Serengeti Safari
Tanzania has a number of good parks for seeing wildlife. The most famous is Serengeti National Park. It has wide open plains that you expect when you think of African safaris. The Serengeti has all of the big five game animals, African elephants, Cape buffalo, lion, leopard and rhinoceros. It also has giraffes and large herds of zebras, wildebeests, and other antelope. There are plenty of smaller animals as well. The Serengeti is enormous, comprising 5,700 square miles.
Kilimanjaro Airport, Tanzania, is the closest international airport to the Serengeti National Park. It is about an hour from the large city of Arusha. Serengeti Park is a long drive from Arusha, which is why some tours stop at Ngorongoro Conservation area along the way, staying there for two days. Olduvai Gorge is also along the way, and tours usually stop there for an hour or so. The Serengeti Park can also be reached by small plane from Arusha. If you book a tour, usually, all of the travel arrangements from the airport will be taken care of.
Trip Information
On this trip, I joined my husband and another couple who had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. This is an extension of that trip with Wilderness Travel. While they acclimated on Mt Meru and climbed Kilimanjaro, I went on extensions to Masai Mara in Kenya and Gorilla Trekking in Rwanda. We drove from Arusha, Tanzania. First we went to Ngorongoro Crater, and then drove to Serengeti National Park. We stayed near the Naabi Hill Visitor Center in a tented camp.
Giraffe Encounter
While driving between the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Serengeti Park, we had an amazing experience! We pulled off the road under some acacia trees for lunch. Our guide fixed us a fresh lunch, and while we waited, a small herd of giraffe wandered in to eat leaves of the acacias. We had lunch with the giraffes! It was interesting to see how they used their long tongues to eat the leaves near the top of the trees while avoiding the thorns. We were careful to stay near the safari vehicle and out of their way. You don’t realize how large they really are until you are on foot close to them. They can be 19 feet tall and weigh up to 2,800 pounds. This was the one of the most memorable parts of this trip.
Kopjes in the Serengeti Plains
Naabi Hill, near where we stayed, is a large kopje, a rock outcropping. These rock outcroppings look like a pile of boulders sitting on the grassy plains. Below is a lion sitting on a kopje. Lions like to sit on these kopjes. They like the shade of the trees and the elevation gives them a good view of the plains to see prey.
Once we were in the park, we stayed in our vehicle except at designated areas, where we stopped for lunch. Our guide always fixed a fresh lunch for us. Many other groups brought boxed lunches. We left our camp early and did not return until evening. The park is large and this year, the grass was high near Naabi Hill. Many animals stayed out of the high grass, because it gives cover for predators. This meant we had to drive farther to see animals on this trip.
Serengeti Plains Animals
We saw a number of elephant family groups. Usually in groups of up to ten or more mothers and young. They come near the vehicle when crossing the dirt road. In the photo above, there is a kopje in the background.
Zebras were plentiful on the plains. We did not see small babies, but there were a lot of young zebras. Young zebras dark stripe in usually brown until they are grown. All zebras have unique stripe patterns. Newborn babies imprint on their mother’s stripe pattern so they can find their mother in a herd.
Angry Hippopotamus interacts with Impala herd
Driving along on a dirt road by a stream, we had another adventure. We saw this hippo running along beside us. The stream was on the other side of our vehicle. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other wild animal. This is mainly because people go to streams to get water, and hippos graze on grass near the streams. The hippos will attack people if the people are between the hippo and the water. As the hippo ran, we came upon a herd of female impalas all protecting their young from the approaching angry hippo.
We spotted many animals in the plains and along wooded areas in the Serengeti. The big herd of wildebeests were just starting to arrive when we were there in late January.
Leopard in a Tree in the Serengeti
Leopards like to climb trees. They are very strong and usually drag their prey up the tree to keep other animals from eating it. We saw this one in a tree near a stream.
This extension lasted six days, after which we flew home from Kilimanjaro Airport.
References:
National Geographic
Wikipedia
Related Sites
Serengeti National Park Website
Tour operator we used for this trip: https://www.wildernesstravel.com
