Born Free (Tanzania)

Immediately upon landing at Kilimanjaro airport and grabbing the airport shuttle to Arusha, we realized this was going to be a bit more civilized. Our hotel was on the outskirts of town in a lush garden and forested area with a fine selection of East Indian cuisine, a few resident monkeys and a balcony for drying our urgently needed hand washed clothes.

We had booked another four day, three night safari through the Northern Circuit, including Lake Manyara and Serengeti National parks as well as the Ngorogoro Crater Preservation area, but despite the slightly higher price tag, this time it was all going to be tent camping. While we were suppose to have be joined by an Aussie couple, they had some baggage delay issues so we ended up with a private safari (our own driver/guide and cook).

The first day within Lake Manyara Park we saw many of the animals we had encountered in the Masai Mara (in Kenya), with a few notable additions:

Birds – European Rola, Southern Ground Horn Bill, Hammerkop.

Monkeys – Olive Baboon, Blue Monkey, Vervet Monkey (which we think should also be named Blue – see photo)

Blue Monkey

Vervet Monkey (you be the judge)

That night we experienced some trade-offs for the quite basic camping accommodation when our cook (now our private chef) brought out a sumptuous meal of pepper steak stew, all cooked on the campsite open fire cooking facilities. The next mornings’ breakfast of quiche and fresh fruit really solidified it.

Our three hour drive to, and another three hours within, the Serengeti was punctuated by our first Africa Leopard spotting (but from about 100 metres away – beyond picture proof range). The area is more typical savannah-like and so finding the animals in the higher grass was a bit more of a challenge. But the next days’ morning drive provided the missing link to our Big Five spotting as we followed the squelch of the CB to a cluster of trees where an adult Leopard slept precariously on a branch about 8 metres up – and well within zoom range. Over on the adjacent tree were two youths mostly visible as blurs through the branches chasing each other around as part of morning playtime, before they settled down for the long afternoon nap – my kind of day.

Driving back through the park en route to Ngorogoro we spotted Eland (largest antelope), Grant’s Gazelle, Golden Jackal, Spotted Hyena and a few new birds – the Kory Bustard (heaviest flying bird) and migrating Egyptian Geese (happy to be away from home for the moment).

The Ngorogoro Crater is about 20 km in diameter, with side heights reaching 600 metres, serving as a giant pen containing the animals within, and in greater numbers than we have seen before (over 25,000).

These are the plain scenes that are so prevalent on specialty TV animal / nature channels, with hundreds of co-mingling “zeal” of Zebra and (wait for it) “implausibility” of Wildebeest.

The matriarch of a pride of lions was leading her five young cubs to a fresh kill breakfast, while nearby buffalo seemed surprisingly unconcerned (it was after all one of their own being served up).

Our campsite was quite crowded as it is the only one situated at the crater’s edge.

That afternoon when we returned for the drive back to Arusha, we encountered an elephant in camp apparently having learned the easy route to some drinking by pilfering from the large water tank supply – which as it happens is equally accessible either by the tap at the bottom (for humans) or via trunk on the open top.

After now having seen the “Big Five”, even if it took travel to two countries, we decided that this checklist was unfair and too confining a set of categories, so we made up a couple of additional groupings:

The Big Ten = Big Five + Giraffe, Hippo, Zebra, Wildebeest, Cheetah
The Undersized Eight = Warthog, Hyena, Bat-Eared Fox, Thomson Gazelle, Jackal, Dik Dik, Hyrax, Mongoose