Return to Ndutu

Thursday, 27^th January

Our safari is nearing its end.  We were sorry to say goodbye to Joe and Barbs at Sayara yesterday morning and drive south, back to Ndutu.  Joe led the way out to the main track by a better route than the one by which we had arrived two days before and bad us farewell at the Kichwa Tembo (elephant skull) junction.  Three and a half hours later we arrived in Seronera, filled up the Landcruiser with gas and ate our lunch at the visitors’ centre.  We both had lumps in our throats as we left Seronera behind, hurrying to make it to the Naabi Hill gate by the appointed time on our park permit.  We were at Ndutu  by tea time.

Lioness with three cubs

We spent today enjoying early morning and evening game drives and relaxing all day.  We saw a lioness with three very small cubs both times.   There was an orphan wildebeast lying all alone on the soda pan by Lake Ndutu.  He was only a few days old and mooing piteously.  He got up and tried to find a place to nurse somewhere on our vehicle.  It was the hardest thing to resist giving it a drink of water and letting it follow the car to a shady place.  Over lunch at the lodge we talked about how much we both wish we could find a way to come back to live in the Serengeti for a time at least and possible ways this could be achieved.

Wildebeast orphan lying on the salt pan by Lake Ndutu

Birds at Ndutu Spa

One of the four genets who live in the roof of the lodge and come out in the evening to play on the rafters.

Me a snob?

Giraffe family

Jackal cub

Love Bird family

Wildebeast

Tomorrow we head back to Arusha, where we’ll return the Landcruiser and spend the night with Jo and Judy before catching our plane home to Yellowknife, via Amsterdam and Calgary.

Sayari Camp

Tuesday, 25^th January

We woke up bright and early this morning in time to see the sun rise as we drank our morning tea and coffee.  We were given much too big a breakfast for 7 o’clock in the morning, then set off on a game run at 8 with a young fellow called John as our guide.  Without him we would never have found a lioness with four cubs, or navigated around the tracks and much of the time off the road right to the Kenya border.  He brought tea and coffee along for us to enjoy under the shade of a tree before heading back to the camp after three and a half hours driving around, seeing big herds of zebra, eland and topi, hippos and crocs in the Mara River and a great many hyenas and jackals as well as the lions.  We also saw some klipspringers by the kopje behind the camp as we arrived home at the camp.

Zebra

Big herds of eland

Hyena

Jackal

Klipspringer

Klipspringer

The landscape from a kopje of the area around the Mara River

Curious lion cubs

Mara Elephant

Crocs in the Mara River

Giraffes coming down to the Mara River to drink.

Oribi are only found in this area of the park.

Tommies and topi

We have spent the heat of the day at camp, sorting and labelling photos, reading and relaxing and being served lunch under the shade of a big acacia tree.  John will return to take us out again around 4:30, but first, I’m going for a swim!

We had a lovely late afternoon game drive with John.  It’s such a beautiful area.  He guided us around and over several kopjes in search of a pride of 22 lions that live near the camp, but we only saw one female.  We did see lots of klipspringers and also lots of oribi, small gazelles which are only found in this area of the Serengeti.  We also saw two different herds of elephants, one of which moved into the camp area and we can hear them, as well as the illusive lions, outside our tent now as we pack and get ready for bed and an early start tomorrow morning!

I think this has been my favourite place so far this trip.  Not only is the camp placed in a beautiful area and comfortable and well run, with delicious food, but Joe and Barbara have been excellent hosts and made us very welcome and been excellent company.

From the Western Corridor, north to the Mara River

Monday, 24^th January

Today we drove back to Banagi, then north up the middle of the park to the Mara River, near the Kenya border and Masai Mara National Park.  The bush becomes thicker and the grass longer as one drives north.  The acacias are in bloom and everywhere is green.  We saw small herds of zebra, topi, impala, troupes of monkeys and the occasional giraffe from time to time, but not much else.  The road was fair, though occasionally boggy or deeply rutted.  The main feature of the day were the tsetse flies who follow any moving object and swarmed the car every time we slowed down to take a photo or negotiate rough stretches of road.  These pests are far more of a nuisance than mosquitoes in the Serengeti and carry a less easily transmitted but worse disease than malaria, called sleeping sickness.  Recently there was a case at the Serengeti Research Institute.  One of the research assistants was thought to have malaria and treated for that, but it turned out to be sleeping sickness and he had to be flown out for emergency treatment.  Luckily it isn’t as prevalent as malaria because there is not much one can do to protect oneself beyond constantly flicking oneself or rolling in mud like the animals do!  They are like horse flies and are impervious to bug repellent.

'Castle of Clay' or termite mound.

Kongoni

Dikdik

Zebra and topi

The drive took longer than we had expected and deteriorated considerably once we were on the final stretch of road from Tabora B to Kogatende.  We located the air strip near the Sayari Camp without much trouble, however, where to go after that was impossible to determine.  A ranger from the ranger post at the air strip came out and tried to explain, but it didn’t help, because there are no signs and the roads are so eroded that they have multiplied.  Add to that the tracks made by tourist game runs and so forth and one has no idea which one to take.  Our cell phone didn’t work as the signal was not strong enough.  Luckily Jo and Barbara, our hosts at Sayari, were looking out for us as we’d spoken to them earlier in the day.  Jo spotted us in the distance setting off in the wrong direction from the air strip and came out to find us and guide us to the camp.  

We were given a lovely welcome by Jo, Barbara and their staff at the camp, where we are once again the only guests.  It’s a permanent, luxury camp with all mod cons.  Only the canvas walls and fly sheets make it a camp.  We swam in their lovely swimming pool fashioned from the rocks of a kopje to cool off and relaxed until supper.  We ate the best meal in several days with our hosts, listening to the lions grunting nearby, then went to bed early after a long and tiring day.

Our palatial tent at Sayari Camp

The swimming pool at Sayari

Enjoying gin and tonics round the fire before dinner.

Soroi Lodge near the Musabi Plains and a drive to Kirawira

Soroi Lodge, perched at the top of a mountain.

Sunday, January 23

A bathroom to die for, especially after 2 days at a basic tented camp!

A bed the size of a football field

The lodge is built in a series of platforms descending from the top of the mountain and overlooking the Musabi Plains.

The dining room

The pool

We’re enjoying the luxury of  Soroi Lodge, a spectacular new lodge run by French Managers.  We are the only guests here who aren’t French tonight.  The lodge is build on the side of a steep hill, spread out over a large area with a pool, bar, dining room and fire place deck at the top of the hill, 25 ‘bandas’ each housing one guest room, and a reception area by the entrance.  The bandas are framed with wood, with a wooden floor and a thick thatched roof.  The front overlooking the hills and opening onto our balcony is all glass or screens and the sidewalls are of canvas.  It has a bathroom to die for and the shower, with hot and cold water, is outside on the balcony.  You can dry off in the sunshine.  The hillside is so steep no-one can see and the end walls of the balcony are screened from view.  We have electricity, wireless internet and lots of water, hot and cold!  We loved the simplicity of the basic tented camp for a couple of nights, but this is glorious.   

We washed all our by now very grubby clothes in the bathtub and caught up on our email this afternoon.

This morning we left camp early and drove around the Seronera River some more, hoping to see some interesting animals, but only saw hippos.  Then we drove to Banagi and again, were treated to hippos, this time in obscene quantities!  There’s been a population explosion in the hippo pools there.  It really stinks as wall to wall hippos jostle for space in their own toilet.  The abundant animals that used to inhabit the banks of these rivers year round have all but disappeared and those which are left are mercilessly pursued by armies of land cruisers and land rovers filled with tourists – including of course, ourselves. 

Kubukubu hill, near Banagi.  We used to see it from our veranda at SRI.  

Banagi hippos in the Grumeti River

Banagi hippos

After Banagi, we set off towards the west at a good clip as we wanted to visit Kirawira, near the end of the western corridor of the park, where Helmut used to do a lot of field work.  We frequently camped there by the Grumeti River in the abandoned and derelict buildings of an old veterinary research station.  After a long drive, past the Musabi Plains, on the south side of which this lodge is located, we almost got there at about lunch time.  Mum and Stephen, do you recognize this drift?  It’s where Helmut, Dad and you, Stephen, aged thirteen, spent several hours chopping up a fallen tree with a panga.  It had been washed onto the drift by the river blocking the road.  It had to be removed from the drift so that we could pass and camp at Kirawira on the other side of the river.  Well, today we were dreadfully disappointed to be prevented from crossing at all by the high water level.  We knew better than to attempt to do so, though the water was only a few inches deep, because it was flowing very fast and there were crocodiles on the down stream side waiting for what the river might bring them for dinner!  Helmut's past experience when he actually did once try to cross a drift across the Seronera River in similar circumstances and was swept off it into the river taught him not to try that again.  There were hippos and crocodiles in that place too, but luckily he was able to escape out of the back doors of the sinking land cruiser, tie a rope to the roof rack and swim to shore without getting eaten.  He then walked 5 miles home.  Next day the car was hauled out of the river by a grader from the national parks headquarters.  Anyhow, there was nothing to do but turn around and drive all the way back the way we came until we got to the turn off on the Masabi Plains.  Gone are the herds of hundreds of giraffe around Kirawira.  We saw none.  Only a few small groups remain of the topi which used to teem all over the Musabi Plain.  We did see plenty of zebra, impala and waterbuck, in similar numbers to what one used to see everywhere.   It’s hard to believe how few predators we have seen anywhere.  We have heard lions and seen a couple, seen both a cheetah and a leopard in the distance and a few hyenas, jackals and foxes.  If they are still around, they are keeping away from the roads, that’s for sure.

Drift over the Grumeti River near Kirawira

Croc waiting to see what good thing to eat might come over the drift and into his mouth.

Heron and crocodile

The crocodile pool below the drift.

I’m looking forward to some French cooking this evening.  The food we were given at Wilderness Camp left much to be desired, though they clearly did their best and it was certainly plentiful!

Herd of female impala

Seronera

Saturday, 22^nd January

This morning we returned to Seronera, following the track beside the Seronera River, because Helmut wanted to call on Marcus Bourner, a German researcher funded by the Frankfurt Zoological Society since the about 1977.  He heads up some kind of monitoring program.  We also needed gas and of course wanted to go on a game drive around all the old haunts where we used to find the animals for visitors to see, who weren’t able to stay for long enough to wait for them to walk by our house, which they all did from time to time.  We saw hippos in plenty in various places and at one point came upon a traffic jam of about 20 tourist vehicles.  It was a leopard and cubs that was attracting as much attention as royalty, even though the leopard was far away and not easy to see or photograph, strolling along in the long grass on the plain some distance away from the river.  It was a lovely drive.

Early morning balloon safaris seen from Wilderness Camp

Leopard with cubs near Seronera River

A herd of Landcruisers filled with leopard watching tourists

A hippo keeping an eye on us watching from the bank of the river.

There are plenty of hippos in the Seronera River

One hippo setting off from the river to graze on the grassland the other side of the road.

One of the few Seronera giraffes

Vervet monkey sharing the shade under a tree with us

We went to the new Visitors’ Centre not far from the Parks Headquarters, which consisted of a beautifully done interpretive walk around the kopje and a garden with picnic tables and a small kiosk selling snacks and a souvenir store.  There we found our beloved ‘pimbis’, or hyrax – both tree hyrax and their larger relatives the rock hyrax – in abundance, reminding us of the tame ones that lived around our house, especially Rafiki (friend, in Kiswahili) our particular pet, who used to like to sit on Helmut’s shoulders and sneak into the house to steal our bread or fruit if we were careless enough to leave the door open.

View from the kopje on which the Visitors' Centre interpretive walk is situated.

Rock hyrax like Rafiki, the tame hyrax or 'pimbi' that liked to sit on Helmut' lap on our veranda years ago.

Tree hyrax are smaller and greyer than the rock hyrax.

By then it was after noon, but we didn’t want to eat our packed lunch there, so we drove out onto the plains and ate our picnic under a tree before returning to our camp to spend a long, lazy afternoon there.  I even spent some time listening to and learning one of the movements of Brahm’s Requiem, ready for our return to Yellowknife!  We are now the only visitors staying at the camp.  Soon we will eat dinner and probably go to bed right afterwards.

Me relaxing and learning my notes at Mukoma 2 Wilderness Camp