Back to Serengeti

The last time I visited Tanzania was in late 2009, when I made a so-called Overland trip from Nairobi, Kenya to Johannesburg, South Africa. So, in practice, we drove down about 8,000 km of East Africa in a motorhome for about 20 people, spending the night in tents in different campsites. At that time, the Serengeti National Park made an unforgettable impression on me, so after a decade I decided to go and see if the same magic is still preserved in the endless grasslands of the heartlands of eastern Africa.



I traveled to Tanzania on the wings of Turkish Airlines and I have to say that the flight wasn't very comfortable when the nine hours of flight was done in a narrow body Boeing. In addition there was also a stopover in Zanzibar in the middle of the night. On the positive side of things, we arrived the destination on time and the driver, booked in advance, was also waiting with his sign. The approximately 50 kilometer stretch between Kilimanjaro Airport and Arusha is one of the most valuable road sections in the world, if you look at airport transfer prices from an international perspective. It wasn't quite clear to me why this was the case, but one should be prepared to dig pockets reasonably deep.

G Adventurers at the Ngorongoro Crater viewpoint

Our actual safari tour began on the second day of our trip from Arusha when we headed west with our Landcruiser towards the village of Mto Wa Mbu, where we learned about the local culture and the village's various projects (among others) in rice cultivation, wood carving and banana production. The village tour ended with a delicious lunch prepared by local ladies.

After the village visit, we made an afternoon-long safari to nearby Lake Manyara National Park, which is especially known for its tree climbing lions. Behavior is not typical of all lions, but something that happens especially here. Within a few hours we had plenty of time to see the park's fauna, and at the end of the tour, we also encountered two lions lying in a tree. So the safari side got off to a pretty good start. The next morning we headed towards one of the nearby villages of Maasai, where we came across a community project sponsored by our tour operator (and practically ourselves) to improve indoor air quality in tribal huts by donating materials for fireplaces and chimneys. The difference between a completely traditional and a modernized hut was like night and day. No wonder respiratory diseases are much more common in the traditional Maasai population than their cousins in the city.

Clean Cookstove Project in action.

After the village visit, the Jeeps headed for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Serengeti National Park. The drive was dusty and bumpy road for several hours. The road from the Ngorongoro gate is still completely gravel-based and in poor condition. It's much more drivable than many of the roads we would come across in the park, though. This time, the most spectacular sight of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem - migratory wildebeests and zebras - was for the most part feeding on the plains outside the park's gates, creating a stark contrast to the park's Savannah, which this time housed only a few smaller herds. In any case, the scale of the herds still seemed to be the same as ten years ago. There were animals all the way to the horizon to all directions.

Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem is the home of 2,5 million Wildebeests.

We stayed at the Dikdik camp for a couple of nights in the park and made our daily safari rides from there. The absolute highlight of the day of arrival was the cheetahs that were surprised by the carcass. I couldn't see cheetahs at all on my last trip ten years ago. The first afternoon's ride provided a varied setting of different species and the stunning Africa of my memories still seems to exist, at least here. Unfortunately, however, the situation regarding the continent's animal populations is bleak, especially because of poaching and shrinking habitats. It is likely that wild rhinoceros will be permanently lost during my lifetime and, indeed, the future will look very bad on this front, if one looks at the population projections in Africa.

The second and third day of the safari offered guaranteed Serengeti in its various forms (lions, elephants, giraffes, Impalas, antelopes, birds, buffaloes and many others) and when we finally headed towards Ngorongoro Crater, we had already seen four out of the so called Big Five in the memorable landscapes of Serengeti. The rains that had hit East Africa hard this year had also left their mark on the park, with the tracks still so wet in many places that they could not even be driven by our four-wheel drive jeeps. This year it had rained up to three times as much as usual during the so-called short rains in November-December. At the same time, Australia is suffering the worst drought and wildfires on record.

Cheetah lunch after a successful hunt. 

 These extremes are the two sides of so-called IOD phenomenon. The Indian Ocean Dipole causes seawater warming off the East African coast and, consequently, cooling water in Australian-Indonesian waters. These result in exceptional rains in East Africa and exceptional drought in Australia. This phenomenon is probably somehow related to climate change.

After the successful safaris in the Serengeti, we headed to the Simba camp on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater for the last night. From there, we moved down to the crater the next morning, with the cool air taking away the warmth of the previous days. The morning mist of the Ngorongoro crater, along with the rising sun, forms a magical landscape where the shadows of the animal figures pass through the mist like in a fairy tale. In the crater, we also saw some rare rhinos - albeit at a very long distance. We ended our trip having lunch in the crater and then headed back to Arusha, the end point of our shared trip.

Ngorongoro Simba camp in sunrise.

My decade old memories of Africa were still alive in the continent's most famous national park. However, the development path is anything but positive. I hope we can find truly globally effective measures to maintain the vitality of our natural habitats and animal populations, both on land and at sea. This is extremely difficult, as many interests conflict with nature conservation, as we have seen in the climate change debate.

The fact is that an economic system based on economic growth cannot save us, but instead we must start thinking about how we can reduce consumption significantly. That, in turn, means practically lowering our standard of living, and I understand that it causes a lot of negative emotions and events. Therefore, unfortunately, I do not quite see it as a realistic political option. Therefore, the situation will probably worsen for a few decades before finally having to take actual action, as there are no other alternatives left. Until then, I think the same will unfortunately continue and that is not good for our environment or ourselves for that matter.