoo directors, research coordinators and many other zoo employees will be heading to Houston for the annual zoo convention.

Concerned members are trying to get the momentum going to pass a resolution that will oppose the northern route currently staked out in the Serengeti for a highway. They are encountering great resistance among the membership.

This isn’t because there are members who support the highway, quite to the contrary. I doubt you would find a single AZA member who supports building the highway.

But it’s because the organization is so nebulous. The excuses I’ve heard range from “it’s not our responsibility” to “it will cause a backlash.” Both extremes are ridiculous if not arrogant and presume an unrealistic character of what AZA actually is.

Zoos, today, have morphed into wonderful institutions, so different from what they were when I was a kid. Many of my clients’ jaws drop when I say this, and I have to agree with them that watching a captive animal is not my cup of tea.

But putting animals on display, today, is becoming a secondary role for the best zoos. You would be very hard pressed not to find a zoo in America today, which doesn’t have something to do – some money invested – in the Serengeti.

Zoos are turning into wonderful research institutions. Their captive animal populations have become ever more precious as the world’s biodiversity crashes. They have unleashed a scientific potential that exists in their employees that is doing wonder in Africa.

So they, probably more than any other group of institutions, has a real and immediate interest in what happens in the Serengeti.

What is true is that their association isn’t a very good one. One part of their association, the SSP groups which manage marvelously the placement and movement of one captive animal with another across all zoo borders, is a work of genius. But, I’m afraid, that’s about it.

So it’s time they step up to the plate and make a concerted effort to evince their missions and their ideals. They must join a growing chorus of wildlife NGOs opposing the highway, and it will definitely help.

So please, call your zoo now. Ask to speak to the director, and you’ll likely be able to. If you can’t, get his email address after leaving a phone message.

We must stop this highway.

To read my other blogs about the highway, click below:

Tanzanian President reaffirms doing the project.

Tanzanian Minister of Tourism has questionable links to highway.

World Bank withdraws funding for Tanzanian road building.

Serengeti Highway Alert and summary.

Serengeti Highways & Monopolies

August 16, 2010August 16, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 8 Comments

Your voice against the Serengeti highway has attracted the attention of the most powerful in Tanzania. Unfortunately, he’s digging in his heels.

During an end of July live television speech to the country President Jakaya Kikwete said that “under no circumstances” will the government be deterred from building the road.

Kikwete doesn’t shy from the limelight, but most keen observers seriously doubted he would enter this fray. Whether the road cuts 40-50k through the neck of the Serengeti as planned, or is rerouted on a more lengthy route as we all would prefer, there are going to be very angry people, locally and foreign. Ethics, conservation and the Serengeti aside (be damned!), this is no good place for a politician.

So what’s his motivation?

I think I know, and I think he has a point (that he hasn’t made), and that point isn’t strong enough for him to really push this calamity through…

It’s already widely known that Kikwete is invested in the newest of the Serengeti lodges, the Kempinski Bilila.

If it weren’t for his intervention in the first place, this lodge would never have been built. It had initially failed to get the necessary permits from Tanzania conservation and wildlife authorities. Kikwete intervened.

Counting Bilila, there are ten principal lodges serving the Serengeti.

Only one other property, Grumeti, joined Kikwete’s Bilila in the realistic drop in prices from 2009 to 2010. All the other 9 defied market indicators arising from the world recession.

Is Kikwete’s support for the Serengeti highway linked to a belief that the property companies monopolizing the Serengeti are out of touch with markets and need to be forced into greater competition less Tanzania tourism suffer?

Boy, is that giving the fellow the benefit of the doubt! But it’s true. All the other 9 properties have been around for many decades; several of them are approaching the half century mark.

And they all market as if we were in the 14th century. When the good times roll, they raise prices as we would expect. But when a world recession hits, they also raise prices or don’t reduce them. This half-baked theory is “be damned cash flow”, just maintain some modicum of profit.

Before reading on, take a look at the price comparison of the Serengeti Lodges shown just below, then drop down to continue reading.

SereLdgePrices — Based on average tour operator contract prices.
For retail prices add 20-30%.

Raising prices in a declining market reduces cash flow but profits can be somewhat maintain by cutting off lots of operations.

Like jobs.

As much as a third to a half of Tanzania’s tourism employees in 2006 is currently without work.

Tanzania doesn’t have an unemployment security system. There are no legal inhibitions to just telling someone not to come to work today… or anymore. AND those poor folks collect no compensation from the state once “made redundant.” Tanzania has no safety net for the newly unemployed.

That’s the ouch of the policy, but the fact is that it’s a terribly poor business strategy, anyway. It’s a short-term fix and a long-term disaster.

All the training, operational achievements, marketing strategies suddenly hit a brick wall. And to regain them when things get better isn’t just a matter of rehiring those who were fired. That rarely happens.

Serena Hotels built and integrated a modern and very expensive worldwide reservations system in 2007. It took thousands of hours to implement. They adopted an imaginative “Active Senior” program around the same time with some target marketing.

EWT just used Serena Hotels in Kigali and Kampala. It was a nightmare. I personally was at the check-in desk in Kigali untangling a terrible mess. And they seemed to have dropped their “Active Senior” program, just at the time such a program would reap huge benefits: (If any market niche is immune to the world recession, it’s seniors.)

The much better strategy is to follow capitalist principals of supply and demand. Don’t loose your investment in people’s training or marketing strategies that remain viable, and get enough cash flow to see them through the hard times.

Lower prices.

Unfortunately, unlike pricing, we can’t get occupancy rates as they are closely guarded secrets. But there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that while Bilila is probably the most luxurious lodge in the Serengeti, when it opened in 2008/2009, it drastically lowered its initial asking prices.

And then Bilila dropped prices from 2009 to 2010, to keep its occupancy constant. Kempinski won’t say, but the best anecdotal evidence we’ve collected suggests Bilila has achieved this strategy.

If true, Bilila is reacting to real market forces and maintaining a constant cash flow by doing nothing else than lowering prices. Whereas all the others are laying off staff, closing portions of their properties and extending off-season closures.

Bilila is new, well run, and managed to the current market. There hasn’t been any new lodge in the Serengeti for more than a decade since the out-of-the-way and hodge-podge configured Mbagaleti was built. Before that it was another ten years earlier when Elewana (luxury branch of Sopa Lodges) purchased and rebuilt Migration Camp.

Frankly, that was just fine by me and many, many others. The exclusiveness of the Serengeti is one of its principal draws.

But Kikwete has a point, even if he hasn’t expressed it. The old dogs controlling the existing lodges in the Serengeti: Serena, Sopa, &Beyond and TAHI, are rutted in savoring their monopolies. As with inflexible pricing, Kikwete may see the whole cartel is inflexible to any new notion, good or bad.

Alright, so I’ve made a point, and perhaps Kikwete has, too. But is it germane to this argument about the Serengeti road?

No.

I returned from Uganda, today, and one of the most glaringly obvious difficulties it has in rebuilding its national park system is that major thoroughfares cut right through their wildernesses.

Queen Elizabeth National Park is essentially bisected by a main road, and there are burgeoning little towns at every stop conceded not to be an actual national park proper. The stress on the area’s wildlife is huge.

The tarmac roads that crisscross the great South African reserve, Kruger, absolutely stunt its wilderness growth. Kruger has one of the lowest ratios of migrating herbivores to the rest of its animal population of any park in Africa.

Herbivores constitute the base of the mammalian food chain. It eventually feeds not just the lions but the gerbils and acacia.

Mr. President Kikwete, if I’ve struck a chord with you, let’s work this out another way. I’d be all for disinvesting the monopolies that currently control the Serengeti: Legislate the right for only a single property company in each unique reserve, for example.

But don’t kill the Serengeti. That’s the worst strategy of all.

Remarkable Season

April 12, 2010April 20, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

migration4 — All around the hill, from horizon to horizon, was wall-to-wall wildebeest.
How can I estimate this? Was it a half, or a third, of the 1.65 million gnu?

A quarter to a third of hotel/lodge employees have been fired: Food and service are suffering. Maintenance and new building has halted. There’s less air service. And the weather is the weirdest in years. This was one of the best safari seasons in my career!

(I don’t want my glib rejoinder to suggest the situation for Kenyans and Tanzanians doesn’t merit serious concern from those of us better off. It was literally a daily chore for me to listen to plaintive if polite cries for help.

Usually each night after dinner – when all my clients thought I, too, had gone to bed – a former employee or friend of a friend would ask me to sit with him/her for an “evening tea.” That was an euphemism for “I’m really in trouble; dozens of family depend upon me; can you give me work or know where I can get it?”

There’s no social safety net for tourism workers in East Africa. If things get bad, you just pick up your bag and go away. No unemployment insurance, no pension, no severance.)

But if we have any hope for the future, we have to build on the positive, and the positive outcomes of this safari season were nearly unbelievable.

Start with the fact that my Great Migration Safari began at The Ark with a take-down (kill) of a bushbuck by a hyaena, literally ten feet below those of us looking over the water hole.

Take-downs are rare; I haven’t seen one for five years. Almost all kill attempts end in failures. With lions the failure rate is above 80%. Failed attempts are often linked to too many tourists watching, botching up the plan!

Well, we don’t have too may tourists, right now. The Ark can serve 125 people; counting us 10, there were only 27. Less noise, less disturbance, less intrusion on the wild nature of things.

I make it a point to avoid the crowds on my guided programs, but I can’t remember when I’ve had it so easy.

I was in the bush with clients for 24 days. The only time – the only time – one of our game drives encountered significant periods of other vehicles was in the crater. Otherwise, we were alone. In fact for almost all the time we were in the Serengeti, in Shaba and in the Aberdare, we were totally alone.

My first safari with the Gustafson’s from Georgia left Olduvai Gorge around 10:30a and traveled through the Serengeti pulling into Ndutu Lodge around 5 pm, having never seen another vehicle.

I can’t remember when the bush was so vacant of tourists. And while this is no scientific study, the list of email “special offers” I returned to suggests it is definitely true.

At what has become my favorite boutique camp in East Africa, Swala Lodge, we were the only ones there! The manager team, Steve and Maryann, the waiting staff, the cleaning staff, the kitchen staff, outnumbered us 2 to 1!

Phil Haney of the Gustafson Safari was within an arm’s width of being touched by an elephant’s trunk! We approach all eles carefully, and when they seem friendly, I coach my clients to be absolutely quiet. Phil was, and the old bull was apparently getting nostalgic about the loss of tourists!

The weather everywhere was unusual, especially to the north in Kenya. The rains approached El Nino intensity and the temperatures across the board were ten degrees F warmer than normal. That meant the tse-tse were bit more feisty than usual.

Conditions were therefore a bit uncomfortable compared to a normal year, we did gut stuck a bit more than usual, but of course the animals loved it! Colin McConnell at Ndutu Lodge confirmed my own observation that there have never been so many baby wildebeest as right now! It’s truly incredible. It’s almost as if every single female has a calve.

Painted snipe, Ovambo Sparrowhawks, Abdims and Open-Bills, and blue-cheeked and even carmine bee-eaters! Birds that either should have already left or not yet arrived!

My last morning on safari was Friday. The ten of us set up breakfast on Mesa Hill in the Kesio Valley in the southern grassland plains of the Serengeti. The flat-topped hill stands about 200 meters above the plains that surround it: Mti-ti and Lakes Masek and Ndutu barely visible to the east, Olduvai Gorge just below the hill, the endless Kusini flat plains stretching to our north, and Ngorongoro like the massive godhead it is taking up most of the southern horizon.

It was breezy, sunny, cool and fresh, with wisps of cloud foretelling the afternoon storms. The yellow bidens flowers dominated the veld, but there were also beautiful blood red flowers, both white and red glover, and as we raced over in our Landcruisers fabulous whiffs of wild sage.

But what dominated the scene at breakfast was the most massive, concentrated wildebeest migration in my memory. All around the hill, from horizon to horizon, was wall-to-wall wildebeest. How can I estimate this? Was it a half, or a third, of the 1.65 million gnu?

I knew it wasn’t all of them, because on our full day traveling from Olduvai to Ndutu – seven hours of driving – we never left the herds, and that was in a completely different part of the Serengeti!

I twirled around the hill with my binoculars peering out over Eden. Not a single other car. Maybe five or six hundred square miles. My heart ached for Balthazar, one of the best camp managers I’ve ever known, fired after 20 years service and no insurance to treat his gout; Mercy, a promising school-leaver with a degree in hotel management who could replace Desire Rogers in an instant, hawking newspapers in Nairobi traffic; or 48-year old Grace, my close driver/guide’s eldest daughter, appointed as a vice president to a new university that now won’t open, picking oranges on her uncle’s farm.

And my heart lept for joy as I saw the faces of my awestruck clients, breathless as they too looked out over the great migration.

Forget the math. Forget the social science for just a second. Africa’s experience is an infinite one, made even richer by its painful ironies. That last scene from Mesa Hill Friday morning is my lasting memory of this season, as inexplicably joyous as wildebeest numbers are inestimable.

On Safari: Migration Outstanding

March 23, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It was slightly wetter than normal for my Gustafson safari which ended Monday, and the migration was outstanding!

The unequivocal highlight was the day we left Olduvai Gorge for Ndutu, spending the entire day on the grassland plains northeast and south of Naabi Hill. We drove and drove and only rarely found areas with no horizon-to-horizon wildebeest.

Tour organizer Gherry Gustafson said she was “overwhelmed” by the migration. She and her husband, Leland, had just been in Kenya last October and realize now that the migration in the Mara during the dry season is but a fraction of what we see right now on the southern plains of the Serengeti.

On the day we traveled north towards Moru, we could see from Naabi Hill’s viewpoint innumerable files of wilde covering the southern grassland plains, right on queue.

The safari started in fire devastated Arusha National Park, and I could see the effects most seriously in the state of the many previously beautiful crater lakes.

They are all now filled with algae and there was not a bird to be seen. This is the result of heavy ash that “strangled” the lakes. I expect it will take at least a year to fully recycle.

But in Tarangire we hit so many elephant that I keep having to remind myself that this is not “the season” for elephant. And, in fact, true to researcher Charles Foley’s explanations, the ele we saw were all in the northern quadrant, more or less residents or travelers between Tarangire and other northern parks.

Numerous times we were engulfed by ele. Phillip Haney was almost touched by the trunk of a curious bull.

The wetness of the season was evident everywhere, and Lake Manyara – nearly dried out at this time last year – was well beyond its normal shorelines. And as a bonus for us the near shore was plastered with I suspect hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of flamingo.

And the crater was incredibly wet. The Mugie River was overflowing its banks menacingly flooding the northeast sector. And thousands of wilde and zebra were clogging all the roads, since that was the only dry place around.

But the rain was not as heavy as in neighboring Kenya, where floods in the north have been so severe that a number of safari camps and lodges in Samburu have been wiped out.

More on that after my next safari, starting in a few days!

Back on (a wet) Track!

January 19, 2010January 20, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Now at one of my favorite Serengeti lodges, Ndutu.

As we enter the great migration season in Tanzania everyone ready to go (including me) wants to know the state of the veld. Well – dare I suggest it? – it looks… wonderful.

I wanted to say “normal” but normal doesn’t exist, anymore, in these confused eras of global warming. But frankly that’s what 2010 looks to be: right on the charts of normalcy for the last 30 years of climate statistics.

Which makes it very abnormal for the last 3-5 years. So in that context 2010 is on target to produce the finest scenery and best game viewing in the last five years!

Mother Nature broke the 3-year “drought” as you would expect her to: grumbling and shaking off somnambulant neglect with thunderous bursts of rain which in some places, like the western and northern Serengeti, represented some of the most incredible torrents ever seen.

On Christmas Eve 1.5-1.7 inches of rain fell in one day over most of this area. For the month of December the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem experienced nearly 7.0 inches of rain. This is nearly three times “normal”.

The deluge resulted in worries that El-Nino was battering, again, and that soon the world would float away. Didn’t happen… yet, anyway. And western climate prediction centers show a real return to normal patterns for the remainder of the year.

This is my favorite area in the world. From the Talek River in the Mara to the central Steppe of Tanzania, the veld is now a deep, rich green. On the flat prairies of the Serengeti the “wet” wildflowers are all over the place:

Little white flowers looking exactly like their nickname, Tissue Paper Flower, (Cycinium tubulosum) literally cover the veld, almost like snow. Remarkably this year, they’ve even covered the veld as far north as Samburu. Unusual and rarer apricot and red versions have been reported in abundance in the Mara salient.

A bit anxious and not normally so prolific, Kenya’s national flower, The Flame Lily,(Gloriosa superba) is already standing out. (This is one of the reason locals are worried about the deluges continuing; but I think superstition is getting in the way. Lilies are tubers and build up residual nutrient stores during dry times, and these guys are just impatient to get going!)

The wildebeest migration was normal for the first time in years. Last year it lingered in the northern Serengeti (the Mara) almost until January, as the rains further south were light. But this year the great herds were well south of the Sand River by early December… just like scientific papers crunching 30 years of data say they should.

The Ewaso Nyiro River in Samburu, the Tsavo River in Tsavo, the many rivers in the Mara including the Great Mara, the many rivers in the Serengeti, and the two lakes in Ndutu (Masek and Ndutu) are all recovering, looking normal, after spurts and backups throughout December.

Grazers including all the plains antelopes are becoming fat and sassy. Browsers, especially elephant, are still struggling, searching those areas with new growth but relying on grass until it happens. Giraffe are a bit luckier, they can reach the new, high acacia shoots.

An incredible sight was reported in mid-December as Lake Manyara began to refill, and on one day, December 14, literally several hundred thousand flamingos returned. Where had they been?

European migrant birds are down in great numbers. The massive and awesome funnels of tens of thousands of Abdim storks have been seen above the crater.

Nature is balanced, and compared to what most of us felt was a stressful several years now ended, the predators thought otherwise. It was heyday for lion, hyaena, jackal, leopard and cheetah. For them the return to normal times means predation is much harder, and already camps like Governor’s in the Mara are reporting fewer cubs surviving, more internecine fighting.

The yin and yang of the veld. But I for one feel enormously relieved. There is a stress when surveying an African veld that is distressed for lack of rain unlike any other experienced in the modern world. It is a helplessness that pivots the intellect into moments of superstitious hope. That arthritic spiritual response is agonizing, and now — at least for now, it’s gone.

Migration Arrives!

June 25, 2009September 22, 2009 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tour operators and property owners await the wildebeest migration into Kenya’s Mara from the Serengeti like most Kenyans await the rains. Well, it’s arrived!

Kenya’s Maasai Mara at any time of the year is a fabulous place to game view. The gently rolling grasslands, numerous watercourses and occasional tall hill provide all the conditions for outstanding animal viewing. But it is the fact that the Mara is the wettest place of all East African protected wildernesses that seals the deal.

Last year I was privileged to be in the Mara on June 16 when the first several thousand wildebeest straggled across the Sand River towards Keekorok Lodge. The privilege continued this year with my first family safari of the season when ten or twenty times as many surged into the entire bottom southeast of the Mara on June 23.

Whitney, the grandfather, had been on one of my Serengeti migration safaris before, and he so wanted his family to experience something similar. I knew this, and he knew that a June safari anywhere in either Tanzania or Kenya is iffy with regards to the migration. This is because the migration is triggered by rains and no-rains, and predicting the weather – especially in this erratic period of climate change – is very difficult.

Whitney and Ada had experienced the optimum, so we all knew we couldn’t achieve that. Almost all the wildebeest herd is found in the southern Serengeti in March and April. In the best of years, less than half that number reach Kenya later on. But like so many family safaris, the schedule has to be determined by the children’s school year and summer schedules. So, we crossed our fingers.

As I’ve written many times recently, East Africa is in the second year of a dry spell, which in some places is a true drought. The Serengeti has experienced a similar patchwork of rains and no-rains, with the large majority of the area much drier than usual.

But the Mara is as wet as ever. Now an important word of caution. Many of the Mara’s river, including the Mara itself, are fed in the escarpments and hills west and north of the park where it’s been miserably dry. So the rivers are very low. I really must admit that I’ve never seen the Mara River so low, and this will likely have a number of significant effects.

But rain over the grasslands has not stopped. The grass in the southern part of the park is nearly four feet high. The Sand River, which is fed by run-off of the rains, is actually more than its usual trickle. That’s all the wildebeest needed to know.

I saw huge lines of wilde down the main Lobo road with my binoculars on June 24, so we decided to alter our program and take our morning game drive on June 25 towards the Sand River gate. This is the southeast most part of the Mara.

What a brilliant idea, even if I do say so myself! The massive herds – much larger than last year – were surging across the river into Kenya. We arrived around 7:30a, and I expect the surge began sometime the night before, because hyaena were having a heyday. I saw a jackal and a hyaena eating side-by-side! That’s ridiculous, and it meant there was so much food available that their normal enmity had been overcome.

There were rib cages, legs, feet, hides of wildebeest all over the place. This area of the Mara doesn’t usually have this high density of hyaena, but they knew, just as they know when birthing is about to begin.

This is an area of beautifully defined rolling grasslands that are separated by deep valleys. Most of the area was filled with wildebeest, “little black dots” as Ezra would explain. But yes, thousands and thousands of little black dots.

Getting close was so much fun. The wildebeest sonorous and quite varied speech is called “blarting” and is so enticing I’ve never had a customer who hasn’t tried to blart back!

We obtained permission to go through the gate towards Tanzania. Hardly 50m from the gate we encountered three lion, sated to the extreme, in the high grass. What was so comical was that there were several hundred wilde about 20 feet away from them! They couldn’t move, they were so full.

Later we’d see a beautiful male lion casually dining on a less than fully butchered wilde. His mane was among the best I’ve ever seen.

We drove up to the old, scratched cement sign which towers above the road and says, “You are now entering the Serengeti National Park. Welcome to Tanzania.”

That brought waves of nostalgia for the days before 1978 when we could proceed into the locus of the herds, which was undoubtedly between Balanganjwe and Lobo. But no longer. Since then, you can’t cross between the two countries at this point. So we turned back, yet euphoric at the wonderful experience we’d been having that morning.

Even had the migration not arrived, the Mara would have pleased us all. We found leopard, so wonderfully in the open during the morning, that you couldn’t have wished for better. We saw collections of animals – topi, impala, hartebeest, wildebeest, zebra, giraffe – framed by the little hazy mountains of a distant horizon that the Mara is so famous for.

But true, even in this economic downturn, the Mara seemed crowded. Much less than in year’s past, but infinitely more than during my migration safaris in March and April when we seem to have thousands of square miles to ourselves.

As the day ended on Lookout Hill above our camp on the Sand River, everyone paused to watch a spectacular sunset. A sun, hidden moments before by thick clouds, appeared just above the horizon as a deep red-orange orb that flared the sky with pastel blues and mauve and streaks of red. “We couldn’t have asked for better,” Whitney said.

I agree.

Ndutu Migration

April 9, 2009September 23, 2009 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Our three days ended with a bulls-eye migration find at Ndutu. But a whole lot more, too!

There are several reasons that most safaris don’t overnight in Ndutu, even though that’s the best place to be to see the great wildebeest migration from late November through May. We did spend our last three nights here, and we had an incredible experience, finding the migration and much more.

I’ve always been irritated by so many companies talking about the “Great Wildebeest Migration” and then not truly featuring it, since they bypass Ndutu. Ndutu Lodge is the only permanent lodge in the southern Serengeti grassland plains. There are also many private camping sites. But all the other lodges in the Serengeti are between 3 and 8 hours further north.

Ndutu Lodge is a historic lodge, built by Margaret Gibbs years ago, I think in the 1960s. It has 27 rooms and doesn’t normally take groups. The rooms are very comfortable, but very simple. The public areas are all covered but opened to Lake Ndutu. The staff is old and loyal; the food is OK. It is not “Maasai Versailles” or anything close to it.

Nor does it belong to any chain of hotels like Sopa or Serena or Kempenski, and it doesn’t offer butlers like Grumeti or Klein’s, and charges are incurred for laundry and drinks. But it is almost a wonderful secret, used by those of us in the know who grow nostalgic the moment we leave. It has a fantastic setting, and there is absolutely no better place to stay during the migration.

I used to prefer a private camp, and there are many good sites in the area. But in the last few years the rains have grown heavy when they fall – I mean, really heavy. We like it that way, as do the wildebeest and other animals, and not least the spirits in the sky that produce unbelievable sunrises and sunsets. No matter how good your camp is, it isn’t fun when it rains hard.

So that leaves Ndutu Lodge. We arrived Monday evening after a fabulous journey through the eastern Serengeti north of Olduvai. Twelve days ago this was brown and dusty; now it was green and fresh, little dust. There were literally tens of thousands of Thomson’s Gazelle, some eland and a handful of zebra and wildebeest. The big herds weren’t here as they have been for me in most of the years past. But we enjoyed outstanding views of the Serengeti during our lunch perched on a kopjes opposite Lemuta, and we had the entire day from the moment we left Olduvai completely to ourselves.

We traveled for 6 hours from Shifting Sands, which remarkably was wet and not windy, likely covering about 50 miles. We encountered not a single other vehicle and certainly well over a hundred thousand animals.

We arrived the lodge just before a downpour. It’s exhilarating to be in the Serengeti’s rainy season storms, because there’s plenty of lightning and thunder.

The economy has really dampened tourism, but we talked with the other guests, other drivers and the wonderful Ndutu manager, Colin McConnell, and decided that our best bet for finding the migration was to more or less duplicate what I had done two weeks ago: go south towards Makau.

The heavy rains can shift the herds in a night. For one thing, they hate gushy grounds. And they are driven by a need for food, not water (especially now when it’s everywhere). Dried clumps of grass turn enticingly edible virtually overnight when it rains.

Reviewing my notes of many years I knew that if the locus of the migration weren’t south, that there would still be a lot of wildebeest there. The Ndutu-Makau-Kusini-Ndutu triangle that touches the Kerio Valley to the south, the Moru Kopjes to the north and Hidden Valley to the east, seems never without wildebeest during this season. This is probably because it is one of the flattest sections of plains just north of Ngorongoro, so it captures a lot of moisture. Anyway, this is where we went first. We had a second day if we needed it, to go elsewhere.

I venture there are probably few tourists who buy a “migration safari” who don’t come home and claim they’ve seen the migration. The following day we would travel through great numbers of wildebeest around Naabi Hill, the center of the park and where the main road passes. We’d see several vehicles stopped there on the main road as visitors popped through their opened tops to photograph large herds. But they had no idea!

How many did we find Wednesday morning? It’s really hard to estimate, but presuming that at any given time we would have 30-40,000 wildebeest in view 360 degrees around us, and that we spent several hours moving around this triangle, I’d say a quarter million.

When we stopped and set up breakfast in the middle of the plains, the wilde gave us a wide berth. It was as if we opened a hole on the prairie.

Everyone was famished. Even though all you do is look, it’s incredibly exciting. There was great conversation and much laughing throughout breakfast as Tim, Rob, Judd and Brad tried to sound like gnu!

Thursday we went to the Moru Kopjes, the prettiest part of the Serengeti. Yes, we saw more wildebeest, the same groups that most tourists see, but to us it was a drop in the bucket of what we had ourselves experienced the day before.

What impressed me most this time at Moru was how frightened the elephants were that we encountered. They acted like elephants of old, during the years of poaching. As soon as they saw us, the ears flapped, there was trumpeting, and they high tailed it away running madly. I don’t understand this. I haven’t seen this behavior in years and I hope it doesn’t mean there is poaching, again.

We were unable to visit the Maasai cave paintings, because other visitors were there first: lion! During our three days in the Serengeti we saw over 40 lion, including about a dozen very little cubs and a lioness about to give birth. We watched a leopard on his kill in a tree, and followed a family of 3 cheetah hunt.

And one of the great bonuses was an amazing series of sunrises and sunsets, among the best I can ever remember seeing. Someone remarked that “It’s Photoshop in Real.” Steve Coates said all we have to say at the debriefing is “Oh, my god!” The skies were ludicrously beautiful.

Ndutu and the Serengeti performed for us magnificently.

Dry Serengeti

March 27, 2009September 23, 2009 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Our safari encounters a very dry Serengeti. Is a drought, or are floods, coming?

We arrived Ndutu Lodge on Wednesday after an extremely dry drive east to west across the entire bottom half of the Serengeti. It isn’t yet a drought, but it’s very dry.

We started north of Olduvai Gorge, saw the remarkable Shifting Sands and had lunch on a kopjes near Lemuta. The veld at a distance had a patina of green, but was mostly brown. There was no new grass. We found a few waterholes, but they seemed to be drying rapidly. Around one, five hyaena seemed to keep guard.

The difference between the Serengeti Plains when they are verdant and green, and when they are dry as now, is the difference between exuberance and depression. We found abandoned Maasai bomas, no sign of Maasai anywhere. There were still some animals – as I said, it isn’t yet a drought, but the herds were nowhere to be found.

The plains looked like they do in August. It was even the more remarkable, because Ngorongoro was so wet.

Universal opinion here is that global warming is causing extreme fractures in traditional weather patterns. A hundred-square mile area like the crater can be normal and wet, and adjacent at Olduvai it’s like a drought. Sand rivers and seasonal streams intersect these areas, so it definitely isn’t as bad as a real drought. But it isn’t good.

On Thursday we had to leave the Serengeti all together and enter the Maswa Game Reserve. There at its southern end near the Kerio River we found lots and lots of seemingly happy wildebeest. The veld was green and there were puddles of water everywhere. But at Ndutu where we stayed, it was dust.

Lake Ndutu looks OK. But Lake Masek is dry and the swamp is brittle. How absolutely remarkable that there can be such a difference in such a relatively small area.

On Friday we headed north to the center of the park. In a complete switch from normalcy, the center and the western Moru Kopjes were beautiful and green, wet and gorgeous. And while it may have taken us a few days to discover this, the wildebeest already knew!

Massive seas of wildebeest were coming from two opposite directions into this area. From the north around Seronera, and from the south at Ndutu, they were flooding into the Moru Kopjes in the west center of the park. It was fabulous for us!

We took the long route all the way around the kopjes, and the site on the western side was stupendous. Great lines of running wilde – looking quite healthy – were streaming through the passes in the great sculpted kopjes. Thousands of zebra followed. And on our way out of this beautiful dense herd, we saw a huge leopard!

George Haley, a farmer from Illinois, remarked, “I don’t understand how there can be so many animals in one place!”

For us we’d accomplished our task, found the wilde and in huge numbers. But I remain so worried for Tanzanians. Whether a drought will now develop, or floods will arrive late, neither will be good for man the farmer, or man the miner, or even man the city dweller.

For the animals, they’ll work it out. Obviously floods are better than a drought, so for them I worry less. There’s a 50-50 chance that life will be just A-OK for them.

But for men, it’s already a disaster.

Great Wildebeest Migration

August 1, 2008August 17, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

THE GREATEST WILDLIFE SPECTACLE ON EARTH
by Jim Heck, June, 2008

The greatest wildlife spectacle on earth is the migration of about 1½ million white-bearded gnu (wildebeest) through the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem. Wildebeest are joined by another half million zebra and gazelle.

The easiest time to see the migration is when it’s most concentrated, December-April on the southern grassland plains of the Serengeti and NCA. At no other time, anywhere during the year, are the animals as concentrated. The most dramatic times — including river crossings — are in May-July, but this period requires a lot of luck and usually more time for the effort. A large portion of the herds reaches the Mara by August and lingers there through October. The herds are usually most dispersed July-November.

Weather significantly effects these patterns.

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Nothing in the wild is ever guaranteed. But during more than a half century of tourism to East Africa, few seekers of the “Great Migration” have been disappointed if they did their homework and looked in the right places at the right time of the year. This is because the migration is very predictable, as predictable as long-term weather has been. The advent of global warming may be set to confuse things a bit, but so far the effect has not been substantial.

The migration follows the new growth of nutrient grasses, which is governed by rain. The wilde need large amounts of grass to eat. Where and when the grass grows is normally easy to predict, presuming the weather is normal.

The best nutrient grasses grow on sunlit plains after it rains. There are three choice areas for this in the massive 7,000 sq. mile Serengeti/Mara/NCA ecosystem. They are (a) the southern third of the Serengeti, widely referred to as the “southern grassland plains”; (b) sections of the Serengeti’s western corridor just above and below the Grumeti River; and (c) Kenya’s Maasai Mara.

The historical rain data is very misunderstood. There is a huge myth about East African rains that confuses the issue. Parts of Kenya and smaller parts of eastern Tanzania have two rainy seasons: the Long Rains (March-May) and the Short Rains (end of the year). Because these were the areas settled by colonial farmers, this weather dynamic was presumed very incorrectly to be true of all of East Africa. East Africa lies astride the equator, an area of one of the most complex weather systems on earth. Tiny microclimates in relatively small areas differ wildly from one another.

For the most part, the wildebeest migration area does not have two rainy seasons. It has a single rainy season from the end of the year through May, and the rest of the year is dry. (The Mara is a small but important exception to this very true, general rule. It can rain in the Mara, at least a small bit, almost every day of the year except in October.) The rain begins in the south and recedes north towards Lake Victoria. And the wilde follow it.

We generally think of the beginning of the migration starting at the end of the year, when all the wilde are gathered on the southern grassland plains. The rain has just begun. The grasses that emerge after the long half-year dry season of dust and debris are the most nutrient of the year. The herds stay here until the rains end sometime in May or June, eating the nutrient grasses and calving early enough that the young wilde can grow strong before they have to move north. This is the best time to experience the grandeur of the migration, because it is the only time during the year that the largest congregation of animals occur in a single area.

During this time large sections of the herds will move to and fro, usually east and west, traveling in migratory files and in migratory behavior from one area of good grass to the next. They aren’t really migrating, but moving around an area that is about 1500 sq. miles, because this is a large enough area that parts become dry and grassless while other parts get heavy rains and blossom with grass. In the equatorial regions weather doesn’t move like it does in the temperate zones. There aren’t fronts that carry massive storms across big areas. Massive thunderstorms do occur and they are impressive, but they simply form, drop their rain, and then dissipate. This can lead to very spotty areas that are quite wet next to near drought areas. The wilde have to continually navigate these areas on the plains.

But come May, the rains begin to end in the south and recede relatively quickly towards Lake Victoria to the north. The veld everywhere dries up and the wilde quickly consume all the last grasses. The young are normally about 4 months old and ready to undertake a frantic movement north.

Almost suddenly, the herds start to run north. Unlike their less focused to-and-fro on the southern plains, now they form large, thick lines, 3 or 4 abreast, and run crazily north, sometimes for hours without stopping. This is the time that wildlife films are made, because when the herds reach rivers or lakes, they often stampede drowning each other. This is the time crocodiles feast. Mothers are separated from their calves and turn back, and sometimes in a river or lake there will be several files going north and several files going south at the same time!

But seeing this is much more difficult than seeing the congregation of animals on the southern plains earlier in the year. This is because it’s hard to predict in the time most visitors give to a vacation, exactly when the rains will stop. Moreover, the wilde run fast and furious at this time, and figuring out when and where the tight, concentrated migratory files are going to be, is not easy. This is a huge area they are running into, 3 to 4 times bigger than the southern grassland plains. So unless you have a month and unlimited resources to follow the herds, it’s a poorer bet trying to see the migration at this time of the year, rather than earlier or later in the year.

As the herds move north, they generally split into several or more large groups. These partial herds may move in completely different directions. The largest tends to move into the Serengeti’s western corridor by May and June, following the rain trends. This doesn’t last very long, though — maybe a month at most. The rains continue to diminish towards Lake Victoria, moving outside the park. When it dries in the western corridor, the herds tend to stop following the northwest movement of the rain, because that would be through heavily human populated areas. So they turn back on themselves slightly, moving east through the corridor and the adjacent Grumeti Reserve. The frantic racing that began a few months previously tempers down a little, but the herds still move quickly. If they could they would move north, but that too is an area with high human habitation. So they continue moving east until they reach the left edge of the northern Serengeti. As soon as the borders between human populated areas and protected wilderness allow, they turn north, and usually it’s raining in this direction. Lake Victoria stretches out a bit towards this area, and the rain dynamic is sustained. This area — just north of where the western corridor meets the northern finger of the Serengeti — is mostly thick woodlands. This makes game viewing difficult if not impossible, and does not provide large areas for grazing grass, so the wilde generally move quickly through this area. About 25k before the border with Kenya, the Serengeti’s top-most ecosystem turns back into savanna grasslands which continue into Kenya’s Mara and is the dominant feature of the Mara. So this is an excellent area for migration viewing for a late season migration experience in Tanzania. But it usually lasts for a very short time in July.

Sometime in late June through mid-August, a huge portion of the herd, maybe a million, reaches Kenya’s Maasai Mara. This is the furthest north and rainiest protected grassland plain in East Africa. That’s why they’re here. It rains in the Mara practically every day in the year, except in October and the first part of November.

The wilde remain in the Mara, unable to follow the rains right into Lake Victoria because of the human populated areas, there. So they remain in these furthest northern areas eating whatever grass they can find, grass which until October is continually regrowing with the new rains.

The Mara has a number of relatively big rivers. So there are many opportunities for “river crossings” as the wilde — unable to constrain their migratory urges — race back and forth all around the Mara and over and back over its several big rivers. The scene may not be as expansive or dramatic as the May/June filings in the south, but it is often easier to plan on seeing, because it lasts for a much longer time (August-October) in the much smaller area of the Mara.

So what happens when the rain stops, everywhere? That is truly the marvel of the migration. Without a cloud or smell of water to be guided by, the wilde know where to go. They dare not run, because there’s no food now to fuel them, and half are pregnant. So they return — often in very small packs or even individually — usually walking slowly southwards through the now parched and dismal veld of November and early December. And at the end of this laborious trek they arrive, again, upon the great southern grassland plains … just as the new rains start anew.

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Category: Great Migration