The struggle to retain a real adventure spirit in safaris, today, is no better illustrated than in our experiences in Tarangire and Manyara.
Tarangire is the best elephant park in Africa, period. The population is healthy, increasing in numbers and so the only controversial question is are there too many elephant here?
So everyone wants to come here, and that means “crowds.”
It was hot and we’d been on the road for nearly eight hours. The numbers of elephant and giraffe and other animals we’d seen in Tarangire was stunning but we were almost at camp and it was time to hit the showers and go for sundowners when…
…Tumaini hit the brakes and dust flew all around us like an explosion. When it settled, hardly ten meters away was the biggest lion I think I’ve ever seen.
Today I begin guiding a private safari of a family from Boston, a wonderful itinerary longer than the average which visits virtually all of the best places in Tanzania.
Mom and Dad and the two pre teens will be staying at some of the finest, most comfortable lodges and camps in Africa.
In a friendly coffee house in Arusha this morning we discussed the historic election yesterday of Somalia’s first democratically elected president. There were only Tanzanians and me, but one of the Tanzanians had Somali relatives.
There are great hopes for President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed who has widespread support and seeks more U.S. involvement in addition to holding U.S. citizenship. His greatest challenge: He could be banned from entering the United States by Trump’s executive order.
Jim is headed back to Africa! For the next seven weeks you can follow his journeys here at africaanswerman.com. He’ll be traveling and working in Kenya and Tanzania.
ARUSHA
[Several times in February]
Tanzania’s most important northern city, a growing metropolis dominated by the flower farm industry and tourism. One of the few cities with a really viable big game park only about an hour away!
Mt. KILIMANJARO
[Several times in February]
More and more Jim is beginning many of his groups in the high foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Hardly a stone’s throw from Kenya’s Amboseli the game is pretty good and the scenery outstanding. On these safaris he’ll be staying at the Ndarakwai Ranch, which also vies as East Africa’s main warehouse for movie industry gear and prep.
TARANGIRE
[Several times in February and March]
Although this is not the prime season for Tarangire, even during its worst times it provides the best elephant experience found anywhere in Africa!
LAKE MANYARA
[Several times in March]
Jim has brought this overused but exceptional ecosystem back to reasonable use by spending most of his time in the remote southern end, where only a handful of the tourists usually go. This allows him to show his clients the unique diversity in plants and birds found in this small park without the hassle of crowds.
NGORONGORO
[Several times in March]
Africa’s most visited single game park never fails to live up to its reputation, but that often means crowds. Jim easily overcomes this simply by taking the time to stay on the east rim, which also allows his vehicles to be the first down at dawn.
SERENGETI
[Almost two weeks in February and March]
This is Jim’s favorite place in the world, so expect many blogs from several different places in the park as he seeks out the Great Migration at the best time of the year to see it!
While wifi in East Africa improves daily, it’s not yet reached the finish line! Jim may be unable to file four times weekly as he is accustomed to doing, but he says he’ll try! Stay tuned!
Jim is OnSafari in Nova Scotia. See his next regular post on Monday, October 31.
Canada’s defense minister says that the country will use “lethal force” to protect civilians when it sends 600 soldiers into Africa’s troubled regions shortly.
It will be Canada’s first serious involvement in UN peacekeeping in Africa since its famous general, Romeo Dallaire, was thwarted from preventing the Rwandan genocide more than 20 years ago. Then President Bill Clinton used America’s UN veto in the Security Council to prevent Dallaire from using “lethal force.” You know what happened next…
“Why are you doing this?” the question on the website asks rhetorically then answers quickly, “Our population is shrinking. A slow economy… has us on an unsustainable path… We have a beautiful island, a friendly people, a rich culture and a bright future. Join us here on Cape Breton Island!”
The website is “cbiftrumpwins.com.” K & I are in Nova Scotia this week. We’ll be in Cape Breton this weekend. Don’t jump to too many conclusions. We’re visiting relatives, looking at a vacant family house on the southwest shore and have been planning this for some time. But the truth is we’d do almost anything to get away from this mad election. We’ll get home the day before the vote. (We’ve already voted.)
But it is interesting, isn’t it?
We were among 30 cars on one side of the Mara river – there were another 30 on the opposite side.
I don’t like crowds in the wilderness, and I avoid them pretty successfully. But this is an exception. If you want to see one of the most dramatic still truly wild components of the world’s last great animal migration, you’re going to be part of a crowd.
True, there are plenty of river crossings on the great migration route that don’t draw crowds, and I’ve enjoyed them. But the classic and most dramatic crossings are in the Mara, and there are only a couple dozen favorite crossing spots.
Unlike so many animals, wildebeest are very finicky eaters. All they will consumer is grass. Grass comes after rain. The wilde’s instinct forces them to “follow the rains,” which generally recede over the course of the year in a northwesterly direction onto Lake Victoria.
Before reaching the Mara, the great herds have crossed at least two and sometimes four or five other great rivers as they move north.
The Mara is the last and furthest northern river before the herds are turned back by developed farm fields, towns and villages. Here they cluster and start moving backwards and forwards across the river seemingly without purpose. The instinct to move is too great, and if the movement is a rebound, so be it.
This has been the case for at least the last half century. Before that they may have continued all the way to the Lake before turning around. The boundary is not natural in the wild sense, of course, and it results in the mass confusion, exceptional drama and photogenic scenes that have become the trademark of the great migration.
A bit further south the herds’ decisions to move back and forth across rivers is governed much more by actual rain. Particularly now with climate change, the intense micro-climates may mean a healthy rainfall a few miles to the north, or a drought, a few miles to the south.
I’ve often watched the herds move north out of Tanzania to Kenya right on schedule in June, but then return months early in August because of early, heavy rains in northern Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a wildlife documentary is simply an edited version of what the Miller Family saw this morning in person. I remember encountering a BBC/Nova film crew once shooting a river crossing here in the Mara, and there were at least 20 vehicles just in their team.
We were watching a newborn zebra being defended by its mom against a hyaena when we spotted massive clouds of dust several miles away above the river.
Our camp driver, of course, knew exactly what “favorite crossing place” was near the dust and we headed for it posthaste. Wilde will jump 20 feet into the river and then try (usually unsuccessfully) to scale the other side of a 20-foot canyon, but they prefer easier entries and exits, often dry river washes merging with the great Mara. There aren’t many, and everyone knows them.
To reach this crossing place, we had to drive through the herds, and that in itself was fabulous. I estimated between 3500-4500 in this particular group. They were racing in multiple files and converging on a plateau just above the crossing point.
We slowed down among their incessant blarting mixed with the anxious barking of the zebra. Clearly this group was getting psyched up to cross!
By the time we got to the crossing point most of the prime spaces were already taken by other cars. But our driver knew the river so well that we went down river all of a few hundred meters where it turned and found a beautiful viewing area right there.
Across the river were four giant crocs, pulled out onto the sun with bellies already bulging with previous crossings.
So then, like everyone, else, we just waited.
After about an hour, all of a sudden, we were surrounded by wilde! They came so fast the dust came after them! This wasn’t the crossing place, this was our secret viewing area, and it was very rocky and steep at the river’s edge.
Then almost as quickly, they moved away back into the riverine forest. For some reason, they weren’t going down the “favorite crossing place.”
After about another half hour some cars began to leave. We thought we would, too, but just as the engine turned on we could see upriver that the first of the group had reached the river’s edge at the end of the wash.
At first they didn’t seem to do anything but grow in numbers and drink the water. After about five minutes, though, the pressure of the racing wilde behind them forced them to start the swim across.
They walked until the depth of the river forced them to swim, and wilde do this by successive leaping. Water was splashing all of the place. I watched a croc leap out and grab the side of one wilde. It was soon mayhem. Six or seven abreast were swimming across, many getting drowned by others behind them, some actually swimming back across the river!
A half hour later it was all over. A very small group of about 25 wilde for some reason remained on the wash and didn’t cross, but the bulk had move onto the other side and were congregating on the plains and starting to graze.
We found a nice place much further down the river to set up our wonderful breakfast, but the river runs fast here, and numerous “floaters” or dead wildebeest passed by us.
The great migration is like one little muscle in Mother Earth. It’s a reflection of the ecological heritage that makes our planet so awesome. Until we free ourselves completely of our biological roots, we need to truly experience the power of our organic world so that we can concede that we’re only one piece in an infinite universe of life, beholden to the great migration as the wildebeest are to the rains.
We’re in the Maasai Mara, Kenya’s best game park and the top of the great Ngorongoro/Serengeti/Mara ecosystem.
She had killed a wildebeest yearling this morning without much effort. Large files of the great migration are coming through the salient. We saw three groups of about 400 wilde and another of about 1000 that was running in single file.
We even watched a small group of several hundred try to cross the Mara River. Only one did! But the others’ reluctance was understandable. The river is already littered with dead wildebeest among very fat, giant crocs.
So the young female leopard that probably weighs around 120 pounds max had pulled the 220 pound yearling into the crux of a tree about 6-8 feet off the ground. That’s not very high for a leopard who can easily lift 350 pounds 20 feet into a tree.
But she was with an older daughter and I wonder if maybe she was teaching her how to lift the kill. In any case, they made haste with their feast, eating more than half of it in a single setting. That, too, is unusual for a leopard which may take a week to finish off its kill.
The urgency was in part because there were so many vehicles trying to watch them. The Mara gets a bum rap sometimes regarding too many vehicles, and for the vast majority of our game drive we were alone or just with our other vehicle in the Miller family safari.
But a leopard is prize stuff. So all the vehicles in the neighborhood came to see them, and that meant when we arrived there were another 7 vehicles. Once we got our fleeting pictures, I insisted we move on, as even more vehicles were arriving.
I felt she was understandably nervous. The would move together out of the deep bush to one side, then the vehicles would move to that side, and they would move to the other.
It was a fantastic first game drive for us!
We followed the river for the migrating wilde, encountered great herds of buffalo, saw elephant and a bunch of other stuff. The Mara is one of the most beautiful parks in my estimation. As the afternoon light cut across the prairie stopped distantly here and there by a single struggling acacia tree, there was a sense of wild peace you just find nowhere else.
Tomorrow we’re going out for most of the day. Stay tuned!
We’re in The Selous, a giant, uncontrollable river delta a bit like the bottom of Louisiana, a reserve the size of West Virginia in central Tanzania.
The Selous is not for everyone. Even now at a cooler time of the year it’s extremely hot and humid. Game viewing is restricted to not very many tracks, or by boat on the Rufiji River.
But it is the river which makes this such a wonderful safari experience. And with a massive dam planned in the next ten years, it’s an urgent experience, as well.
Approximately half of all of Tanzania is drained by the Rufiji and Ruaha Rivers through The Selous into the Indian Ocean. This is a wild unkempt wilderness, not quite as ever-changing as Botswana’s Delta, but similar. The great sand rivers change courses easily.
We stayed at a camp on the Rufiji and it was spectacular. Our tents were on the embankment just above the high water mark, so that now it is easily 15 feet down to the water. From my deck I looked over the great Rufiji, about a mile wide at this point, defined by great stands of Borassus palm. Since we’re on a bend, there were wonderful sand bars used by numerous crocs and hippos.
On our first river excursion we bucked the extremely strong current until we came to the first lake created as a side-water by the river. This is a main feature of the Rufiji and it results in more placid water not sure for our game viewing, but for the animals as well.
We saw tons of giraffe and impala together with waterbuck and buffalo, zebra and wildebeest on the dense game area along the shores of the lakes and river. We pulled close to elephant pondering whether or not to cross (and swim) the deep lake.
This is a time that resident birds nest, and the bird rookeries were exploding with activity. We spent a good amount of time at one, a white-fronted bee-eater colony. Our pontoon boat pushed right up to the edge of the water underneath the colony.
The bee-eaters nest in holes dug from the clay sides of the river. There were easily several hundred and we watched with fascination as they managed their one hole among so many others.
Just before we left, a monitor lizard appeared, its tongue flashing out into holes looking for eggs. The bee-eaters descended on it en masse but it wasn’t deterred. We watched him come up short from a couple holes before we had to leave.
I think the single most impressive thing about river game viewing in The Selous is the crocodile experience. There are so many the place begins to look like a set for an Indiana Jones move.
Probably not as big as we find on the Mara or Grumeti Rivers, or in far north Kenya, but the sheer numbers staggers the imagination. These crocs subside mostly on fish, and there are some incredible fish in the river!
Ben and Charlie went fishing and came back with over 25 kilos of fish! The largest was a catfish around 12 kilos.
But on the next day we saw that fish is not the sole diet of these river monsters. On our game drive, which focused along the shore of the river and lake, we were watching an idyllic scene of impala and waterbuck in a beautiful landscape with a small stream flowing into the lake.
I remarked to everyone to watch the impala, because they are masterful leapers. Shortly after I said this, a young waterbuck raced across the river (didn’t leap) and its left leg ended up in the snout of an 8–foot long croc! Snorting the waterbuck disappeared limping into the bush.
The animal persisted and pulled its leg free, and the croc followed it a few meters out of the water before slipping back.
Fish eagles are the trademark of wild Africa. They look and act very much like our bald eagles, but they have a piercing, undulating call absent from our eagles. I see them practically everywhere in Africa where there is water.
But here in The Selous they are remarkably vocal, calling constantly and often while flying. I think this is because there are so many of them, territories are very competitively obtained, and the screaming comes from the victors.
I was surprised how little good wifi we’ve had the last week. One of the staff at our Selous camp explained that the demand has grown so significantly that the infrastructure just isn’t there. So stay tuned! I’ll blog whenever I’ve got a signal!
On a two-day hiatus from my Miller Family Safari, I find myself in a Poe or King hell: Dar-es-Salaam.
The family’s foreign exchange student joined them for the first ten days. The two of us peeled off the group yesterday so that I could shepherd him onto his international flight home to Paris.
Unable to catch up with the family in Zanzibar for two days, I’m staying in Dar es Salaam. The Ramada Resort on Mbezi Beach had a good deal, and I also booked their “40-minute” transfer from the airport. It took two hours.
This was 7 p.m. on a Thursday night. My savvy cabbie avoided the main roads as much as he could. We wound our way through a maize of small streets that anywhere else in the world would resemble a walking mall, but with nano-millimeters to spare we passed giant petrol trucks and mammoth buses, but at least we were moving.
It was dark. No street lights, so the only illumination was the ubiquitous “open” and “welcome” neon signs of the myriad of shops lined up one after the other. Bridal shops, grocery stores, children’s toys to many pharmacies were doing a robust business, many with lines of people waiting to get in. People crossing the street, 3-wheel tuk-tuks and an unending barrage of motorcycles somehow effortlessly wove in an out of our two moving lines of mammoth traffic.
But this clever navigation had its limits. Three or four times we had to get back on a disastrous main road: Four, five or six lines of vehicles moved often quickly then stopped … once for 25 minutes. White uniformed policeman at several intersections wielding large red or green neon batons waved tides of vehicles forward and back in a futile attempt to unclog the mess.
Two minutes less than two hours I arrived at my destination, 11.2 miles from the airport. Taxi fee: $70 with tip.
Of course I was frustrated and exhausted, but I couldn’t help thinking of the people who live here, of the enormous resources spent just coming and going. Easily 1 out of 4 large trucks were petrol tankers. Sometimes my cabbie decided to turn off his car engine, but usually not. He explained that was hard on the engine and used even more gas.
What percentage of the gas was used to stand still? But that pales in comparison with the time all these people have lost of their productive lives.
Speaking with staff at the hotel I learned that most of them live in reasonable proximity to the hotel, but that was less true of management and specialty services. One woman said she spent five hours daily getting to work and back! Another has been given a room in the hotel, and “commutes” home (15 miles away) on his days off!
Most African metropolises are a mess. Urban immigration for the last two decades has stunned social anthropologists by its magnitude and speed, and Tanzania is right there at the top of the charts.
Of the estimated Tanzanian population of 55 million, nearly ten percent reside in Dar es Salaam. Add surrounding communities in the area where I stayed Thursday night and it’s likely around 8 or 9 million.
I’ve written about Nairobi’s congestion often in the last several years, and the new highway system that came on line last year did seem to help … a little. But even in Nairobi’s worst times, it did not take two hours to go twelve miles.
This was a real education for this old safari guide. All the pontificating about how to help the developing world, how to share the world’s resources, seems meaningless after this experience. Until the chaotic congestion of African cities is resolved, how can anything else begin to be done?
I suppose as we age the accumulation of changes so untethers us from our foundations that it seems apocalypse is right around the corner. Nevertheless, this safari truly makes me wonder if African wilderness will be around much longer.
I remind myself that in 1979 Peter Beard published a best-selling book, The End of the Game, and his predictions couldn’t have been more wrong. There was not the near total collapse of the wild animals in East Africa he predicted, but in fact a tripling of the animal populations.
So I’m hesitant now to render a similar prediction. Few knew the East African wilderness as well and intimately as Peter Beard. Few were as moderate or unopinionated as him.
Yesterday we left the crater for Lake Manyara National Park. The crater was enormously stressed, but not by the customary impacts of a normal dry season. This was a much different dry season, one framed by the extremities of climate change.
The single-most easily observed effect of climate change in East Africa is the severity of micro-weather cells. The crater like the Serengeti was severely dry, more so than normal. But the areas hardly a few miles away in the higher elevations of the crater rim and Karatu butte were soaked. Not so much by current rain (although there has been some unusual showers) but by the floods of the last rainy season which went on nearly a month longer than normal.
Drop back down to Lake Manyara and the desiccation of the veld was as bad as the Serengeti or the crater floor. Yet the lake itself is massive. Rivers flowing into the great lake itself are so strong that tracks I used in the rainy season in March are now under water!
All this because the higher elevations – a soaked micro weather cell – continued to drain off the unusually wet season.
Grass on the veld doesn’t grow because a nearby river is flowing, but it does mean that a normal light shower provides just enough moisture to bloom grass on that desiccated veld: I guess the best way to explain this is that despite an unusually hot, dusty and dry veld, an unusually high water table supports grass growth at the slightest encouragement.
We saw ridiculous numbers of baby buffalo in the crater. (Buffalo eat very little of anything but grass.)
We encountered so many giraffe in the Serengeti around lakes Ndutu and Masek that 8-year old Donovan began each game drive by announcing, “I guaranteed you we’ll see giraffe.” Masek and Ndutu were unusually large for the same reason as the crater lake and Manyara: heavy continuing runoffs from the nearby highlands.
Giraffes main food are the leafs of the acacia tree. Deep rooting acacia trees tap easily into a high water table. The acacia near all these lakes are leafing anew and even blooming, something not normal before November.
More than a hundred elephant around Lake Masek, dozens in the crater forests, and yesterday, almost a hundred elephant in Lake Manyara is not something I expected to see, now. There were many babies, and elephant abort at the slightest indication of a drought. Elephant are the most voracious consumers of vegetation on earth. They can easily move great distances and they don’t remain in areas without food.
So why sound the alarm?
Elephant, buffalo and to some extent giraffe, easily move great distances and fairly rapidly. Other animals don’t. Impala are home-bodies, with family collections rarely shifting far. Hippo might travel ten miles a night to eat, but they don’t easily adjust their territories, returning to the same river bed or lake each morning.
We normally see hundreds if not thousands of impala on a normal safari. I think so far we’ve counted 35 or so.
The first four hippo we found were frozen dead in the dwindling waters of the Seronera river, their hides already cracked wide opened and storks already picking into them.
All the 20 or so hippo we saw in the crater were crammed into the single lake at Lokitok with none in other normal areas like the well-signed “hippo pool.” At the famous hippo viewing area in Manyara we saw only a couple hippo and they were all very sick, their hides chalked with salt.
Could it be that only those animals capable of rapid shifts in territory will now survive? There’s more water than ever, but it comes as torrential rains in shorter intervals into smaller areas followed often by severe heat and drought.
Animals that can react to these anomalies might not just survive but prosper. Those that can’t will die. But the matrix that emerges will be radically different from the one that has existed all my career until now. Can the ecology retool and resync this fast?
My gut says no. But then so did Peter Beard’s almost a half century ago.
Lazy guys, content curmudgeons, and sassy big boys told us some marvelous stories about the crater this year. In sum, better than expected rains have relieved some tension in the wild.
Normally I find less than a few thousand wildebeest in the crater now at the height of the dry season, and these are often late birthed calves that missed the normal time to migrant and were then captured by the crater’s slightly better rainfall and subsequent scarce grasses.
This year rack up at least five thousand and it could be many more, and I’m sure that there were late birthed calves among these but it was mostly overly lazy males. After the males rut in May they sort of discard any more personal responsibilities, moving only when their belly tells them to. They lack the intuitive urge to migrate that the females have with calves in tow, and migrate only because grasses die.
Apparently the grasses didn’t die as usual in the crater because of slightly better rainfall, and moreover, the Serengeti just beyond the crater’s rim is so terribly dry that they might have turned back when they hit the dust.
Unlike the Serengeti we experienced the last few days, the crater showed some rain with slight patches of green especially on its eastern side. The rivers were flowing more than normal suggesting the rim got even more rain, and the central lake was much larger than usual, displaying a good number of flamingoes.
So the male wildebeest decided heh, what-the-heck, there’s grass here! And they were joined by several thousand zebra that are driven more by available water than the wildebeest (who also need water, but are more finicky about the type of grass they eat than zebra).
So it was a bonus for us, but potentially a very dangerous situation for these male wildebeest if the dry season now resyncs normally. Between them and the wonderfully green Mara far to the north where their brides and children have gone is one of the most desiccated Serengeti’s I can remember.
One of the first things we saw the first afternoon in the crater was a pride of lion finishing off a buffalo kill. (By the way, it was right at the edge of one of the designated picnic sites!) That was cool enough all by itself, but more telling were two big, healthy male elephants who had wandered into the area.
These old curmudgeons weren’t up to much of anything, displaying vast amounts of boredom. They sucked in great amounts of water and then let it dribble out or squirted it in funny ways all over the place, obviously not in need of a drink.
When this game got tiresome they started what I can only describe as trunk yoga. Contracting their trunk upwards, it spiraled into a corkscrew and for obviously no reason.
At first they didn’t seem the least interested in the lions and their kill hardly 40 meters away. But after they’d cycled through their list of personal games, one of them turned towards the lions and froze before a slow, lumbering towards the kill.
Most of the lions scattered, but the one big female whose belly exceeded that of any of the others, stood her ground and growled.
The 6-ton ele hesitated momentarily, then lowered his head and moved forward.
She growled some more.
Heh, what-the-heck, he seemed to say as he flapped his ears, I made my point! And he lumbered away. All in all it was just an old guy, very well fed, with a lot of time on his ears.
This morning just after dawn we followed a bunch of excited hyaenas as they headed towards a big family of buffalo. Having last March just watched such as situation ending with a dozen of these monsters tearing apart an old, sick bull, I wasn’t about to leave.
But this time it was different. The family had dozens of youngsters and almost as many newborns. I noticed that one group of hyaena was actually cleaning up the after-birth, while others were testing the health of the newborns with quick little sorties into the herd.
Buffalo birth year-round and like elephant tend to abort when conditions are poor. That’s why we don’t usually see a lot of births in the dry season, but this dry season is obviously not so dry … at least here in the crater.
Normally the big males of the family guard the rest, but heh, what-the-heck, it was such a beautiful day the males had disappeared somewhere! Later we’d find them lulling about in mud and water chewing their cud near a wonderful patch of green grass. So it was the mothers who were now darting back at the hyaena to protect the youngsters.
I’m sure I’ve anthropomorphized the couple days in the crater a bit more than I usually tolerate of others, but it was a mostly happy situation, with the crater more beautiful and full of animals than is normally the case in the dry season.
Anomalous seasons have a potential, though, to turn ugly. The thousands of wildebeest that elected to remain behind in the crater and not migrate, or the many new born buffalo who need several months of voracious eating to grow strong enough to survive, have hung their fates on the hope the crater won’t turn as dry as the neighboring Serengeti.
Normally, rains don’t return before November.
But the wild often predicts outcomes better than meteorologists. Climate change is confusing weather patterns all over the place. Perhaps this year, in this one place, it will all be for the better.