Starting the New Year in the Serengeti

It was good to wake on January 1st, 2018 and see that the clouds had lifted a bit. We were moving on from Pumzika with no real regrets though I suspect we would have viewed it differently had the weather been better. We had simply felt that cold that goes right through you – and we had been expecting glorious sunshine! However, the food was fine and the beds were comfy.

Off we set for a day’s drive from Central to Southern Serengeti as that’s where the migration should be at this time of the year. We had suggested to our gung-ho driver that he should be careful not to get stuck in the mud – “We don’t do pushing!”. However, he knew better and set off fairly fast. Just a few minutes into the start of the drive we were stuck in mud about eight inches deep. No-one else was around and, after a few anxious minutes, he did manage to get us out.

I had not been prepared for the number of animals we would see or for the fact that the wildebeest followed one another in single file, sometimes filling the whole of the skyline – photos don’t do justice to the scale of such a spectacle!

While we ate a very formal lunch laid out on a red tablecloth on one of the picnic tables provided in the park (near the also welcome ‘washrooms’}, we enjoyed the colours of the iridescent starlings as they played in the water.

Then we were off at a lick to find other things that might interest us:

a leopard hiding in the rocks after killing his brother and eating him the previous day, for example!

And then there were the lions:

Most of the day we hurtled around bumping over the rough surface, constantly reminded that the Serengeti rules of the road are different from those of the Mara. Here there are no roads, just tracks, so, effectively, everything is ‘off-road’! And you can feel the difference!

We had expected the Land Cruiser to be much better for us than the ‘minibus’ style 4×4 we’d had in the Mara – but we were wrong. It may have been great for viewing animals but we found real disadvantages when it came to using cameras, especially with lenses of any length. It was also much more bumpy!

But, about 3.30, the skies turned dark again and our driver spoke those ominous words, ‘It’s going to rain’. He was not very confident about finding the new camp in the rain, so we began to make our way there a little earlier than anticipated.

We DID get there safely but with some hairy moments on the way! More were to follow!