Day 12 - Serengeti

As the entrance fee to the Serengeti park is calculated per 24 hours, we did not get up too early, because otherwise we would not have enough time to get out of the park on time two days from now. Around 11 am we were all ready to go, dressed in light-colored outfits that covered most of our skin, to protect ourselves from the tsetse flies that are very persistent in some parts of Serengeti. They don’t carry any disease here, but still have a nasty sting.

The campsite was more than 100 km away from the entrance gate. We were game driving parts of this distance. The binoculars that I had bought for this trip were worth every penny. Like last year, my strategy was to take a few pictures of the things we saw and then just sit and observed. The other people in our group had better camera’s than I did and were focused more on taking good pictures.

Compared to the other parks, in Serengeti kilometers can pass without seeing anything. Serengeti means ‘endless plains’ and indeed on multiple occasions we could see all the way to the horizon without seeing a single tree, bush or animal. However, when we did see animals, we would generally see big groups of them, like a group of about 150 - 200 elephants. One of these elephants was eating right in front of our truck. He would hold on to a small sod with his trunk, then kick it loose with his food and eat it - very funny. There were also a number of pools with a lot of hippo’s and all of them would stink like crazy. Clearly, it did not bother any of them to be laying in their own poo and the poo of others. The great migration had not started, so the number of wildebeest was not as large as you sometimes see in documentaries, but there were still many of them. According to local folklore a god made all animals and then made the wildebeest from left-over materials, which I think offers a very good explanation for their appearance. In Dutch they are called gnoes, omdat er gnoeg van zijn (hahaha). In Serengeti we also saw a third type of giraffe, the maasai giraffe, which in my opinion has the most beautiful pattern of all of them. One of them we saw, appeared to have an itch on his belly, which he scratched by dry-humping a bush. The hysteric laughs coming from our truck did not seem to bother him at all and it seemed to go on forever. At one point we had to move on, because the campsite was still far away and sunset was approaching, but he was still going at it.

The rain had not improved the quality of the road, so we had to really hurry to the campsite in the end. We made it there 10 minutes before sunset and due to the experience we had at that point, we managed to make camp in that little bit of daylight time that was left. During the evening we could hear hyena’s not too far from the campsite and we could see eyes light up in the bushes surrounding the camp when we shone on them with our flash light. Needless to say, that this was another camp where we were not allowed to have food in our tents or leave during the night. Again during the evening we could sit and eat our diner and marshmallows around the fire and go to the ‘toilet’ (I use this term loosely again here). I came up with the idea to organize toilet expeditions, so we would not have to go into the dark alone. Later I heard that the cook had said to one of our group members that that was actually very smart, because we were quite safe around the fire (of course) but out there in the dark maybe not so much. I’m not quite sure how happy I was about being right on safety matter – again.

Peristalsis of my intestine was not convincingly off, but it was not completely okay either (I blame all the eggs we ate and not the tilapia). Anyway, to be on the safe side, I cut off the top of two bottles, hoping hard that I would not have to use them during the night. Luckily I did not. Also, we were told that this camp would often be visited by hyena’s during the night (which would be perfectly safe as long as you stayed in your tent and have no food in there – of course). Because it was so warm, I had only closed the mosquito net of my tent, allowing me to overlook the site (as well as allowing smoke from the campfire to get in). Anyway, perhaps it would have been cool to see some hyena’s strolling around, but in the end they did not pay us a visit.