11) Olduvai Gorge & Serengeti National Park

Olduvai Gorge & Serengeti National Park

The next day we started on our way to Serengeti and to get there, we had to pass through the Ngorongoro conservation area. We would go down the crater to check it out on our last day so on the second day we only entered and passed on the rim of the crater but did not go down. Still, we had to stop at the entrance and wait for the tour guides to get the entrance documents fixed which gave us just enough time to go to the toilet and for me to, first, go inside the museum area and take pictures of everything that includes text about the area so that I can read it later and learn more about it and write more accurate information here. A fact that I didn’t know but the tour guide, who I forgot to write the name of – Ezekiel, told us that a “conservation area” is basically an area where both people with their livestock and wild animals live together and a national park is only for wildlife. So Ngorongoro was populated by people whom the government aims to relocate in the near future in order to leave the area only for wildlife, but the Ngorongoro area has a direct connection with Serengeti and other parks which allows the animals to roam free. Well, except for the rhinos, for which I will talk about when we get to the Ngorongoro park later. So as we drove through the Ngorongoro rim on our way to Serengeti, I was checking my photos and had my SD card out of the camera and was copying and checking photos, basically stuck with my face down onto the phone when i heard the whole group shout “Aaaaaah!” and I lifted my face and looked forward and.. I saw.. a TAIL.. a f*cking TAIL.. and everyone else saw.. a LEOPARD! Oh my God, trust me, I wanted to commit suicide at that moment, I was soo pissed at myself for staring at the stupid phone, I couldn’t live with myself. This was the last bit about seeing “The Big Five” and only Fill saw them all, I saw “The Big 4 and 1/4” (rhino, elephant, buffalo, lion, and.. the tale of a leopard..). Havi and Patricia didn’t see a rhino in Tanzania, so they also couldn’t see all Big 5, while we saw quite a few of them in Namibia. The Big Five actually consists of the five most difficult-to-hunt animals, they are named so not after their size and are named so by hunters. From that moment on, I was like a wounded animal, constantly whining about the leopards and really became fixated on seeing a leopard.. well.. spoiler, we never saw one again. The sheer luck of a leopard crossing the road right in front of your car, like 10m away, is a once-in-a-lifetime luck which, of course, I didn’t have.. Aaaanyway.. on our way to Serengeti we first stopped by a famous place – the Olduvai Gorge, one of the most significant archaeological sites in the history of humanity – there were found two of the early ancestors of the modern-day humans – “the Nutcracker man” and the “Handyman“, dating from approximately 1.84 million years ago. The Handy Man is actually the one that is believed to be the ancestor of modern humans, with a larger brain than the Nutcracker Man, half the size of a human today, while the Nutcracker man had a brain roughly one-third of the size of the modern human and a huge jaw with powerful muscles and twice the size of today’s humans.

We proceeded to Serengeti and entered through the Naabi gate. At all gates, there were coffee places, souvenir shops, and toilets to freshen up and also there was just outside sort of a basin with a water tap to just wash your hands and it was full of water and all the birdies were there bathing and drinking water, poor things. At some of the camps we’d stop by later on, I would turn the tap on for a few seconds, after noticing birds waiting around, just to get some water on the ground and they’d immediately go there to drink 🙁 Poor things, relying only on human mercy. I think I did it in some places around Namibia too, it was an even worse drought there. Also, there were info sheets placed on lamp posts with information that there is conservation going on for the endangered Secretary Birds and I found that so cool, that they care and protect them. So after we took some breaks for drinking, toilet, shopping or lunch at the gates, we went into the Serengeti National Park. We had a game drive on that day, but it was short, mostly on our way to the campsite, so not really a game drive in the full sense of it. So when we arrived our tents were already built, this was a nice change from Namibia where we had to setup and dismantle the camp every day, we had our chef with us whom we picked up from the city and he was cooking in the kitchen building along with the other group’s chefs. He cooked SOOOOOOO delicious.

The kitchen area where all the chefs cooked.

We still saw quite a lot of antelopes and zebras and some prey birds, the vastness of the park was very impressive with the scattered umbrella trees here and there and I loved it. What did not make a very good impression on me, though, was the huge areas that were burnt to black. Because for me it’s horrible to think about all the tiny animals that cannot run away from the fire and just burn alive. So when I asked they told me that these are controlled fires mostly done so that new fresh grass can grow for the grazing animals to have enough food and secondly, because tourists who come here and eat nuts or seeds, drop them on the ground and that can cause alien plants to start growing and spreading which may overtake the local plants and thus, deprive the animals from their food source. So after seeing elephants, giraffes and lions and whatnot, we arrived at the camp for the night. We were going to sleep there for 2 nights and the camp was super dark, only the building for kitchen and dining was lit and a few round tables with benches around had lights and it was full of people. There was a rush hour in the mornings at 6AM before everyone left for their daily game drives. This was our first night really “out in the open” with actual wildlife walking around and we did see already in the evening bisons super close behind the kitchen building. We also had a little friend staying with us – a little dik-dik <3 Poor thing was alone, I assume its partner was probably killed by predators like hyenas or lions or maybe even a coyote. One of the nights I accidentally scared it off by lighting the torch in its eyes, not knowing it was the dik-dik, so it stood up and moved a bit further down, i felt so bad for disturbing the poor little baby. It was alone, I couldn’t see its mate anywhere so I assumed it probably fell prey to a coyote or hyena or so and that amplified my feeling of guilt when I accidentally scared the little thing off 🙁 It had come so close to humans to seek protection from predators and I felt like I was endangering it bc I scared it off 🙁 The first night I saw it behind the kitchen area and the second night it had moved to the bathroom area by the tents. But it really wasn’t safe around us. Both nights I heard lions roaring, sometimes it was far, and other times it sounded pretty close. One night we had hyenas laughing basically in the camp and another night, coyotes were fighting just outside our tent, right next to my head, it was very creepy and scary, especially in complete darkness and next to your ear. One of these nights I got soo creeped out because I knew Fill had been to the bathroom and in the middle of the night I woke up, it was pitch black and i could hear the sound of a plastic bag, it sure sounded to me like some animal has put its head into a plastic bag, perhaps one of ours, inside the tent and was trying to eat whatever it found there. Since they always told us not to leave anything outside the tents and to always close the tents completely, I thought Fill had forgotten to close the tent and now there was a hyena or coyote inside the tent and was eating our food. That’s what I thought and it’s pitch black, i open my eyes and it’s basically the same as if i had them closed and my brain made up all sorts of scenarios. I froze, I was quite scared and didn’t dare to move, but suuper slowly I turned around to look at the tent’s wall so if this thing bit me, it wouldn’t at least be on my face and then slowly i went under the sleeping bag with my head covered. I was BOILING alive inside the sleeping bag, from the increased heartbeat and adrenaline, but also from the layers of clothes I slept with but i didn’t dare move. So at some point, Fill moved and I called him in a whisper and asked him if he closed the tent when he went outside and he said yes and then i told him that I thought there’s something in the tent eating from a plastic bag 😀 hahaha and then he laughed at me and said I’m crazy and this was the wind hitting the tent 😀 hahah I DIED 😀 Of course, he couldn’t stop telling the story later on to everyone.. :/ Soo these were definitely fun moments, now that I think of it in retrospect. But it wasn’t funny when i thought an animal was INSIDE the tent, but when i heard them around us, I was excited. Also, because I knew that also lions could wander around us with pretty much the same likelihood as any other animal, so I tried to avoid going to the bathroom at night (meaning while everyone was asleep). But on the internet you can find a video of a man who tries to shoo a lion away from his tent and constantly opens the tent, says “shoo” and closes it and then again and again, irritating the lion even more. That’s quite scary. Check out THIS VIDEO with the lion roars. We also heard these roars, just not right outside our tents but it was super close, luckily they didn’t attempt to enter our tent o.O You have no gun, not even a fork 😀 Nada, you just sit there, keep quiet, and hope for the best. So it’s not for the faint of heart.

The plan was to spend 3 days in Serengeti, one of which would be to go and see the Great Migration at the Maasai River in the North of Serengeti. So we had to leave very early as we had more than 3h to get there and the road went out of the Serengeti and then went back inside so that meant we had to stop at another gate and so on. At some point, we diverged from the road, which wasn’t really a road inside the Serengeti anyway, but rather a dusty path that was VEERY bumpy, giving you the so-called “African massage” from all the shaking 😀 and we diverged from it into the very faint, barely noticeable, traces of SUVs and drove until we reached a huge number of cars following and waiting for the migration. There were hundreds, if not thousands of wildebeest and not a lot of zebras. So all the cars had stopped and waited, very far from the river and on the other side was Kenya. In the river are the crocodiles that would feast once the crossing starts, we were hoping to see the crossing, but had to be patient and wait far away from the Mara River, because Ezekiel told us that if they haven’t started crossing and the cars go close, they will scare the animals, but once they really begin to cross, nothing can stop them anymore and that’s when the cars can go and watch what’s going on. We waited around 3 hours but the only thing that happened was the wildebeest running up and down and back and forth around the cars, I think the cars scared them and made them scatter but they would gather again further down in the direction of the river. There were also hundreds of cars, sooooo many, I didn’t expect so many cars, really, but there really were at least a couple hundred cars. We had to eventually have lunch and they parked the car a bit to the side of the main action and we could go down the jeep but were not allowed to move away from the car because you never know who’s looking at you.. But i really wanted to go and take a look at a big tortoise remains to see what happened to it and it looked like it was burnt so at first I thought it was the “controlled” fires, but then realized that part wasn’t burnt and so this must be blood, just dry and black. I snapped a quick photo and ran back to the car, the tortoise was only like 5m away, so i didn’t go far. Unfortunately, even though a few times it looked as if the wildebeest were just about to start the crossing, they never really did. Also, they were afraid to pass between the cars, but the few zebras with them kind of led the way and after the zebras, the wildebeest also started coming between the cars, they would run as fast as they could and it was soo amazing to witness this insane chase between them, big and small, running up and down and bringing up a cloud of dust while making funny “moo”-like and also burping sounds. Super funny to watch and at the same time a marvelous sight to see the thousands of them fathering. We did see many more headed there, so they were still gathering to be as many as possible for the crossing into the Maasai Mara into some fresh grazing Kenyan lands. Oh, also Ezekiel told us a funny story – why the wildebeest is called “spare part” animal in Tanzania 😀 It’s because it has the face of a grasshopper, striped maine like zebras, the tail of a giraffe, buffalo horns and a hyena’s posture 😀 hahaha

The last day was for central Serengeti where we really tried to find a leopard, but instead, we saw a big pride of lionesses that decided to move away from us from the side of the road where we saw them, to go somewhere far and we managed to count i think around 11 or so. Also a big group of giraffes was so cute to observe, I totally love giraffes, they are super funny animals to watch and when they run it feels like their necks wobble so much backward that it will put them out of balance and they will flip back 😀 But it never happens 😀