When we were planning our trip to the Serengeti, a friend told us, lions are like stray dogs in India. There will come a point when you will get fed up of seeing them.
Wise words those. Though, nothing, no explanation from people who have been there, no amount of Nat Geo shows prepare you for the Serengeti.
In the local Masai language, it means endless plains. That is an understatement. The serengeti is mind blowing in its vastness. Three days of criss crossing the plains in your safari vehicles and you see an ecosystem of every land animal known to you (except the tiger). Elephants, boars, giraffes, zebra, cheetah, wildebeests, lions, birds of all kinds, hippos and the rhino, you will see it all - an paralleled richness of life.
When you first see the plains, you are awestruck at how vast, vast actually means. It also includes the Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest unbroken caldera.
And within these ~36000 sq km live the animals below.
You see live kills (another post by itself), you see animals in their natural habitat, you see nature at its best!
Sometimes you wonder, what the world would be like, left to itself without human intervention.
The Serrengeti is most famous for the wildebeest migration. Each year around the same time, the circular great wildebeest migration begins in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of the southern Serengeti in Tanzania and loops in a clockwise direction through the Serengeti National Park and north towards the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya. This migration is a natural phenomenon determined by the availability of grazing. The initial phase lasts from approximately January to March, when the calving season begins – a time when there is plenty of rain-ripened grass available for the 260,000 zebra that precede 1.7 million wildebeest and the following hundreds of thousands of other plains game, including around 470,000 gazelles.
Unfortunately, our world is changing, global warming affects the rains in this part of the world and that has led to changes in migration patterns. Migration depends on regularity and predictability of rains and that is changing. This causes confusion in the animals which are programmed to follow the rain and the food it brings along with it.
Downpours like this still exist but it is no longer as predictable as it once was.
The Serengeti plain is punctuated by rock outcroppings known as kopjes. These outcroppings are the result of volcanic activity. One of the most famous is the Simba Kopje (Lion Kopje) made famous by the Lion King movie. We were not lucky enough to see a lion on top of one of these but if you do get to see one, you will have lived to tell you saw the Lion King! ;)
Getting there
Land at Kilimanjaro airport and stay at Arusha for that day/night. The next day spend at Tarangire national Park (famous for its elephant population). Then head out to the Serengeti and spend a couple of days there. At the end, visit the Ngorongoro crater which is another whole day's tour.
It is best to hire a the services of a travel and safari operator. They take care of all the entrance formalities, guides and have a route charted out. Depending on budget and stay requirements, they find the best places to stay. Most of the mid range facilities are quite luxurious (imagine staying in a camping facility in the middle of the Serengeti, that by itself is out of this world!)
We used the services of Gosheni travels and they were really good.
There is, unfortunately, no e-visa and you will have to go to the Embassy, rely on a travel agent or send the passport physically to the embassy for the visa formalities. Go here
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