Serengeti National Park
Tanzania
May 7&8th, 2009
After the previous days excitement of Ngorongoro Crater and rekindling our love of the bush we were extremely excited to go to the Serengeti. The beauty of the park is incredible and we had a fantastic two days. Serengeti translates as ‘the plains’ in Swahili and proved to be so. The plains are mainly made up of short pale yellow and green grass with the occasional shrub, but change to more heavily bushed areas with thorn and acacia trees where elephant and giraffe frequent. The landscape is extremely conducive to game spotting and we were once again lucky in our sightings. Our timing was near as perfect as one can get as the wildebeest were making their way from the central Serengeti where we were towards the west.
I don’t know how many wildebeest we saw but it was surely in the hundreds of thousands. At the heaviest of our sightings we spent ten kms in the thick of them, seeing them as far as the eye can see. It was incredible. The fresh smell mixed between fresh air and manure and the sound mixed between a donkey and a sheep. Along with the wildebeest we also saw hundreds of zebra tagging along for the ride. It was impossible to capture on film what we witnessed, but we sure tried (translation- hundreds of photos).
Along with all the prey come the predators. And boy did we see plenty. We saw several groups of lioness lounging about in the sun, cubs hidden from predators on the top of rocks, lions lying in the shade, lions lying in the grass and our favourite- lions lying in a tree. We also got to see a group of five cheetah sunning themselves on a group of rocks.
Besides the wonderful wildlife we enjoyed the comforts of a lodge celebrating my birthday in style. Thanks to my parents. It was full board so we ate brilliantly, sipped G&Ts, and again enjoyed the comforts of hot water. Africa is heaven.
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