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