Tanzania’s vast plains are home to the world’s most dangerous and most beautiful beasts
Stephen Pritchard
Africa is a vast gymnasium for the senses. Sight, hearing and smell are given a punishing workout; tired, urban eyes become sharper, ears more alert and noses are offered new, stimulating aromas.
Driving across huge landscapes in search of elusive leopard or cheetah, you become the hunter, the pursuer, using all your senses to pick up clues. How often do we look intently at our surroundings, listen in silence or sniff the air? On safari it becomes instinctive, and the rewards are enormous.
Out just after dawn in the western corridor of the Serengeti national park in northern Tanzania, all the senses were in play, and our alertness soon paid off. A lioness was seen ambling away from a kill. She and her two “sisters” had just breakfasted on wildebeest and were graciously leaving the carcass to five jackals. A vulture descended untidily to join the table. Much bloody-muzzled squabbling ensued, until a lone hyena approached. Hyenas are beefy, and would normally drive off a pack of jackals, but this one was different. He was limping. Warily, the injured hyena circled the jackals and vulture, holding his tender right paw in the air. They sensed his unease and began to circle him. Suddenly, he seized his chance and dashed at the pile of flesh and bone, grabbing at what he could. Pathetically, almost comically, he emerged with the beast’s tail and dragged it away to gnaw at a safe distance.
Such dramas are repeated at every dawn amid the vast plains of northern Tanzania. I was in a party of eight aboard a Land- Rover, each of us as taut as piano wire, straining to catch the sights and sounds of nature in the raw. Wildebeest, zebra, giraffe, impala and baboons were easy to come by, but spotting lion, leopard, cheetah and crocodile was much harder. Cries of “Rhino!” “Big cat!” “Croc!” would fill the Land-Rover every few minutes to be met with “It’s a boulder/tree/gnu, stupid,” as we strove, like excited schoolchildren, to be the first to spot something special. It became addictive.
That morning we had set out from Kirawira, a luxury tented camp run by Serena Hotels as a reincarnation of a Victorian expedition base – great swaths of canvas housing heavy, brocaded furniture, writing desks, brass lamps, even a wind-up gramophone. Each guest tent is built on a raised platform with sundeck and furnished in period style (though with very un-Victorian plumbing). Superb meals are served on crisp, white linen in a large open-sided tent with sweeping views across to the Grumeti River. It’s rather surreal, but very seductive.
After watching the jackals at breakfast, we were driven further into the bush to be met by more surreality; a party of chefs and waiters from Kirawira waiting to serve us eggs, bacon and champagne under the shade of a spreading acacia tree. Returning to camp an hour later, we passed the scene of the kill. Only the wildebeest’s spinal cord and horns were left. The jackals had devoured everything else.
The heat began to rise and it quickly became obvious that we were in for heavy rain. As we made our way back to our tents a storm gathered pace, sending great sheets of water cascading on to the plains, thundering on the canvas and scattering lightning like neon across a dark, boiling sky. Further game drives were out of the question, so we spent the evening as the Victorians would have done; playing parlour games in the “drawing room”.
By 6am the following day the rain had gone, but before heading for the small airfield from which we were due to fly back to Arusha, we set out to walk across the plains, accompanied by Erasta, a horticulturalist and wildlife expert, and by a park ranger armed with an AK-47 rifle. We had spent a week in a Land- Rover, and to find ourselves walking out among the animals was at once liberating and disquieting; the rifle providing only small comfort.
We soon spotted a large herd of buffalo. A layman would probably nominate the lion as the most dangerous animal in this part of Africa, but he would be wrong – it is the buffalo. Single males are particularly dangerous. The week before a female staff member at the nearby Grumeti River Camp had been badly gored while walking at night on the edge of the camp. Erasta was pleased (and so were we) when the herd took fright and ran away with its young.
Eyes and ears alert (those senses again) we walked on to see a carcass-eating pack of hyena, more jackals, bat-eared foxes, zebra, wildebeest (everywhere), giraffe, warthog, and a beautiful butterfly larva the size of a fat cigar. Erasta talked us through the uses of each of the myriad varieties of thorny acacia bush. The roots, bark, leaves and fruit are used by the Masai people to cure all manner of ailments. One even has Viagra-like qualities in its leaves, which are pounded and made into a (rather popular) tea. We walk on for two-and-a-half hours through dense scrub and over open plains, but return disappointed at not seeing any big cats … but I bet they saw us.
The smell rising from the evening earth was like a rich, warm, brown vegetable stew. We were coasting along in the Land- Rover, on a game drive near the banks of the beautiful Lake Manyara, 110km west of Arusha at the end of the first full day of our safari. The tarmac surface had given out 30km back and we were now, at last, on dirt tracks and about to encounter our first animals. Quite suddenly, standing against the setting sun, were several majestic giraffe, chewing slowly and looking at us impassively through long, glamorous eyelashes. This was the Africa we had come to see. Soon, a large herd of zebra came nosing out of the scrub, and then waterbuck, impala, dik-dik and briefly – too briefly -an elephant with her young.
That evening at the Manyara Serena lodge, as a full moon spread a silver carpet across the lake, we dined in the warm night air, excited by the first day’s tally of sightings.
The next morning we were introduced to Herman, head gardener at the lodge and eager to tell us about the uses, culinary and medicinal, of his plants. He also explained why, of all animals in the bush, he admired the hyena most. “He is a natural cleaner,” he said. “When every other animal has finished eating its prey, along comes the hyena and eats everything that is left – flesh, hide, bones. Now that’s what I call a digestion.”
Care of the environment is key at all Serena’s lodges across Tanzania, but perhaps particularly at Ngorongoro. There, the low-lying stone complex, at 2E250m above sea level, melts into the mountainside, making it almost invisible from the floor of this massive extinct volcano. The local water table is fragile, and must support the Masai tribesmen’s herds of cattle, so no swimming pool.
A 65km drive from Lake Manyara finds you on the lip of this massive caldera, 8E288km2 of plain, ringed by high mountains – an Africa in microcosm. Plains, swamps and forest are home to the major species found across equatorial Africa, and from high above the valley floor I saw my first lion, the confident big-cat swagger unmistakable even from a mile away. Flamingos turned a small lake the colour of cheap lipstick, while a rhino stood motionless at the water’s edge. This was going to be amazing.
My notebook for the next day conveys some of the excitement at seeing wildlife in such profusion. “8am start for drive through crater. Vervet monkey, zebra, rhino, hartebeest. Big male lion, with ancient, battered face, striding alone across the grasslands. Flamingo, pelican, black heron, jackal, hyena, bat-eared fox. Hippo wallowing in mud. Lion pair resting. Esa (our driver) says they mate up to 40 times a day when the female is in season. No wonder they look exhausted. Warthog and babies, elephant from afar; lone lioness idly checking out the zebra. Black kites diving on picnickers, sacred ibis, eagles, wading birds. Back to the lodge to find a huge buffalo wandering in the grounds just below the bar.”
More than 125 people work at Ngorongoro Serena. Many have gentle names that reflect the age of the missionary in Africa – Deo Gratias, Gabriel and God Listens (“Call me Goddy for short”). They live at the lodge, but at our next stop, the Serengeti Serena, Charles, the beefy, jovial manager, explained that he was not allowed to keep his staff on site. Strict conservation within the Serengeti National Park decreed the animals came first. Only 365 guest bed spaces were available in the Tanzanian stretch of the national park (an area the size of Wales).
“No one is allowed to actually live in the national park, so my staff have to live out. This area is protected as a natural wilderness for ever,” he said, beaming with undisguised pride. Also beaming with undisguised pride was a young Masai, who came to sing to us with his guitar. He had just paid 49 cows for his latest wife…