We were ready to leave the crater at the end of the game drive when Tumaini noticed far away near the down road a huge group of wilde running down the side of the escarpment.
We stopped and turned around and with my binocs I could swear I was in the western corridor watching a couple thousand frantic animals in their endless search for better grass. But we were far, far away from that place.
We finished four days and hundred of miles through the Serengeti, found the migration in multiple places and ended for our last two nights at Tanzania’s famous Crater Lodge.
It’s unusually dry. Not yet a crisis it will become so if widespread rain doesn’t develop, soon. We arrived the crater in a rainstorm, so that was obviously good news. But the day that preceded our arrival was a dust bowl.
We were besieged by tse-tse fly in Tarangire, and I was filled with adoration for my clients for toughing it out. So much was seen and so few complaints!
Many Africans view 2018 positively, a time when autocratic leaders solidified power and stability increased. For many African conservatives it was a good year.
It was not a good year for African liberals, human rights activists, members of the LGBT community, women or those who champion democracy. Rightists celebrated; leftists wept.
The Obama family just took a “secret safari” in Tanzania in a private reserve owned by an anti-conservationist American billionaire who was fined $2 million by Fish & Wildlife for changing the tidewaters of Chesapeake Bay, who has been charged by Tanzanian groups for illegal draining of the Grumeti River and for supporting the Road-Through-The-Serengeti, and who currently is knee-deep in a controversy regarding Harvey Weinstein.
See a lot of lions on your safari, Barak? #MeToo on my last safari.
I suppose every “big” event, whether NASCAR or a high school spelling bee, has a baseline everyone knows: Winners and losers are known and handicapped, so the drama often comes in the unexpected. That for sure has been the Great Migration ever since global warming.
But not this year!
No zebra. No wildebeest. A handful of gazelle. Just a handful of giraffe. Everyone was ecstatic, because there were 25 lion and a leopard, but I was worried.
We left before dawn in search of leopard. Most safaris do find a leopard but not all, and together with the rhino it’s very difficult to find. Tomorrow when we head to the crater to end the safari, we’ll exhaust our chances. There are no leopard in the crater.
There were spits of rain, but the sunrise seemed to push the clouds away. It seems to be very wet all around us, but right here it’s still very dry. Many animals have left. No one had seen a leopard for days.
Monday we flew into the southern Serengeti over Ngorongoro Crater then south of Olduvai Gorge. There should have been tens of thousands of animals. There weren’t. Much of the area was dry as a bone. It shouldn’t have been.
How could we ever find the great herds in this? Were there even great herds left?
As usual for this time of year it was bone dry. Mornings were still and cold. Saturn twinkled above in the ink blue predawn sky almost as brightly as the half moon which had set in the middle of the night. The sun rose as a giant orange ball behind a charcoal grey curtain of dust and the first breezes tossled the fields of dead, blonde grass. By noon dust devils twisted across the veld. By afternoon strong winds obliterated the cloudless sky with layers of dust.
Pundits like to advise potential safari travelers that this is the best time to see cats. To a certain extent that’s true. But what they see isn’t often what they expect:
Jim is traveling home after the group’s last night in the central Serengeti. Photograph by Mariam McCall of Kiota Camp under the full moon.
We’d found the migration, dozens of lion, hundreds if not thousands of elephant, and we were in the Seronera Valley towards the end of our safari watching a leopard hunting.
Normally leopard hunt at night, but there was no doubt as this magnificent rather stubby female stalked through the thick river’s edge foliage diagonally towards us. We couldn’t see what she was stalking, but her behavior was undeniable.
From mid-morning when we left Olduvai Gorge to when we rejoined the main road from Ngorongoro to Seronera, we were off-road in the middle of nowhere. I saw one distant group of Maasai with goats and not a single other car, not even a dust plume of a far distant vehicle or far away donkey convoy for 30 miles. It was us, the overwhelming Serengeti and 150,000 white-bearded gnu.
We lunched on a kopjes 1500′ above the vast newly green Lemuta Plains with new storms threatening above. We took more photos of one another I think than anyone took of the 30 lions we’d so far seen! Behind and below us was about 300 sq. miles of Serengeti dotted from horizon to horizon with wildebeest.
Read more
Jim is in remote areas of Ngorongoro and the Serengeti on safari with his Great Migration Safari. He’ll post as soon as he can!
It rained all night. The unending thunder and lightning kept Tammy awake for much of the night and me worrying about what we were going to do the next day.
We went to the nearest ranger post and got careful directions to the next post down the line, joined a convoy with another vehicle headed in the same direction and sloshed our way from Kusini back to Ndutu.