Serengeti comes from the Maasai word "Siringet which means wide endless plain, and it is a very fitting name. What an incredible week! I hardly know where to start so I guess I will work chronologically, but be warned this is going to be a long one!
Day 1:
It has been raining for the past few days pretty non stop so we were pretty nervous about the road conditions because the roads here easily flood over or become mud traps. So we got up early packed up the cars and drove out. Fortunately that morning was the first dry morning in a while and the roads wound up being fairly passable. In order to get to Serengeti you have to pass through Ngorongoro Crater, which means the drive there was incredibly beautiful and very bumpy. I feel bad for people who have carsickness problems! On our way through Ngorongoro we stopped at Oldevai Gorge which is actually a butchered version of the Maasai name for it Oldepai Gorge. So we had a little lecture looking over the gorge about Nutcracker Man and Handy Man and all of really cool primitive people the Leaky’s found in the gorge. It is crazy to stand and look down where early man was figuring out fire and stone tools and know that my most ancientest ancestors are most likely from there. So we had some fun taking goofy evolution pictures and walking through the museam where they had animal skuls that had been found in the gorge of early forms of extinct and extant mammals. Pretty much everything was bigger and badder back in the day. Some of the early elephant footprints were essentially small craters! That was a nice rest stop before we continued our drive to Serengeti.
Once at the front of the park we got out and took a few more photos in front of the sign and then we still had to drive another half hour to an hour to get to the real front gate, but on either side of us we could see the wildebeest migration where a million (I’m not exagerating, its like 1.3 million wildebeest) wildebeest follow greener pastures through the park. So that was very cool. Once at the visitor’s center, we got to walk around for a bit while they worked out our passes and they had those giant Maribu storks I was talking about so clearly I followed those around for a bit. They are like the ugliest birds in the entire world, which makes them sooooooo cool!!
Then we got to game drive to our campsite which was the dik-dik campsite! On our way we passed three cheetah all fairly large so it was hard to determine whether they were a bachelor group of males or a mother and her two grown cubs, but anyways we ran into them and we got to watch them for a while. Cheetahs are just the most beautiful animals ever. They have such grace, and one so kindly sat on a mound for us and posed so that was just lovely. Then we got to see them jog, they almost ran, but in the end it was not full speed but still impressive! Once we left the cheetahs, we ran into lions spooning. It was a male and a female and I was just dying from the cuteness because they were literally spooning and he even had his arm around her! But at that point a few people in the car were getting a little bit cranky so we didn’t stay very long.
Then came the torrential rains…so we had to close the roof and just chill out. We couldn’t really set up camp because it was raining so hard so we just hung out in the cars until it let up a bit. Then we got to see an incredible sunset, and it is so flat and expansive you can just see for miles. It was so beautiful because the sun was bright yellow and then from there it turned orange then red and then into a bluish purple plus there were little lines of clouds going across the sun to just add to the effect. (watch the first scene of the lion king and then imagine it in reverse). I did not sleep well that night because I was just too busy listening to all of the sounds like the hyenas laughing off in the distance and I was just too excited!
Day 2:
We got up early because we were doing a birding exercise and that meant we had to be up with the birds. So we had a light breakfast at 6:30 and then headed out. I have never been super into birding but I might start picking it up, because it is actually kind of fun especially once you know a few birds. I can still only identify the cool ones. I still identify all of the swallows and things like that as little brown birds, because that’s what they are! haha
Anyways, this is the day that I completed my Big 5. That means I have seen lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and leopard. That’s right I saw a leopard!!! It was chilling in a tree doing leopard-y things! It was absolutely incredible. Out of all of the big cats, I think the leopards are probably the most stunning. They are so incredibly beautiful. It was hard though because they are always pretty far away. Later on in the trip we had one pose on a mound for us and that was fantastic, but most of the time they are in the trees and they are impossible to see!
One thing that really struck me about Serengeti that I never felt in any of the other parks was that there are so many other tourists there when you see something cool. When you are driving around there are generally not too many cars around, but as soon as someone gets wind that there is something cool, you get there and there can be 30 cars there and there is one tour company, leopard tours, that is so pushy and obnoxious and so we decided that we don’t like them because they don’t have good safari etiquette. It was a little off-putting at first, but I got over it, and there were a few times when either our car or one of the other SFS cars found something first and our drivers have a code so that we don’t attract a gillion other cars when we find something and that was very cool.
From the leopard we could see a bunch of cars on the horizon so we told our driver to take us there, and it would up being a massive pride of lions lounging in the grass on the side of the road. There were about 19 lions and all female except one young male. They were just lying in the grass taking a nap and what not. The muscles on female lions are impressive. They are some very powerful creatures! I think that they look like (and probably are) the most powerful of the big cats. Cheetah have much leaner muscles and leopards are a bit smaller than lions. Lions just look so strong. So anyways I got a bunch of great pictures of lions because they were so close. I even got a video of a mama lion licking her baby! I could have puked it was cute. (I don’t know why I decided that puking is a symbol of cuteness but apparently it is.) Then that night we all hung out and relaxed.
Day 3:
It was another early morning because we were birding again but this time we were also tourist watching. That means that you creepily stalk tourists to see how long they stay at different animals and which animals they skip and stuff to see what draws tourists. Is it baby animals or large animals or big cats ect. So clearly I had fun being as creepy as possible and recording notes as if they were wild African animals and not silly looking tourists, because lets be honest we all look absolutely ridiculous in our safari outfits.
This was the day that we got to see the leopard on the mound posing so perfectly for us. It was funny because we saw the leopard in a tree and then we left to go look at some elephants and came back because it was still there and the other cars told us it had jumped out of the tree but that it was still around. Me and my friend Nikki spent about 15 minutes convincing ourselves that this rock below the tree was it lying in the tall grass and then the car behind us told us to turn around and BAM there it was clear a day sitting right on this mound above all the grass. It was hilarious, because we were actually convinced that this rock was it but it wasn’t, and we were so focused on this one spot that we missed the actual thing like 100 meters to the right!
At lunchtime our camp was overtaken by 20 to 30 mongooses…mongeese? (Idk mongoose plural) It was thoroughly entertaining to watch people chasing these little meerkat-like weasely things around the camp! I was locked in the room with the food and told not to leave, because we didn’t want to let them in so all I could do was watch! We eventually just let them go and they left of their own accord by the time we got back from our next game drive.
Anyways one of my favorite parts of the whole trip was the sky. The people in my car can attest that about every five minutes I exclaimed, “OMG look at the sky! Check out my “artsy” picture of these clouds!” You can just see so far, and in one direction you can see a thunderstorm and the other clear blue skies! I can’t even begin to describe how expansive and stunning it was.
Day 4:
We got to sleep in a little bit because we weren’t watching birds and then we went to a lecture with a post doc, Tom Morrison, who was doing research in the Serengeti. After his lecture he decided to take us to one of his vegetaton plots and WE GOT TO OFF ROAD! It was not very far at all, but it didn’t even matter because we off-roaded in the Serengeti! They even let us get out of the cars and walk around. It was really cool. During the lecture someone forgot to close their window in the car and a baboon got in and stole a can of Pringles…womp womp! I’m just glad it wasn’t my car and that she didn’t steal anything worse, like a camera or binoculars or something.
From our chat with Tom, we headed to the hippo pool where hundred of hippos just hang out and wallow. I obviously was in paradise! There were baby hippos and fighting hippos and even mating hippos! One thing I never realized is that hippos have the ugliest tails ever…its just this little tiny flap of skin that hangs over their but and it is kind of gross, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are my favorite animal!
After the pool we headed to Serena lodge, which is a hotel in the Serengeti where we were going to have lunch and a swim, as a little treat. You could either do the buffet or order from the snack bar. About half of the group did the snack bar and the other half did the buffet. I decided that the buffet was the way to go, and I was one happy camper after wards. I actually ate like a hippo. I’m talking four plates (and they weren’t small)! Haha It was so good! I can’t say I really liked the lodge though. It felt kind of weird to have this massive lodge with a swimming pool and everything in the middle of the Serengeti. It felt wrong. Camping is one thing, but this was a nice place, and I would have forgone my four plates of delicious food to not have that place there and have the Serengeti be a little more wild. The even more entertaining part was when this one was complaining that we were disrupting the peace, because 38 college kids tend to make a little bit of a rucous even on their very best behavior. She said “These kids are disrupting my peace, I am just trying to enjoy the wildlife!” Excuse me! If you want to enjoy the wildlife get out of the pool and go ride around in a safari car! Oh well, it was a nice little treat and I had fun anyways.
We were giving each other superlatives in the car on the way home, because we were talking about how that would be a fun thing to do at the end of the semester and guess what mine was…Loudest person at camp! Womp womp I just can’t help it that my voice projects! Haha
Day 5:
Headed home L We packed up camp and then did one last game drive as we left the park, and it was the perfect ending because we saw a mother cheetah with her two baby cubs and baby cheetahs are so cute. They have little fuzzy faces and little afros and I was very tempted to steal them except that there was this other large mother cheetah. The one baby kept imitating everything the mom did so when she looked over her shoulder so did he and when she stood up so did he and it was so adorable. The other was just lying down being lazy which was also super cute. That was the perfect way to end it. Cheetahs on day one and cheetahs on the last day. Also got to see a serval which is a small spotted cat about the size of Rori, and they are so pretty. So I was excited about that too.
Overall the trip was just incredible. I couldn’t believe all that I saw and did and I never wanted to leave. I can’t wait to go back with Dad in a few weeks, because it was by far the coolest place I have ever been. The last night I watched three thunderstorms in the distance while looking up in to the sky above me and seeing a thousand stars! We nick-named it a Mufasa sky because it was like the scene were the cloud/ghost of Mufasa tells simba to remember who he is! Haha Pretty much everything we do relates back to lion king in some way or another.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve uploaded a few pics to the photo gallery, and I will continue to try to up load more.
Christine
Day 1:
It has been raining for the past few days pretty non stop so we were pretty nervous about the road conditions because the roads here easily flood over or become mud traps. So we got up early packed up the cars and drove out. Fortunately that morning was the first dry morning in a while and the roads wound up being fairly passable. In order to get to Serengeti you have to pass through Ngorongoro Crater, which means the drive there was incredibly beautiful and very bumpy. I feel bad for people who have carsickness problems! On our way through Ngorongoro we stopped at Oldevai Gorge which is actually a butchered version of the Maasai name for it Oldepai Gorge. So we had a little lecture looking over the gorge about Nutcracker Man and Handy Man and all of really cool primitive people the Leaky’s found in the gorge. It is crazy to stand and look down where early man was figuring out fire and stone tools and know that my most ancientest ancestors are most likely from there. So we had some fun taking goofy evolution pictures and walking through the museam where they had animal skuls that had been found in the gorge of early forms of extinct and extant mammals. Pretty much everything was bigger and badder back in the day. Some of the early elephant footprints were essentially small craters! That was a nice rest stop before we continued our drive to Serengeti.
Once at the front of the park we got out and took a few more photos in front of the sign and then we still had to drive another half hour to an hour to get to the real front gate, but on either side of us we could see the wildebeest migration where a million (I’m not exagerating, its like 1.3 million wildebeest) wildebeest follow greener pastures through the park. So that was very cool. Once at the visitor’s center, we got to walk around for a bit while they worked out our passes and they had those giant Maribu storks I was talking about so clearly I followed those around for a bit. They are like the ugliest birds in the entire world, which makes them sooooooo cool!!
Then we got to game drive to our campsite which was the dik-dik campsite! On our way we passed three cheetah all fairly large so it was hard to determine whether they were a bachelor group of males or a mother and her two grown cubs, but anyways we ran into them and we got to watch them for a while. Cheetahs are just the most beautiful animals ever. They have such grace, and one so kindly sat on a mound for us and posed so that was just lovely. Then we got to see them jog, they almost ran, but in the end it was not full speed but still impressive! Once we left the cheetahs, we ran into lions spooning. It was a male and a female and I was just dying from the cuteness because they were literally spooning and he even had his arm around her! But at that point a few people in the car were getting a little bit cranky so we didn’t stay very long.
Then came the torrential rains…so we had to close the roof and just chill out. We couldn’t really set up camp because it was raining so hard so we just hung out in the cars until it let up a bit. Then we got to see an incredible sunset, and it is so flat and expansive you can just see for miles. It was so beautiful because the sun was bright yellow and then from there it turned orange then red and then into a bluish purple plus there were little lines of clouds going across the sun to just add to the effect. (watch the first scene of the lion king and then imagine it in reverse). I did not sleep well that night because I was just too busy listening to all of the sounds like the hyenas laughing off in the distance and I was just too excited!
Day 2:
We got up early because we were doing a birding exercise and that meant we had to be up with the birds. So we had a light breakfast at 6:30 and then headed out. I have never been super into birding but I might start picking it up, because it is actually kind of fun especially once you know a few birds. I can still only identify the cool ones. I still identify all of the swallows and things like that as little brown birds, because that’s what they are! haha
Anyways, this is the day that I completed my Big 5. That means I have seen lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and leopard. That’s right I saw a leopard!!! It was chilling in a tree doing leopard-y things! It was absolutely incredible. Out of all of the big cats, I think the leopards are probably the most stunning. They are so incredibly beautiful. It was hard though because they are always pretty far away. Later on in the trip we had one pose on a mound for us and that was fantastic, but most of the time they are in the trees and they are impossible to see!
One thing that really struck me about Serengeti that I never felt in any of the other parks was that there are so many other tourists there when you see something cool. When you are driving around there are generally not too many cars around, but as soon as someone gets wind that there is something cool, you get there and there can be 30 cars there and there is one tour company, leopard tours, that is so pushy and obnoxious and so we decided that we don’t like them because they don’t have good safari etiquette. It was a little off-putting at first, but I got over it, and there were a few times when either our car or one of the other SFS cars found something first and our drivers have a code so that we don’t attract a gillion other cars when we find something and that was very cool.
From the leopard we could see a bunch of cars on the horizon so we told our driver to take us there, and it would up being a massive pride of lions lounging in the grass on the side of the road. There were about 19 lions and all female except one young male. They were just lying in the grass taking a nap and what not. The muscles on female lions are impressive. They are some very powerful creatures! I think that they look like (and probably are) the most powerful of the big cats. Cheetah have much leaner muscles and leopards are a bit smaller than lions. Lions just look so strong. So anyways I got a bunch of great pictures of lions because they were so close. I even got a video of a mama lion licking her baby! I could have puked it was cute. (I don’t know why I decided that puking is a symbol of cuteness but apparently it is.) Then that night we all hung out and relaxed.
Day 3:
It was another early morning because we were birding again but this time we were also tourist watching. That means that you creepily stalk tourists to see how long they stay at different animals and which animals they skip and stuff to see what draws tourists. Is it baby animals or large animals or big cats ect. So clearly I had fun being as creepy as possible and recording notes as if they were wild African animals and not silly looking tourists, because lets be honest we all look absolutely ridiculous in our safari outfits.
This was the day that we got to see the leopard on the mound posing so perfectly for us. It was funny because we saw the leopard in a tree and then we left to go look at some elephants and came back because it was still there and the other cars told us it had jumped out of the tree but that it was still around. Me and my friend Nikki spent about 15 minutes convincing ourselves that this rock below the tree was it lying in the tall grass and then the car behind us told us to turn around and BAM there it was clear a day sitting right on this mound above all the grass. It was hilarious, because we were actually convinced that this rock was it but it wasn’t, and we were so focused on this one spot that we missed the actual thing like 100 meters to the right!
At lunchtime our camp was overtaken by 20 to 30 mongooses…mongeese? (Idk mongoose plural) It was thoroughly entertaining to watch people chasing these little meerkat-like weasely things around the camp! I was locked in the room with the food and told not to leave, because we didn’t want to let them in so all I could do was watch! We eventually just let them go and they left of their own accord by the time we got back from our next game drive.
Anyways one of my favorite parts of the whole trip was the sky. The people in my car can attest that about every five minutes I exclaimed, “OMG look at the sky! Check out my “artsy” picture of these clouds!” You can just see so far, and in one direction you can see a thunderstorm and the other clear blue skies! I can’t even begin to describe how expansive and stunning it was.
Day 4:
We got to sleep in a little bit because we weren’t watching birds and then we went to a lecture with a post doc, Tom Morrison, who was doing research in the Serengeti. After his lecture he decided to take us to one of his vegetaton plots and WE GOT TO OFF ROAD! It was not very far at all, but it didn’t even matter because we off-roaded in the Serengeti! They even let us get out of the cars and walk around. It was really cool. During the lecture someone forgot to close their window in the car and a baboon got in and stole a can of Pringles…womp womp! I’m just glad it wasn’t my car and that she didn’t steal anything worse, like a camera or binoculars or something.
From our chat with Tom, we headed to the hippo pool where hundred of hippos just hang out and wallow. I obviously was in paradise! There were baby hippos and fighting hippos and even mating hippos! One thing I never realized is that hippos have the ugliest tails ever…its just this little tiny flap of skin that hangs over their but and it is kind of gross, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are my favorite animal!
After the pool we headed to Serena lodge, which is a hotel in the Serengeti where we were going to have lunch and a swim, as a little treat. You could either do the buffet or order from the snack bar. About half of the group did the snack bar and the other half did the buffet. I decided that the buffet was the way to go, and I was one happy camper after wards. I actually ate like a hippo. I’m talking four plates (and they weren’t small)! Haha It was so good! I can’t say I really liked the lodge though. It felt kind of weird to have this massive lodge with a swimming pool and everything in the middle of the Serengeti. It felt wrong. Camping is one thing, but this was a nice place, and I would have forgone my four plates of delicious food to not have that place there and have the Serengeti be a little more wild. The even more entertaining part was when this one was complaining that we were disrupting the peace, because 38 college kids tend to make a little bit of a rucous even on their very best behavior. She said “These kids are disrupting my peace, I am just trying to enjoy the wildlife!” Excuse me! If you want to enjoy the wildlife get out of the pool and go ride around in a safari car! Oh well, it was a nice little treat and I had fun anyways.
We were giving each other superlatives in the car on the way home, because we were talking about how that would be a fun thing to do at the end of the semester and guess what mine was…Loudest person at camp! Womp womp I just can’t help it that my voice projects! Haha
Day 5:
Headed home L We packed up camp and then did one last game drive as we left the park, and it was the perfect ending because we saw a mother cheetah with her two baby cubs and baby cheetahs are so cute. They have little fuzzy faces and little afros and I was very tempted to steal them except that there was this other large mother cheetah. The one baby kept imitating everything the mom did so when she looked over her shoulder so did he and when she stood up so did he and it was so adorable. The other was just lying down being lazy which was also super cute. That was the perfect way to end it. Cheetahs on day one and cheetahs on the last day. Also got to see a serval which is a small spotted cat about the size of Rori, and they are so pretty. So I was excited about that too.
Overall the trip was just incredible. I couldn’t believe all that I saw and did and I never wanted to leave. I can’t wait to go back with Dad in a few weeks, because it was by far the coolest place I have ever been. The last night I watched three thunderstorms in the distance while looking up in to the sky above me and seeing a thousand stars! We nick-named it a Mufasa sky because it was like the scene were the cloud/ghost of Mufasa tells simba to remember who he is! Haha Pretty much everything we do relates back to lion king in some way or another.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve uploaded a few pics to the photo gallery, and I will continue to try to up load more.
Christine
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