Serengeti

Day 7 - Feb 11 

It’s not a nature documentary.  I am not sitting at home maybe slightly bored watching some impossible animal footage of rarely exhibited behaviour.  At close range.  But the scenery is familiar.  It is just that I am literally part of it – you could turn the camera on me and prove it but that would be edited out before it got on the telly.  The lion’s nose, ten feet from my own is only ten feet from my own and if it did roar it would be deafening and terrifying.  I’m glad it didn’t as we made eye contact the physical possibility of a pounce into our open topped car and the eviscerating consequence imposed itself. I was scared like an antelope.  That yellow metallic utterly alien predating stare.  No harm done.

More than that though it was the moments when mood and setting coincided to take me out of usual traffic and into a bleached and tawny wild world where be dragons or anyway giraffes and elephants and gnus.   Also the light.

Also the little creatures, comical and characterful - the warthogs in procession, the mongooses scattering in the sun, the bat eared foxes leaving quickly with a bat eared backward glance.

We spend a lot of time spotting birds; novel and exciting for me and as many have found before there is a very satisfying world of variety, colour and spectacle in the back of every Serengeti scene and in the endlessly shuffled pages of your bird guide.  It takes application though.  As of course does the whole amateur naturalist thing – it is easy; the heat, the endless being chauffeured and lectured, the getting up and sitting down, the flies: to forget the ineffable magic and perhaps stare out the window at the dust and dream of days end.  That is very understandable.  But a bit of a shame so we stop for a picnic and play football for a while with our guides before we get too tired. 

Then you can go again amongst the Tsetse flies on another dusty search for a cheetah and not mind a bit if you don’t find one.  The drive alone is worth it.  Out on the “endless plain”.*

 

Taran is being a joy on safari – he is the family fauna expert and games organiser.  Jo is the jolly photographer, landscape and game spotter even if it does turn out to be some different coloured leaves.  I am I believe chief stander upper in the landcruiser and am trying to organise our collective bird knowledge and learn just one phrase of Swahili.

* “Serengeti” is Swahili for “endless plain”