A glorious New Year’s in the Serengeti

FLASH-BACK POST: December 31, 2009 - January 3, 2010
[post written on Jan. 4, 2010]


We know many of our blog readers may find the names of the places we’ve been to be a bit of alphabet soup requiring the help of GoogleMaps to locate. But our guess is that nearly all of you have heard of Serengeti National Park in northwestern Tanzania. Odds are that if you’ve ever seen any nature show about Africa - especially any show about lions or migrating wildebeest - it was filmed in the savannahs of the Serengeti.

In an effort to ensure our time in Tanzania really was a holiday from our regular crammed-into-a-mini-bus style, we booked a ‘budget’ 4-day/3-night camping safari to the Serengeti from Dec 31, 2009 to Jan 3 2010.

We arrived at the starting point for our safari adventure, Arusha, Tanzania, after a harrowing ferry ride from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam - the trip was twice as long as expected and featured big swells, ever-increasing diesel fuel odors, and an incorrectly-English-subtitled version of the film Blood Diamond (which is an English-language film) - and a 12-hour bus ride from Dar Es Salaam to Arusha.

Mt Kilimanjaro from the road to Arusha

As for the Serengeti…breathtaking. It was a long day’s drive from Arusha to it, but the trip was made shorter by light banter from our driver/guide, Daudi. Zanzibari by birth, Daudi was in northern Tanzania for the same reason as hundreds of other Tanzanians--to tap into the tourism market. We were surprised to learn there are 83 safari companies based out of Arusha and that the largest one owning 400-some Landrovers (the scourge of the Serengeti)! Daudi had nearly completed a university education focused on tourism and was knowledgeable about the animals and natural world around us. However, he could have used a few more lessons in professionalism as he was only willing to minimally suppress his strong dislike for our cook, Marceli (yes, even the most ‘budget‘ of camping safaris comes with a driver/guide and cook for the group). Outright conflict never broke out, but Daudi did declare Marceli to be “useless” on several occasions and said repeatedly that “he just never shuts up.”

We started out on the safari by heading into the foothills of the Ngorongoro Highlands towards the Ngorongoro Crater. The view was otherworldly, with volcanoes on the horizon and beautiful with lush vegetation. We reached the rim at 3,000-some meters where temperatures were cooler and fog draped over the ridgelines. This area is now the home for many Masai people (having been relocated during the Serengeti’s establishment), and we commonly saw men, women and children in red plaid dress dotting the countryside, their cattle blocking the road.

The amazingly beautiful Ngorongoro Crater

Masai boys herding cattle in the road

As we dropped over 2,000 meters as we descended down towards the Serengeti Plains the weather warmed up, the landscape became grassland, and we began to see thousands of wildebeest and hundreds of zebra and Thompson’s gazelle everywhere. These three animals apparently travel together in an ever-moving migration, following the moisture and available grasses. Rich imagines this must have been the way North American Bison looked in South Dakota before the railroad days.

As we planned our trip to be a budget camping safari, we rolled up into the public campground to find 27 tents already up. This campsite was unlike a National Park in the US. Individual sites do not grant each party a sense of privacy here. Instead, it was a smallish grassy area where everyone was helter-skelter organized with narrow alleys between tents and a strong sense of “community.” As it was New Year’s Eve, the air was filled with revelry which, we hoped would keep the wild animals at bay since there are no fences encircling the campground and we had been told elephants are great at sniffing out snacks kept in tents (which we of course had!). Fortunately our sleep was undisturbed - we had a 5am wakeup call for our true New Years celebration--a sunrise hot air balloon ride!

Sunset in our campsite on New Year's Eve 2009

Just before dawn we were whisked away by a jeep into the middle of the Serengeti passing hartebeest and a lioness with cubs along the way. We arrived as the first light was falling onto the vast plains, and could barely make out three massive deflated balloons laying on the frosty (coconut) grass. We were among the first of our balloon‘s 16 passengers to arrive, so we stood about watching our breath and shivering until everyone arrived and the inflating began. The roar of the burner was tremendous and the balloon’s fabric glowed with each burst of the flame in the dawn’s twilight. Once flying, that same burner gave the hair on or heads a feeling of imminent combustion. The views of the Serengeti were beautiful. The wind that day didn’t happen to take us by much wildlife, but the landscape at dawn was peaceful. Once we landed, we enjoyed a champagne toast (apparently a hot-air balloon ride tradition) and were whisked away to another remote location in the middle of the bush where linen-covered fully set tables awaited our arrival for a full breakfast and more champagne.

Rich and our semi-inflated hot air balloon on Jan 1, 2010 (yes, the grass is frosty)

The rest of our New Year’s was average after this start. You know: watched some elephant herds with adorable, awkward youngsters who kept falling in the mud puddles along the road; sat near some lions who were stalking far-away gazelle they had no real hope of catching; discovered a massive herd of zebras in the foothills; tracked a leopard as it picked a better tree in which to sleep.

Lioness and 3 sleepy cubs

Wildebeest on the Serengeti plains

Elephants

 Lazy leopard in a tree

Two lions lounging in a tree

A flock of ostrich in the road

Hartebeest

Baboons (including an adorable baby) in a tree

Hippo-pile in the river

Gigantic herd of zebras

Maribou stork 

Just when we thought the day could not get any better, our after-dinner tea was interrupted by a group of four elephants who came eating their way through the public campsite. At one point, there was legitimate concern that the matriarch was going to trample our tent as she was busy stripping a tree of its leaves no more than ten feet behind it. We didn’t know it at the time, but this sort of elephant invasion became a theme as our breakfast on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater (on our final morning of safari) also concluded with a huge bull elephant drinking out of the camp’s water tank. We were told he was a frequent visitor to this easy drinking hole.

Bull elephant posing with our safari jeep on his way to the water tank (above) and up close (below)

Ngorongoro Crater

Mastodon-sized elephants in the Ngorongoro Crater

Zebra in the Ngorongoro Crater

African buffalo

Very full lion

Cheetah on the prowl (and a massive flock of pink flamingos in the lake in the background)

Once we safely returned to Arusha, we went back to the Caanan Hotel, which is a place we had picked primarily for price and easy pre-safari pick-up, but turned out to be a wonderful, locally-owned business. Off the beaten track, but clean, safe, and staffed by very friendly people, we would highly recommend this hotel if you find yourself in Arusha. Also, it is partnered with the Oreteti tour company, which prides itself on providing community-based ecotourism (that is, they only employ local people who actually know the areas you may visit, they pay these people a fair wage, and they invest a portion of their profits to local educational efforts in the communities that are visited during a tour). Unfortunately, we found through our own safari with a different company that these are not priorities for the majority of the tourism industry (especially the fair wage part, which leads to not-so subtle hints about tipping being dropped from the get-go). A day-trip with Oreteti (see our next blog post) made us wish that we had gone with them for our Serengeti safari.

Note: we have sooooo many more pictures of the Serengeti to share, we are working on getting the best ones uploading and will share the link once they’re ready for viewing online.