Category: OnSafari

OnSafari: The Mara

OnSafari: The Mara

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

pinksunset.mara.08aug.447.jimWhy spend the time and money to travel north on a Tanzanian safari to the very border of Kenya, and then not cross?

I ended my extremely successful McGrath Family Safari game driving along the great Mara and Sand Rivers, seeing really giant crocs, looking longingly to Kenya. You aren’t allowed to cross over.

Ever since the 1979 dispute between the two countries closed the border, numerous attempts by good politicians on both sides have tried to reopen it to no avail.

Oprah stood where my family had lunch yesterday, peeved to smithereens that she wasn’t allowed to cross a few years ago.

Nobody can. Not even the politicians themselves.

The dispute is now so old that recounting its history is like critiquing a marble statue: Interesting, but it’s not going to change.

We had great game viewing these last two days, including a family of 12 lion in a weeded kopjes, elephant playing along the river, giraffe starting at us as we bumped and hurdled ourselves over really bad roads, and to everyone’s glee, 5 baby rock hyrax popping out of a rock design placed at the edge of our camp’s swimming pool.

But it’s a long … and expensive journey to get here. Obviously we aren’t unusual, because the camp we stayed in, Asilia’s Sayari, is expanding (now 15 tents) and is one of the most expensive and luxurious camps in Tanzania.

The southern (Tanzanian) side of the rivers that make up some of the border with Kenya are filled with camps. We encountered almost as many game viewing vehicles as we did in Tarangire. So clearly, we’re not alone.

The attraction is the allure of the migration. Read my last blog to see how crazy this is! Yet we are all driven by history, and in fact the chances today of seeing the great herds in Tanzania are definitely chances that on every day of the calendar are moving northwards.

But more correctly – and this is my own experience – they aren’t moving as much. It’s wetter, so more grass, and areas previously dust bowls at certain times of the year in Tanzania are no longer.

Personally, I love the Mara. In Kenya it’s called the Maasai Mara. Here it’s called the Mara District. But it’s the Mara, absolutely one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It’s cold at night like Seronera, but it never gets really hot during the day even with clear skies. It rains almost every day of the year except in October and November, which I love because it’s not the least disruptive (it never rains for long) and it’s dramatic and turns the veld into a bouquet.

(P.S. The animals like it, too.)

There are woodlands, but they aren’t as dense as further south, so you can reach a rise in a hill and have vistas that stretch for dozens if not hundreds of miles. It’s a lush carpet of greens: the shining reflective green of grasses and the deep dark fur greens of the trees and few woodlands.

And, of course, the rivers. We spent most of our time up here along the Mara River. It’s a raging, but not very deep river, bubbling over lots of big rocks producing white water and little cascading waterfalls everywhere you look.

Also everywhere you look are hippos, uncountable there are so many, and some of the world’s largest crocodiles. I think the biggest one we saw was probably 14 feet, but I have seen them twice that size!

The birdlife is exceptional. First of all, things are easier to see when the woodlands are thinned out. So, for example, we saw numerous klipspringer, steinbok and reedbuck, and even an oribi! These aren’t rare animals, just difficult to find because of their size, color and stealth.

The same is true for birds. So within a half hour we saw a hoopoe, a pygmy falcon and the pink-eyelidded Verreaux’s Eagle Owl!

But it’s not all good news. Tanzania – at least up here – pays a lot less attention to its wildernesses than Kenya. So there are many, many more tse-tse. There are many fewer tracks that we can use. And most of all …

… Tanzania does not allow off-road driving as the Kenyans do in the Mara. That’s critical. The official Tanzanian position is that it damages the ecosystem, and there is some truth to that.

But it’s a little truth, and the real truth has to do with Tanzanian corruption and lack of resources dedicated to tourist parks. So as Kenya calms down (the British removed their travel warnings on the Kenyan coast last week) I think that I and most of my colleagues will choose to travel to Kenya to see the Mara rather than here.

But the McGraths and all the others we met here this time made absolutely the right decision. The southern Serengeti remains my favorite place, but … the Mara is a close second!

OnSafari: The Migration

OnSafari: The Migration

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

From Naabi Hill looking west.The greatest wildlife spectacle on earth has become unpredictable because of climate change, as awesome as it remains.

Today my McGrath Family Safari left the Moru Kopjes at 7 a.m. and arrived our camp near the Mara River on the Tanzanian side around 5:30p. During that time we saw two enormous groups of wildebeest, despite reports that they were all in Kenya.

From just after the Grumeti River near Seronera to Lobo, a distance of about 25 miles, we drove continuously through wildebeest. I estimated a quarter to a third of a million.

After we arrived at the Kenyan border for lunch, we headed west then north again towards the Mara River. From about the Lemala Camp position on the river to about 10 miles southeast of Kogatende, we saw another 100-150,000.

If my very rough estimations are even slightly correct, it means that we saw – today in Tanzania – from around a quarter to a third of all the wildebeest and zebra known in East Africa.

Is this the migration?

For years and years, 30 of my own career to be exact, the more or less circular migration of the great herds was a given that you get nearly set your watch by. Safaris were appropriately planned several years in advance to intersect the best of the great herds.

The beginning of the year began with the rains that attracted all the herds together on the southern grassland plains. Here they calved – all of them, around the last week of February. There was a minor hiatus in precipitation in February in the south, more in the north, but the rains were continuous until often an abrupt stop in late May or early June.

A few weeks later the herds freaked and started running north. The calves were strong enough by then to do so.

They would sometimes break into three sections, often not, with some going into the western corridor and others sticking to the eastern Serengeti. Then by the end of June, virtually all the wildebeest moved across the great Sand and Mara Rivers into Kenya, where they stayed until October.

It just doesn’t happen that way, anymore. Calving is erratic and occurs almost everywhere on the migration route. This year hardly any calving occurred on the southern plains.

Read my “OnSafari” reports for the last several years. This year we found most of the migration in March where it traditionally would have been in June, and we later found it in April where it traditionally would have been in February.

On the McGrath safari last Wednesday, we left the crater to enter the Serengeti. We visited Olduvai, where it was bone dry and few animals, but by the time we hit the Lemuta Kopjes the plains were covered with wildebeest.

From Lemuta west to the main Serengeti road, we easily saw 100,000 wildebeest. This is an area where traditionally they calve in February. Today is nearly July.

In all these unusual cases, the wildebeest were where the grass was growing, of course because it had rained. The rainy season is now all mixed up. Overall precipitation is greater than normal, but it comes in dangerous torrents followed by mini-droughts.

The wilde are adjusting.

The “migration” was never only wildebeest. It was a third zebra as well, but I’ve also noticed that the zebra are separating from the wilde in ways they didn’t before. For the last several days with the McGraths, for example, we encountered around 20,000 zebra starting at the Simba Kopjes through the top of Seronera and west into Moru.

Zebra, no wilde. (Well, maybe one or two or ten or twenty.) And today with the fractions of millions of wilde we saw, hardly any zebra.

Zebra have different eating habits and preferences than wilde. Perhaps climate change is differentiating these even more.

This is fascinating and perhaps troubling, but nowhere near as troubling as the commercial sites, like herdtracker.com, which claim to tell you where the wilde are.

Today, well, the wilde are everywhere. Large herds literally can be found in the furthest south and furthest north part of the Serengeti. Presumably, too, there are many in Kenya.

Irritated by sites like herdtracker.com motivated by commercial advertising, the Frankfurt Zoological Society is in the beta stage of a much more exact migration locator which will be launched soon as SerengetiTracker.com.

The FZS is radio collaring a number of different wilde which it believes come from different parts of the herd, and these will be tracked by satellite.

This is good, but not even this will be complete.

Meanwhile, my McGrath Family Safari couldn’t be happier. After all, they weren’t supposed to have seen the migration.

OnSafari: Crater

OnSafari: Crater

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

craterIt could be in an unexpected poem, a playground of happy children, the smells of the holidays … or the crater at sunrise. This is when your testy, challenged human spirit inflates with joy despite every reason on earth it shouldn’t, and you know everything is just fine.

This isn’t the best time for game viewing in the crater, although few tourists who come now realize this. There’s probably fewer than 5-6,000 animals from the peak in March and April of more than 20,000.

But all that transitory wildlife is only a part of the crater’s story. The inorganic magnitude of its landscape is unmatched anywhere on earth.

Right now as the rough winds signal that rains won’t return for six months, the thick cloud cover of the season will clear for a few hours in the late morning. This morning we had one of the most crystal clear crater mornings I can remember.

It’s only 12 miles across but it seems like hundreds. You’re constantly recalibrating your depth perception. The crater’s rough edges are still lush green, still sucking the last of the fresh-water rivers sinking down from the highlands. But brown is sweeping the floor as it becomes drier and drier, producing this most marvelous contrast of color.

At first everything is pastel and then the morning explodes and there’s this quilt of primary color.

It was hard today with the wind so strong to hear all the bird song, but whenever the wind died the red-naped lark seemed to be singing from one side to the other. We saw nearly 30 crested crane honking then leaving their long necks outstretched as if still tied to the sound long gone.

When it finally warmed to 50 then 60 and finally 70 degrees, the couple thousand wilde that remained started to blart and a few began prancing around. The zebra started barking and the hippo started grunting and you knew that the ossified night of the cold season was at least for a while banished.

But only for a short while. Day time on the equator is the same twelve hours more or less year round. But the overcast of the dry season reforms by early afternoon, the strong winds that seemed to sweep away the morning chill die, and cold settles down from the thick grey cloud quite early, probably by 3 p.m., and the animals and birds slow down, stop talking.

Everything in the world has to rest. The drama of the crater in March and April is sometimes overwhelming. You can’t separate the screams of the hoops of the hyaena from the screams of the elephants, and cackles of the dozens of vultures on a kill.

The movement and tension among the animals is overstimulating. No one has time to appreciate the enormous canvas painted when the world’s largest volcano self-destructed three million years ago.

Mt. Makarot never moves (you’ll have to wait to see the Shifting Sands for that!) The great forests of the acacia lehai seem undaunted even by this wind. The deep curving crevices sliding down the crater’s sides hold their form, but the grandeur of all this is missed in the mayhem of the wet season animal free-for-all.

This is the time the crater’s sleeping. That’s what it seems like, sleeping and recovering, and as our rover descended around the curves and switchbacks of the trail down it was as if we were navigating into a dream with the privileged skill of shaman. And when we climbed out during the peace of the midday and looked back, the landscape pressed into our memories like the tune you’ll never forget but will never be able to fully recreate.

The wilde have migrated out. The tens of thousands of Abdim stork and thousands of white stork and myriads of other migrants are gone. For some reason today even the eland had disappeared…

Leaving an earth so huge with the tiny little you there twisting about somewhere maybe inconsequential but you think it’s in the middle, trying to comprehend it all. Endless, right? Something forever is rare in our world, but that’s what the crater was expressing today, its implacable eternity.

OnSafari: Dr. Frank

OnSafari: Dr. Frank

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DrFrankFrom time to time people get sick on their vacation, I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. It happened to one of my clients today on safari.

It doesn’t happen often and today’s case is a classic example of when it does. Years ago I worried endlessly about the food and water, the cleanliness of the beds and so forth, but those worries ended long, long ago.

The lodges and camps on the safari circuit are probably more hygienic and germ-free than most lodging a person would find in an American city today, so that’s fortunately no longer my concern.

My concern is when we get into remote areas, medical care is limited and when it’s needed – for whatever reason – it’s expensive and time consuming to arrange. The larger upmarket properties like Crater Lodge or the Mt. Kenya Safari Club will have medical staff on duty, often a fully credentialed physician.

But upmarket camps, for example, are just too small to offer this. So remoteness is the key worry.

Our safari left the last vestige of civilization today, as we left the town of Karatu and headed into Ngorongoro Crater for the final week. The further we got from Karatu, the more difficult it would become to arrange adequate medical care.

No one comes on safari not knowing this. In fact it amuses me the numbers of people who presume this is the situation the moment they disembark their airplane in Nairobi or Kilimanjaro, areas with modern hospitals and medical care.

So I suspect most travelers have a very good handle on medical preparations and precautions. I think travel clinics within hospitals often over prescribe and are overly cautious, but from these I know that travelers are usually well prepared.

Proper insurance is also very helpful. It minimizes or completely eliminates the worries of expense that increase the more remote one gets. East Africa has a wonderful network of air medical services for very reliable and quick medivac.

So today as the group prepared to leave I get a knock on my door. The spouse conveys how ill her husband feels. We are at lovely Gibb’s Farm in Karatu. Spouses are usually – not always but usually – the best indication as to the seriousness of a situation.

In this case she seemed more concerned to me than she was letting on or was told to convey to me. So I persuaded the patient to go with me to the excellent FAME clinic at the outskirts of Karatu, and sent the rest of the group on its way as planned.

The clinic is run by a man famous in the area, Dr. Frank. His business card says no more than that, but he is an incredibly generous man, a former cardiac anesthesthesiologist in California. His wife, Susan, and he came on safari more than a decade ago and after a close to critical experience climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, fell so deeply in love with the area that they decided to radically change their lives.

And the lives of the people of Karatu.

Dr. Frank’s clinic is modern, exceptionally staffed and beautifully efficient. It serves all the people of Karatu with extraordinarily modern medicine. There is a prenatal clinic, an operating room, patient wards and well stocked pharmacy.

And tourists – and NGO expats – can … “break the queue” and this is because the exceptional treatment he has provided them is routinely returned exponentially. FAME clinic is privately funded mostly from the U.S. and mostly from small family foundations.

My client was seen, given a battery of tests and diagnosed by Dr. Frank with a very serious infection, probably in the lungs. He had brought the infection from home was part of the diagnosis and as often happens with those who get sick on vacation, the relaxation that accompanies a vacation is often the entree for the sickness to finally get the attention of the patient.

His infection had also led to dehydration, the illness I see most effecting travelers. So he was put on an IV for four hours and given massive doses of antibiotics and fluids, then released onto his safari with a box load of medications.

He looks better and feels better, but as Dr. Frank explained, it will take some time to fully recover, and Dr. Frank knows better than any physician at home that the safari lodging will be just fine for his rest and recuperation.

FAME clinic helps many, many more people locally than the occasional tourist like mine. But the relationship that’s built with the foreign tourist is what fuels the project.

So we caught up with our group which had climbed Olmoti Volcano today, and tomorrow we head into the crater for a game drive, thankful for the FAME Clinics and Dr. Franks of the world!

OnSafari: Wild is Unpredictable!

OnSafari: Wild is Unpredictable!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

lionintree.manyara.ckordash.648.14aprLions don’t climb, hippos aren’t in Tarangire, vervets hate thorns, and guides know it all. Just a few of the things disproved so far on my safari!

Apologies for the big delays between blogs, but Tanzania is in something of a data congestion at the moment. Reports from businesses in Dar and Arusha are all complaining of the slow internet signal.

It’s not the weather, which is beautiful and quite normal, nor nearby conflicts, because except for distant Burundi there are none. So common wisdom is probably true: there are suddenly just too many people trying to use to few satellites.

Common wisdom, though, would not hold much rank on the McGrath family safari. Today in Lake Manyara National Park we saw two near-adult lions in an acacia tortilis tree sleeping their lives away until we arrived.

They were draped over the branches like wet laundry hung out to dry. We watched them for a while until another car came up at which time one of the lions got nervous and teetered down quite ungracefully.

The last one tolerated 2 or 3 more cars before she finally took to the ground, too. So what’s all this about lions not climbing well?

The truth is that lions will climb trees everywhere, if it’s the right kind of tree: fantastic Manyara is filled with so many different kinds of trees there are plenty with the requisite low horizontal branches that will tempt this largest of the cats.

But you can tell it’s a real balancing act, because they never seem completely comfortable up there. But unlike their many cousins on the savannah, their views on the ground are obscured by Manyara’s thick vegetation, so anything that gives them height gives them comfort.

Manyara was great in several wonderful ways, today! The lake is pretty full, so the hippos are plenty. The wind was down, the morning not too cold, and we first watched for a good long time at least a couple dozen silvery-cheeked hornbills flying around and cackling madly.

This is the largest of the hornbills in Tanzania and true dinosaur looking bird!

Grandma Cindy asked if there were any malachite kingfishers, and a few minutes later as we headed to the platform overlooking the hippo pool, we saw two! Also saw lanner falcon, long-toed plover and a bunch of other stuff.

Manyara is baboon heaven, but otherwise I never expect Manyara to be a memorable animal experience. Yet we added to the lions-in-the-tree, 15 minutes literally immersed in an elephant family of 13, and the truly beautiful lake shore landscapes covered with giraffe, wildebeest and zebra.

I even glanced a klipspringer as we were leaving. Manyara was a much better animal experience today than I would expect.

The last several days in Tarangire were classic. The park is absolutely the best elephant park in all of Africa, and it gave us opportunities to learn to distinguish between healthy elephants, lone elephants, sick elephants … elephants that were agitated, and so forth.

The northern half of the park has the more docile and approachable sedentary elephants, whereas the south half of the park usually has more temperamental and transitory ones. Only this time I felt they were pretty calm in the south.

It could be that just over time the homesteaders are arriving. Or it might be that the transitory folks were just coincidentally absent, giving entry to the over crowded north. Either way it was an astounding experience for us.

That is except for Hakon and Alden on the way to their Tent #1 at Little Oliver’s, unable to do so because the elephant wouldn’t leave the path.

I think the manager, Julie, did exactly the right thing. Took a truck down the path and let the guy know he wasn’t welcome. Far too often camps try to cultivate wild animals, and it never ends up well.

We had a chance this time to visit the far southwestern side of Silale swamp, and that was a real treat. Lemala has put a semi-permanent camp down there and the tracks are being better maintained.

It gave us an opportunity to see larger numbers of Grant’s gazelle and hartebeest. If there is any drawback to Tarangire it has been the uniformity of its wildlife experience: almost exclusively elephant and giraffe. The new tracks in the south now will broaden its appeal.

Finally, too, as we were leaving we stopped at a water hole in the Serengeti Plains. We’d already spent probably hours watching elephant frolicking in water, but here they were frolicking among very angry zebra definitely not pleased with their arrival.

It was a wonderful interaction that ended when the Mommy elephants finally got the youngsters to leave the swimming pool and the zebra came down to drink. A wonderful end for us in this marvelous park.

Stay tuned! We’re on our way to the crater!

OnSafari: Lost Bags

OnSafari: Lost Bags

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baglostThe family I’ll be guiding for the next ten days arrived cheerful and ready to go!

The McGraths/Bumsteads/Farahs come from Washington and Providence, two families with 4 teenagers and grandma McGrath leading the pack! The kids are 13-18, so older than my typical family safaris and I’m looking forward to fewer video games and more conversations!

We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Practically every safari spends the first night in Arusha, and we’ll be at the Lake Duluti Lodge. There are a dozen decent places to stay in the Arusha area, and a second EWT safari led by Steve Taylor is currently down the road at the Serena Lake Duluti Lodge.

Yep, a names travesty, and the excellent company Serena is completely at fault. For years their lodge was named Mountain Village, and I continue to call it that. But some marketing whizz decided lakes are more important than mountains, and the enormous confusion began.

It hurts this very nice Lake Duluti Lodge much more, because this is a stand-alone property and Serena is a chain.

It seems like this year a lot of people have lost luggage, including me. My bag was lost for 3 days before it arrived with a bagtag that included a transfer in Moscow. I didn’t fly to Moscow. I hope it had a good time.

Poor Audrey from Dallas, the sweetest southern belle you can image, was finally reduced to tears in frustration this afternoon because of the extraordinary bureaucratic confusion that attends some baggage transfers, and as a result, she and her daughter are without their bags.

The devil of the internet led Audrey down a primrose path that ended in Hades. She got her frequent flyer ticket on Aadvantage all the way to Nairobi, and then as any of us, booked a connecting flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro on some service like Expedia.

Only BA didn’t arrive in time. Her safari company here signed off on a bad combination of airlines, since the connecting airline has no baggage agreement with BA. So she was forced into a late night after an around the world journey last minute decision: make her connecting flight and hope the bags would make it, or miss her connecting flight and try to retrieve the bags in Nairobi.

She made the right decision and lost her bags. It was the last connecting flight of the day.

From my point of view, the woes of travel are often self-inflicted, but because of the awful allure of the internet that you can do everything yourself. Audrey has learned her lesson the hard way, and perhaps the rest of you can learn from Audrey.

My family arrived fully in tact. KLM arrives at night, and it’s nearly an hour’s drive from the airport to the lodge, and that was followed by dinner. The first night on safari ended probably among its latest, but they all seem in excellent spirits!

Stay tuned! We head tomorrow into Tarangire!

OnSafari: You Need an Agent

OnSafari: You Need an Agent

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AirportFor years I’ve derided travel agents as unnecessary middle persons. I’m rethinking some of this.

So is Lufthansa, and probably soon Delta. Once completely dependent upon travel agents, these two mega airlines are soon going to charge you if you use an agent or consumer website like Expedia.

I’m in Vienna, half way through my journey back to Africa. Vienna has no flights to Africa, but Austrian Airlines is part of the Star Alliance. I connect here to Istanbul and then to Kilimanjaro.

This is not a routing that United’s MileagePlus originally offered me. I had to tell them. (It’s a regular schedule offering, now, but when I first booked nearly a year ago, it wasn’t shown.)

My own travel agent skills, and the SABRE GDS booking system that we have in the office is what led me to this option.

A normal consumer without access to a GDS couldn’t do this.

GDS’s are children of the original private airline computer systems. In the late 1970s airlines were among the first companies to use computers. The larger airlines leased their computer systems to scores of other airlines and travel agents and they were called GDS (Global Distribution Systems).

For example, SABRE was the American Airlines’ system. AMADEUS was the system founded by the main European airlines.

GDS are much less user friendly but much more powerful than say, Expedia. They can be quite costly to.

GDS can duplicate Expedia methodology: give me the options for flights and costs for where are you going to from where, but their power is greatly reduced by doing so.

Rather, the savvy user must know before beginning a session what the likely “routing” will be. The GDS is most powerful when asked step-by-step to display every possible option.

The professional using a GDS day-in and day-out discovers the tricks and shortcuts and learns the complex fare building that were Expedia to attempt would result in too many options for its users. So consumer sites like Expedia hewn these options down by algorithms based mostly on expected consumer price points.

By doing so, they often miss the boat. There are easily several hundred different connecting possibilities when traveling from Chicago to Kilimanjaro. Neither Expedia nor MileagePlus would have presented me with the journey I’m currently taking, which I constructed myself using a GDS.

Here’s another excellent example:

At last look, there were 281 different “through fares” between Chicago and Kilimanjaro. That means a single ticket, a single fare on some airline or another starting in Chicago roundtrip Kilimanjaro.

But if you build an air fare say with two fares: one to Europe then a second one to Kilimanjaro, the options are enormously greater. Just to London, for example, there are 650 fares published today, and then 362 fares from London to Kilimanjaro.

Delta in correct conjunction with three other airlines produces what I think is the best fare and best schedule to fly from the U.S. to Kilimanjaro … where I’m going.

But to arrive at this “correct conjunction” you must start with a Delta non-code-share to Paris, then pickup Kenya Airways to Nairobi, then PrecisionAir to Kilimanjaro. On the return you can use either KLM to Amsterdam or reverse the PrecisionAir/Kenya Airways/Delta outbound.

There is no existing consumer booking system that will create this itinerary. You can call an Expedia agent, for example, and tell them what you want, but they won’t be able to find this possibility.

Not even the Delta site will generate this Delta fared itinerary. I have no idea why. It could be that the GDS is capable of finding the loopholes in the complicated airline “fare ladders” constructed by complex agreements between different airline companies. It might also be that Delta just doesn’t want you to pay that cheap a fare.

Keep in mind, though, that this isn’t just to get a cheaper ticket, the obsession of the American consumer. It’s also to discover the best schedules.

I’m a safari guide, a poor travel agent by default. But a good travel agent who understands flights to more of the world than just Africa can be very valuable today. Their problem is that airlines no longer give commissions, and their professional service isn’t free.

One of the awful hazards of the internet is that it empowers the consumer to think she’s as good as the professional.

Not if you want the cheapest and the best schedule from Chicago to Kilimanjaro!

OnSafari: Crater Peace

OnSafari: Crater Peace

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craterpeacceHyaenas lurking near a braying, abandoned baby buffalo is simply a part of the absolute peace and beauty of the crater.

The crater we saw today probably has around 16- or 17,000 animals, about 80% of its optimum at this time of the year, as it recovers nicely from the earlier drought.
buftrophy
Such a compact wilderness with such a thick biomass is normally seriously stressed:

Lions encroach on each others’ territories setting up huge fights; many young are more successfully raised because of abundant food, which as we saw today in a golden jackal family creates internal fighting; normal behaviors break down as we saw in a dozen old male elephants all hanging out together … certainly not comfortably.

Buffalo will normally adopt abandoned young. If a mother dies in childbirth, for example, a sister or auntie buf will often take it on. Yet today we watched just such an abandoned baby, birth sack yet completely removed, walk weakly among its herd looking for help and getting nothing but a huge fling into the sky off the powerful rack of one female with another calve.

That’s unusual. It fell into a lump and we drove right up to it, and it brayed at us miserably. Hyaenas were gathering. The outcome was clear.

Yet overlaying all this explicit tension is one of the most peaceful feeling places in all of Africa.

The peace comes first from beauty: the light in the crater, especially now during the rainy season with the skies so wondrously painted, is ever changing. The backlight, the sunbeams through the rain clouds, the blue reflections off the ponds, create a universe so visually inspiring there simply can’t be anything negative about it.
zebflamflow
The sounds of so many wildebeest blarting, individually rhythmically but collectively pure comedy, is so utterly meaningless it’s nothing less than beautiful music.

The vibrancy of the veld adequately watered had everything in high gear: everything from the gazelle chomping the endless grasslands, to the pelican diving for fresh-water fish in beautifully clear running streams, to kori bustards and red-collared widow birds in the most hysterical courtship displays imaginable … life was intricately good.

Can we gather from this contradictory situation that, in fact, it isn’t really contradictory? Can we come out of the crater, today, understanding that if we don’t anthropomorphize birth and death in animals that instead we will begin to comprehend the most amazing puzzles of creation?

A Maasai instructs Lucas Massimini.
A Maasai instructs Lucas Massimini.
I think so. I think that’s the message we took from the crater this morning: we alone, homo sapiens sapiens, should be judged for our behaviors, because our behaviors are no longer chained to limited and clearly specific methods of survival.

The baby buf would be eaten by the hyaena for goodness, because it was nature working, and the fact that it remains somewhat a mystery to us is simply our inability to fully comprehend the puzzle of life.

But experiencing the crater helps us comprehend the puzzle, to want to understand its pieces without projecting our own totally unique ids onto the dung beetle.

And that journey is unlikely to be completed, but it absolutely is down the yellow brick road with a certain end that is good and beautiful.

Breakfast in the crater.
Breakfast in the crater.

OnSafari: Serengeti Super Storm!

OnSafari: Serengeti Super Storm!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Super Storms in the Serengeti, once rare, may now be the new normal.
Super Storms in the Serengeti, once rare, may now be the new normal.
We didn’t know what to do. The super storm had formed so quickly. Should we stay on the hill or hightail it back?

It was our last of four days in the Serengeti and we had enjoyed some of the most spectacular game viewing in the world. But now, the storm threatened all the good memories.

We left camp around 3:30p for the stark beauty of the nearby Maasai kopjes just outside Seronera. In the past I’d seen many lion, cheetah, elephant and of course the ubiquitous reedbuck over these mostly flat grasslands.
lionthruwindow
The kopjes were small by the standards of the Gol or Lemuta, but they were very pretty. They were spaced on either side of a great swamp, and we had been challenged finding a way through the swamp to the kopjes side.

Our game viewing had been supreme, truly by my own high standards. But the payment for this unique experience was what we were doing now: challenging the rainy season in a time of mendacious climate change.

There’d been a drought, then floods. The rain which had been so absent for six weeks seemed to now be pouring back in unimaginable amounts.

As we left camp I noticed that two giant cells were forming: one to the east and one nearly straight above us. If they grew together …

We stopped for some lions near the Seronera river. We quickly checked out the rocks where we knew a mother leopard was raising two cubs. Then we crossed the main road and followed the Seronera river to the east.

We had just reached the swamp when I saw the two cells were combining into a super storm. Tumaini raced up about the only hill in the whole area and we took stock of our situation.

I looked at Tumaini and suggested we just stay put, wait out the torrents that were expected and then slide back to camp.

Annika photographs the family.
Annika photographs the family.

We knew it would be a near catastrophic downpour. The murram tracks in this area were pretty good and while they would rut and splinter, usually a Landrover could travel over them even when covered in water.

But the tracks across the swamp were a different matter altogether. They weren’t murram, but cut over black cotton soil, about the closest thing to quicksand that exists. Add a few drops of water, and you’re sunk on the spot.

Tumaini realized that before I did and in response to my suggestion to wait it out, he shook his head and put the car in gear.

We followed our own tracks back across the swamp and raced as fast as we could back to camp. The rain began all at once.

Directions always available.
Directions always available.

It was so heavy we could hardly see. The car slid back and forth as if being jiggled in a giant bowl. My window wouldn’t close completely, and waves of water fell onto me. The front windshield fogged up completely as the temperature plummeted. I had to open the side flap window and use my sweater to keep the window as clear as possible for Tumaini.

We reached Makoma Hill where our camp was located. The lightning started fierce, the thunder shook the car.

We had to traverse some black cotton soil here, too. Sometimes the car was racing as we slid near sideways. Headlights were pointless. Tumaini had to just feel the road.

Finally we turned up the hill, and a camp positioned down from ours was the first respite I felt. We were still ten minutes away from our own camp, but high enough that waiting it out now would be OK.

And the storm was relentless, and the rain grew even worse. Tumaini forged ahead and we dove into a part of the road completely submerged, the water above the floorboard. I was actually momentarily proud that we had sealed it so well none seeped into the interior.

The main track into camp was useless, so Tumaini used a back service road. We arrived while the torrents continued to fall. There was only a few moments of more anxiety as we waited for our second car, Justin. When he pulled in, relief was manifest. None breathed more easily now than me.

I walked with Kirsten into the dining tent through heavy rain. We stepped through racing water at least a half foot high. But once inside the tent, shoes and socks peeled off and beer and Amarula in hand, the drama ended as an adventure never to be forgotten!
roughridie
Later I would inappropriately bristle at Theresa’s remark that this is why people avoid the raining season. I bristled because in normal times, super storms were about as rare as a white elephant. Well, maybe not quite as rare, but you get my meaning.

Now perhaps I have to concede that super storms in the rainy season might be the new normal. Climate change is devastating here. Obviously, everyone loves the rains, but when they come all at once the veld floods, the washes carry away the soil, new plants die, animals flee the standing water.

All that was yesterday afternoon.

Today we left the Serengeti and took our first game drive in the crater. The drive back to Ngorongoro was truly breath-taking. I’ve rarely seen the veld so absolutely beautiful, glimmering in every shade of lustrous green you can imagine.

Maasai seemed jubilant. The herds were grazing to the fill, as were the neighboring zebra and gazelle.

Tomorrow, our last game drive: dawn in the crater!

Isabella & Magnus watch hippos in the Grumeti at Retima.
Isabella & Magnus watch hippos in the Grumeti at Retima.

OnSafari: Even More Migration!

OnSafari: Even More Migration!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

From Naabi Hill looking west.
From Naabi Hill looking west.
Few times in forty years have I seen such a massive migration. I can honestly say that from my experience I think we have seen at least 1½ million animals.

But that has to remain an estimate. We made no aerial survey, no individual counting. It’s my opinion, but one rendered from forty years of doing this. And whether my numbers are off or not, I can absolutely say that it was among the very best migration experiences of my career.

Brewster Johnson asked me today at Naabi Hill how often we could see the scene around us, and I replied if the weather is normal, every March and April.

That’s pretty true for the south side of the hill we were on at the time: the wilde surrounded the south side from as far as we could see towards Lemuta to the Kusini Plains where the swath ended.

But as we pulled over the hill we could see almost as many again northeast towards Gol and somewhat towards Moru. And combined with what we had seen for the last few days in more distant places like Lemuta, this experience this year was extremely unique.

Today we moved from the southwest tip of the Serengeti at Ndutu into the center, via Naabi Hill. Yesterday evening as we watched yet another line stream into the Ndutu forests (which we could not see from our vantage point today at Naabi) we watched the end of the line brought up by a lost calve.

Hardly had I mentioned that the calve wouldn’t last then we saw a hyaena run after it, easily catching its tail, then immediately start eating it alive.

The scene was disturbing to some on my current trip and is understandably disturbing to many, and to dismiss these feelings by just saying “This is the wild,” is inadequate.

What the “wild is” is not an easy concept. Hyaena are as essential to the wild as baby wildebeest. Hyaena killing baby wildebeest are as essential to the wild as babies being born to wildebeest.

Today we also saw wild dog. Wild dog and hyaena are the most gruesome killers, and wild dog look remarkably cuddly and loving, no less than a slurping lab. But both animals eat their prey before they kill it.

Why that particularly gruesome way of recycling has evolved may be more a reflection of our own consciousness than any comment on what the wild is.

But above all, it’s the perfect lesson on why we need diligently to keep ourselves from anthropomorphizing wild animals.

From Naabi Hill looking south about 25 miles towards Ngorongoro. Field of view at the top of the picture is about 10 miles.
From Naabi Hill looking south about 25 miles towards Ngorongoro. Field of view at the top of the picture is about 10 miles.

OnSafari: Bingo! The Great Migration

OnSafari: Bingo! The Great Migration

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

GreatMigrationFor more than a half day we were immersed in the Great Migration. For at least four of those hours we were driving, constantly surrounded by wilde, zebra and breath-taking scenery. We saw perhaps three-quarters million animals … or more. How do you count endless dots from horizon to horizon?

And for that entire time, from start to finish, from 11 a.m. in the morning to 5 p.m. in the evening, we saw no other cars, no people but Maasai herdsmen. We were 11 people and two safari vehicles alone in the greatest wilderness on earth!

We entered the great southern grasslands just after Shifting Sands not far from Olduvai Gorge. The veld was green and beautiful, so unlike when I was here 12 days ago.

We immediately saw some wilde and zebra, but it was through our binocs that we saw the enormity of the experience which awaited us.

Lucas Massimini & Magnus Johnson on The Rock!
Lucas Massimini & Magnus Johnson on The Rock!

Hardly a half hour later, driving off-road across the plains we encountered the herds. For the rest of the day, from about 11:30a to 5 p.m., wilde were everywhere.

We saw massive herds from just north of Shifting Sands up to Lemuta, northwest all the way to Naabi and into the Gol (perhaps it went on from there, but we could see no further) and west virtually to the main road.

With our binocs we could see great herds further north, but we had to head west to Ndutu. From what we saw I’d estimate the migration filled at least 125 sq. miles, but that was all we could see.

It was so much different than the quarter million we found far from this place in the Masabi Plains 12 days ago.

They were frolicking and bouncing, like healthy wilde, twisting in the air as they ran. There was incredible blarting. This was the normal migration I know, not the distressed one coming out of the 6-week drought we saw hardly two weeks ago.

But it was unique, too. The beautiful grass was new. There was little scat, few zebras, no eland, only 2 hyaena and a handful of ostrich. Of course the veld was filled with tommies, but they reside here year-round.

There were tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of red-capped lark. This remarkable little bird has a distinct job in the migration yet to be fully understood, but it is always found in the vanguard of quickly moving herds.

It was green throughout, with many, many pools of water.

The herd east of the main road had so few young it was depressing. The herd west of the main road was like the ones we saw two weeks ago in the Masabi Plains, about 1 in 10 or 9 were this year’s calves.

Where did they come from? Where had they been?

I remain convinced that the drought fractured the herds. We can say now that it fractured into at least two large pieces and many smaller pieces, but perhaps even more large pieces.

One went into the western corridor, 2-3 months ahead of schedule. Those composed the quarter-million we found 12 days ago. The much larger piece we saw from Lemuta west must have been in the valleys of Angata and towards Sale, perhaps west of Loliondo but east of the Maasai kopjes, although it had been reported very dry there, too.

Perhaps this larger piece wasn’t a large piece, but dozens if not hundreds of smaller fractured pieces.

What particularly amazes me is that when we saw the Masabi herds leave the western corridor right past Soroi Lodge on the old road through the pass to Seronera, I couldn’t understand why they were leaving. It was still raining and the grass was beautiful.

But leave, they did. So why? Why make the trek down to the southern grassland plains if you’re surrounded by excellent fodder?

Is it hard-wired into them to linger in the south until the rains recede in a normal fashion? Are the grasses in the south that much more nutritious and does wilde physiology recognize this?

Whatever the answer, the migration is back on track this year after being dramatically wrenched awry by the drought. I just hope the rains continue as normally they would.

It will take at least another month for those who survived to recover their normal body weight. There are far fewer young than normal. The year will end badly for wilde numbers.

Climate change is devastating the earth. The Great Migration avoided a catastrophe this year, but it seems now like every year is somehow abnormal. Small periods of intense drought are spaced by horrible flooding.

It worries me how long this most amazing spectacle on earth will continue.

Brewster Johnson at our lunch spot in the migration.
Brewster Johnson at our lunch spot in the migration.

OnSafari: Kili Magic!

OnSafari: Kili Magic!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Kirsten Wede, John & Christina Massimini, Theresea & Brewster Johnson
Kirsten Wede, John & Christina Massimini, Theresea & Brewster Johnson
Easily more than 50,000 flamingoes graced our first game drive in Arusha National Park as we drove to Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The Wede Family Safari began in this remarkable little park hardly an hour outside northern Tanzania’s busiest and largest city. The park surrounds Mt. Meru, Africa’s 5th highest mountain, which towers over Arusha.

You won’t see a lion kill and you won’t see giant herds filling the horizon, but we did see lots of waterbuck, zebra, warthog, baboon and .. giraffe. The park is fondly nicknamed “Giraffic Park” because it has so many giraffe.

And there are great chances of seeing the uncommon black-and-white colobus monkey and rare red duiker, both of which I saw on my first visit this year a couple weeks ago.

It was hippos that most impressed the kids, I think; but it was the flamingoes that resulted in the most pictures from the adults!

It really is a beautiful sight. Both lesser and greater flamingo fringed the Momela Lakes, the crater lakes of the old volcano, and even spread into the shallower parts of the lake interiors. As John Massimini remarked, they’re most beautiful when flying.

It isn’t just the formation they form, but the beautiful pastel red flashing with the underwing white that’s so captivating.

Annika, Isabella, Ranger, Lucas & Magnus
Annika, Isabella, Ranger, Lucas & Magnus

As with my last safari we decided to use tracks from Arusha NP to our camp in west Kili, and like last time, we got lost! But it’s kind of hard to really “get lost” when a landmark like Mt. Kilimanjaro is shouting out.

This time it was probably a half hour delay, and I think well worth it, because we got to see what village life in Tanzania has become. And I don’t mean bomas with kids with runny noses:

I mean proper brick or concrete houses – albeit very small – in regular clusters arranged along the irrigation “stream” that a number of villages out here have cut to provide irrigation to this otherwise arid land.

Today we walked around the 11,000 acres of Ndarakwai Ranch in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We saw zebra, wildebeest, warthog, eland, gazelle, mongoose, and tons of impala. The kids aborted the walk after a short while, and I called our rovers up to continue with them on a game drive.

While the adults climbed a hill with spectacular views. To the south was the incredible valley between Mt. Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro. To the north was Amboseli National Park in Kenya. It was a landscape that was Big Sky awesome!

Babu Hans led the charge on the hike. He’ll be celebrating his 70th birthday soon, and this was the reason for his safari. When I told the ranger who was nimbly jumping ahead of his like an impala about Hans’ remarkable agility at 70 years, the ranger proudly told me he was 73!

I love this place, Ndarakwai Ranch, as a perfect way to ease into a safari. It has lots of animals, really comfortable and beautiful but classic not luxurious tents, good food, and fine staff. It’s not as wild and wooly as the big game parks we start to visit tomorrow, but the outstanding scenery is hard to match.

The perfect way to begin while people are still shaking their jetlag.

Tomorrow: Tarangire!

OnSafari: The Great Migration!

OnSafari: The Great Migration!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Mark Weingarden counting the migration.
Mark Weingarden counting the migration.
Perseverance, great attitudes and not a little bit of luck brought us to the great migration in one of the most difficult years to find it I ever remember.

According to Mark Weingarden we saw 283,465 wildebeest in a long narrow area that we traversed of about 20 sq. miles. Mark’s metric was to estimate how many northeast football stadiums would be filled by the herds.

No one suggested we go where we found them. Virtually all the information we had collected for days, combined with internet sites like Herdtracker.com, gave us no help. We were the only car for four hours on the Soroi Lodge access road off the western corridor road.

We had left the western corridor after finding no wildebeest in the Masabi Plains where they had been reported over the last few days. If they had been there, they’d left in a hurry.

Giant storms were building. The veld all along the western corridor from Serena past the Masabi Plains looked green enough with good enough grass to support large herds, but we saw none.

We took side roads like down to the Hembe and Mauri camp sites. It was beautiful and fresh and we saw topi and impala, warthog, tons of gazelle, baboon and even a group of more than 100 eland.

Dan & Roger Pomerantz.
Dan & Roger Pomerantz.
But no wilde.

On our side roads down to the Grumeti River it was depressing. The river is ridiculously low, so it was clear the greened up veld was from recent rains. At the Grumeti Retina hippo pool later we’d see two dead hippo, one being devoured by giant crocs. Perhaps that’s why we got to see the very rare white-headed vulture … because there is so much dead carion.

The afternoon before we had seen maybe a thousand zebra on the plains in front of Makona Hill, and Tumaini and I conjectured that if they were in vanguard of something, it would be in the pass that led from Soroi to Seronera.

We would have liked to take that little track, but it was too wet. That has been the great irony of the last few days: no wilde, stressed and sick animals, but a greened up veld. About six weeks of hardly any rain was breaking and confusing everyone, perhaps including the wilde.

So after following all the public leads and coming up zero, we headed back to the Soroi access road. I wasn’t optimistic. I told my clients that it didn’t look good.

I was wrong.

Estimating wildebeest numbers is not easy, and it’s even harder when they aren’t spread across flat grassland plains, but woven among many forests and valleys. But I think Dave may be close to the numbers. I think we probably encountered 10-15% of the entire population.

Even sitting on a rise in the great plains it’s hard to see any more at once, so we lucked out … we found the great migration.

If I’m right about the numbers, where are the rest?

Dave Koncal & Jane Krug.
Dave Koncal & Jane Krug.

I remain convinced that the dramatically unusual weather has fractured the herds this year. Likely most of “the rest” is in as small or smaller groups scattered all over the place. That would be a natural and positive reaction to near drought.

But now that the drought seems to have ended the herd mentality may kick back in gear. They aren’t in the best of condition. Instead of the normal 1 in 4/5 wilde being babies, I reckon it’s not more than 1 in 10. Have they died already?

We saw two groups with young that still had their umbilical chords. That means very late births. Many herbivores have the capacity to delay birth for at least a little while. Perhaps that’s what’s happening.

The big question now is where will they go. If they came from Masabi in the western corridor they were several months ahead of a normal schedule. We left Ndutu several days ago and it was raining hard there.

This afternoon it’s very hard raining where we are in Seronera, and storms filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Grass will be growing everywhere.

But it is the specially high nutrient grasses of the southern plains that the herd needs for a healthy year. Will they go back to that? Or are they too weak or tired?

I’ve got one more safari to go. Stay tuned!