Why 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!
Another great post Jim, many thanks. I’ve got huge admiration for your consistent, high-quality output. Your post on the Migration on Monday crystallised many peoples’ thoughts about how “beyond-unpredictable” the cycle has become.
I just wanted to point out a couple of things on this post that might leave readers bemused or confused. Firstly, you can cross the border between Tanzania and Kenya, absolutely you can, just not within the Serengeti National Park itself (or the Maasai Mara National Reserve if coming from the other direction). There are several crossing points along the Tanzania-Kenya border between the Indian Ocean coast and Lake Victoria. The obvious one for those wanting to visit the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara on the same trip is the one between Tarime (Tz) and Migori (Ke), just to the west of the park-reserve. It’s a very established border crossing and the local safari airlines Safarilink in Kenya and Coastal Aviation in Tanzania, run services in cooperation with each other that use shuttles on the road to pass through immigration.
Secondly your statements about off-road driving are a bit confusing. Off-roading is the scourge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve: there are large areas that are scored to oblivion by minibus tracks paying no heed to park rules. The eastern two thirds of the reserve is badly neglected by the reserve authorities. In contrast the well managed Mara Conservancy sector, west of the Mara River, is exemplary – as are the community conservancies (Mara North, Olare Motorogi, Naboisho and Ol Kinyei) to the north of the reserve, where the visitor numbers are kept deliberately so low that off-roading is allowed. Those areas are where I would recommend you go the next time you get the chance.
The UK FCOs travel warnings for the Kenya coast have been rolled back – but only as far north as Watamu. Malindi continues to suffer inside the “advise against all non-esssential travel” zone, As does Lamu island, where there’s never been any terrorist threat, and where you can happily walk the streets of the marvellous old town late at night in complete safety. So the Kenya coast’s cloud may have lifted a little, but the damage has been done and it will take time to revive tourism there. The Kenya government needs to shape up on all fronts, but deep-rooted corruption is eating the country alive and undermining security efforts.
It’s instructive to compare Kenya with Tunisia. Kenya hasn’t had a terrorist incident targeting tourists since 2002, yet repeatedly its key coastal resorts have been deemed unsafe. Tunisia has had two deadly attacks on tourists in the space of six months. And yet the UK FCO still says those areas are safe to visit.
One other thing – those 28-foot crocodiles? You should know better than to tell such tall tales… If only there were any crocs, anywhere, that big. The biggest Nile crocodile on record was supposedly shot in the Semliki River and measured exactly 18ft long (5.5m), though the Guinness Book of Records apparently has an account of one from Mwanza that was 21ft 2in (6.45m) long.
Richard –
Thanks so much for some deeper discussions about some of the things I posted. A couple of your remarks, however, beg my replies:
(1) MARA OFF-ROADING : I agreed there was some “truth” to the notion of off-roading scarring the topography. But my adjective “some” is a considered one. The charges you make about the Mara have been unchanged for my 40 years of working there. I don’t see the damage you do. Neither of us are scientists, so perhaps their documentation would help, but my intuition is that it isn’t as bad as often portrayed, and the trade-off of how bad it may truly be, with not just the tourist advantages but the great advantages that it provides a laudable visitor’s motivation to feel the wild, strikes me as an advantage that ought not be compromised.
(2) BORDER CROSSING : Thanks so much for pointing this out as I’d hate guests to think you can’t pretty effortlessly drive between Kenya and Tanzania. However, the Migori/Tarime connection, which is the only near-game park to game park crossing possibility is not just a killer (I’ve suffered it twice) but actually more expensive than circling back around through Nairobi, which remarkably can actually take less time!
(3) BIG CROCS : I guess you haven’t looked at Peter Matthiessen
Eyelids of The Morning
book for a while. It’s too bad the hardcover version is out-of-print but often still available as a used book on Amazon. The caption for the hardcover’s dust jacket of a giant croc from Lake Turkana says it is 26 feet long. Yes, I have seen those!
Thanks for your response Jim, but I’m now even more baffled!
My thoughts:
Off-road driving by thousands of vehicles a month in the 1500sq km of the Maasai Mara National Reserve is very bad news. Off-road driving in the reserve is strictly forbidden, and the reason it goes on is because the reserve is much *worse* managed than the Serengeti National Park, not better as you suggest. If you haven’t seen the damage, perhaps you should drive from the Mara/Talek confluence to Governors’ in January after the Christmas/New Year tourist stampede, or around Talek Gate or Ololaimutiek Gate, or on the east bank opposite Serena during migration season. Off-road driving isn’t just bad for the grass and the invertebrates (true, I’m not a scientist, but I can read science), it harasses the wildlife and drives animals away. Which is why the strictly controlled, Maasai-owned, private conservancies have been so successful at sustaining the Mara ecosystem on the Kenyan side of the border, and attracting wildlife out of the overcrowded reserve into areas that 10 years ago were suffering their own destruction under the hooves of thousands of cattle and goats. So *those* are the areas where you can feel the wild. But you do have to compromise. I first came here as a hitchhiker in 1981, and there have been some big changes.
The Maasai Mara-Migori-Tarime-Northern Serengeti route is about a third of the distance of returning to Nairobi and then flying all the way back to the Serengeti again, and it’s invariably much quicker. But I grant you, depending on the rest of your air itinerary, it could work out no less expensive.
And crocs…
I think it was Peter Beard who wrote Eyelids of Morning (Peter Matthieseen wrote a fantastic book called The Tree Where Man was Born). I’ve still never read Eyelids of Morning and I really must get a copy. I’m sure you’re quite right that the blurb on the dust jacket says the photo shows a 26-foot croc. But honestly, when you see a big crocodile in the Grumeti or the Mara or Lake Turkana and realise it’s maybe 4 metres long (13-14ft), that is *huge*. By the way, in West Africa people often talk about gigantic crocodiles, and the crocs there could still do you serious damage if they thought you were edible (I twice had serious concerns for my children, on two separate occasions, at croc villages), but I never saw any that were more than a couple of metres long. I don’t see the point of exaggerating when the evidence of your own eyes is already so impressive. But don’t take my word for it Jim: check it out – there are no proven records of any Nile crocodiles as big as you (or Beard’s publishers) suggest.
PS: Apologies if any of my remarks come across as point-scoring – not my intention at all. I’m as apt to get it wrong as the next person and always happy to be corrected.