Time Out in Africa: Part 3
Created | Updated Feb 12, 2004
This trip stems from a promise that El (my better half) and I had made to ourselves - when her exams were over we would take off for a while, travel the world, have a little fun. The aim was to do a wide variety of stuff – some touristy things, some mountains, see some friends and family. Most of this journal dates from notes I took in the evening - I have allowed hindsight to creep in in some places though...
Day 8 - Karatu junction to Sayonera campsite, the Serengeti
Another long drive is brightened by our first sighting of giraffe, serval cat and marabout storks. The giraffes supplant the hippos in our affections, the graceful way they move and the way they look at you dozily - very cute. Bizarrely El declares she likes the marabout stork, despite these blatantly being the ugliest bird in Africa.
We see a mating lion pair just before we arrive in camp and are somewhat uneasy to find ourselves wandering around, separated from the wildlife with big teeth by - nowt. El had thought there might be a fence or armed guards, I hadn't really thought about it, but it is vaguely unsettling. We are instructed firmly not to leave our tents to go to the toilet in the night - despite this Kevin decides he has to go in the early hours of the morning. He gets half way before hearing a lion roar, and deciding that discretion is the better part of valour, scurries back to his tent. In fact we hear lions and hyenas several times in the night, although they may have been some distance away.
Day 9 - Serengeti Safari - "Hippos live and eat and root in sh*t" (Not quite Pulp Fiction...)
Today is dedicated to the occupation known as the game drive, and we go round and round the tracks looking for exotic stuff. The fauna in question doesn't seem very bothered by the vehicles - perhaps they see them as some form of particularly docile white elephant? Most of the carnivores we see are asleep or seriously considering a quick nap, but we do see a couple of jackals moving a cheetah on to see if it had left a chunk of kill behind and some more jackals squabbling with vultures over an unidentifiable carcasse.
The most fun we have is at lunchtime, watching the raggedy arsed baboons hassle the cooks for food. They get closer and closer and then run for cover when the cooks make to throw a rock at them. They eventually nick a loaf of bread, and as if to add insult to injury, walk off with it very slowly past us in indian file. They're great fun because they come in all shapes and sizes - from the 60 kilo alpha male, who just strolls around on his fists, through the medium sized females who are the most aventurous, down to the pint sized kids, who want to be hooligans but are a bit too scared at the minute. It's like Fagin and a crew of Artful Dodgers, but with bigger teeth. When Emmanuel brings us the food, he has to be escorted by a mate with a broom, just in case they try a frontal attack on the food tray. As well as the baboons there are mongooses, which I still maintain should be spelt mongeese in the plural.
The hippos go even further down in our estimation after we see them a bit closer up. They swim and drink in a fetid pool of water combined with their own excrement. They fart a lot, and like to swish their tails about in the ooze, releasing yet more noxious odours. Nice.
Day 10 Serengeti to Lake Victoria (Speke Bay) 'I'm a gnu, spelt G-N-U'
Another day another game drive. Hippos go back up in our estimation after we see them trot out of the water, surprisingly athletic on their short little legs. El gets us going when she calls out 'look there's a donkey in that tree'. Alas it is a vervet monkey and not the incredibly rare Serengeti tree donkey. Nevermind.
On the way out of the Serengeti we meet the wildebeest migration in the western corridor. This is quite impressive, especially with the noise of the grunting. Kev's flash digital camera comes into its own, capturing sound and vision. Earlier on in the trip Kev and I had been wondering why there had not been an African version of the Flipper/Skippy/Lassie type shows, featuring an animal saving kids. We figured you could have the Ronnie the Rhino show, featuring a rhino who would rescue kids who had fallen down a well by looping a rope round his horn, and then stomp them to death. He now observes that after Ronnie the Rhino, we could have gnus reading the news which would indeed be good.
With the gnus comes a gnuisance - nasty biting tse-tse flies. Not only is their bite painful (they can bite through a pair of jeans) it also brings with it the risk of sleeping sickness. As our guide philosophically notes, the guides get bitten all the time and they don't get sleeping sickness, so why should we? Be that as it may, they're virtually impossible to swat and we're glad to leave the Serengeti and go where they're not. No doubt about it, the Serengeti landscape is beautiful, but even beauty gets boring eventually. Once you've seen one stripy zebra arse, you've seen them all.
