Thursday, January 18, 2024
Serengeti is Tanzania’s most renowned national park and a home to the greatest concentrations of large mammals on earth. Size wise, it is the third largest national park in Tanzania. Serengeti National park spans an area of about 14’763 sq km. The name Serengeti is derived from a Maasai word ‘Siringet’ to mean ‘endless plains’, and these rolling short grass plains provide an exceptional landscape for wildlife viewing.
We left camp in a drizzle and saw a jackal right away. We also saw some gazelles, topi, etc. and headed towards the Southern Serengeti. We got on ‘main’ road headed to Naabi Hill to get a permit to drive back into kopjes to look for lions. We stopped to look at a variety of animals on the way, including lions. We again intersected the migration, first with zebras, numbering in the 100,000’s and then wildebeest, numbering over 500,000.
Focus today was to be big cats, we ultimately saw 31 lions. We saw them from the main road and on roads to and around kopjes. Kopjes are outcrops of granite that stick out like rocky islands in a sea of grass.
We saw one group of 9 lions on a fresh zebra kill, two of the lions ate off the carcass while we watched. Driving back to kopjes involved some really muddy roads but put us in an area that seemed really wild. We saw several eagle owls, lions and lizards in/around rocks. We ate lunch at the rocks outside of the vehicles after our guides carefully checked for predators. Returning to the main road, we saw more lions, hyenas, vultures and a jackal on a kill and more wildebeest. We saw a cheetah about 80 yards off road, but only lying down. There were a lot of giraffes today, along with some elands and good birds including a secretary bird in its nest.
As we approached our camp for the next two nights, the Ang’aga Migration Camp, we saw two male lions at the entrance. This camp was the most rustic of all, but it ended up being one of our favorite lodgings. It is a mobile camp, moved occasionally to keep up with the migration. Showers were run by two canvas buckets lifted up by pulleys. We told the staff when we wanted a shower and they brought hot water from a large, fire-heated kettle and filled one of the canvas buckets. This system worked fine. We had a good dinner, shower and went to bed to the sounds of lions nearby.
