Habari za safari?
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Last week resulted in a last-minute safari booking, from Friday to Tuesday, to see the best wildlife parks that Tanzania - therefore Africa, therefore the world - has to offer.
Though originally priced at close to $950 per person for a five-day excursion - a trip we were planning on embarking upon next weekend - I had asked our safari dealer to keep myself and Robin in mind for any group trips that might be booked in the near future. Joining a group would reduce the cost significantly. Luckily, a second visit to the office of Sunny Safaris brought good news - a third person could tag along. Thankfully, we saved about $150 per person as a result - close to an extra day’s worth of fees.
I’d been itching to get out of our familiar surroundings - which, though picturesque in terms of natural landscape, are diminished by the aesthetic displeasures of Tengeru’s shanty market town and Arusha’s suffocating urban sprawl. A tour of three world-famous national parks proved to be just the ticket.
First, our bad-ass convertible Landrover took us eastward to Lake Manyara, a park somewhat overlooked by typical safari goers because of its small-size. Unsurprisingly, the park is centered around a large lake, which is back-dropped by a significant section of the Great Rift Valley.
Manyara offered an incredible start to our safari. Within minutes of entering the gate, we came across a family of baboons and then a herd of elephants, just 25 metres or so from the road. Countless more elephants were spotted throughout the day - often within touching distance from our open-top Landrover. Seeing giraffes from a distance, their massive height contrasted by the flatness of the vast horizontal lake, was a definite highlight too.
Next, we landroved north to Serengeti National Park, Tanzania’s largest wildlife sanctuary. According to my Rough Guide, we picked the best time of the year to see what the Serengeti is most famous for - its annual wildlife migration, the largest mammalian gathering on earth with over 3 million attendees.
Utterly failing to disappoint, it was pretty humbling to see more wildebeest and zebras than the eye could ever hope to count. An elephant duel in the middle of the journey north was just icing on the cake.
During our two-night stay in the Serengeti, I hoped to see at least one member of the animal kingdom’s royal family - the lion. Awesomely, we saw around 20 of them. Our entrance to the park was rather muted, driving in the middle of patchy rainfall and with virtually no animals in sight. The next morning, feeling cautiously pessimistic, I was rewarded with a pride of female lions within minutes of leaving the campsite. In this fairly mind-blowing first encounter, four or five lions sauntered past our vehicle, almost brushing the doors with their fur. Not long after, our first sight of male lion was diminished somewhat by the pack of 20-ish vehicles already viewing the animal next to a tree. Still, it was terrific.
Finally, we returned southward to Ngorongoro Crater, the most renowned national park of its kind (a natural volcanic caldera) in the world. The mere fact that the crater is the result of a volcano imploding under its own weight was reason enough for me to want to see it. Thanks to this prehistoric snafu, a gigantic, 600-metre-deep hole was left on the surface of east Africa, and the result is a natural, unbroken amphitheatre for viewing around 30,000 large mammals. The descent into Ngorongoro was precluded by a stay at The World’s Greatest Campsite Ever - a patch of grass hanging on the edge of the crater where we slept in the company of buffalos and awoke to the sight of the sun rising over the massive caldera below us.
The Ngorongoro descent was simply stunning. Edging our vehicle down a steep red dirt road, our party was the first to arrive in the flatlands of the caldera. Thanks to this premier position, I managed to spot a female lion before anyone else - leading to a slow creep as we followed her down the road and several other vehicles joined in. Next, the central Lake Magadi hosted thousands of fluorescent pink flamingos, making a serene backdrop to the caldera’s lush, wet grasslands.
Of all the animals I had yet seen, cheetahs and rhinos were the only desirables left on my list. Within an hour of our descent, I could consider this list complete. A distant rhino plodded along the horizon, made quite visible by binoculars borrowed from host Lema’s brother Eric. Minutes after, our car snuck in beside a small gathering of fellow safari-goers to spot a nearby cheetah lounging on a grassy knoll.
The safari was one of the neatest experiences of my life, and I would say it’s easily worth the trip to Tanzania just to experience one for a week or so. I’ll forgive the lack of seeing a predator’s hunt (aside from watching hyenas bully buffalo) in exchange for the sheer bounty of animals on display during my short trip. Easily the best $1000 or so bucks I’ve ever spent.
Lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, hippos, zebra, elephants, wildebeest, buffalo, jackals, rhinos, giraffes, gazelles, bat-eared foxes, dikdiks, impalas, hyraxes, bushbucks, mongooses, monkeys, warthogs, baboons, a dead snake and a feather-load of exotic birds… not bad for five days work.
Photographer’s note: I did bring a camera along - one not very fit for a safari but well-suited for me not to care if it gets stolen - and took around 250 photos. Internet in and around Arusha is not fast enough for me to upload the photos though, so slideshows will have to wait until I return to Canada.
Posted byplayerHAYTER at 5:51 AM