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Safari To the Serengeti For A Birthday Trip, Both Hair-Raising and Life Transforming

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By Sonya Zalubowski*

The red dust of Tanzania’s iron-rich soil still clings to my athletic shoes.  I’ve been loathe  to clean them, wanting in this small fashion somehow to preserve the way the country, its wildlife and people touched my soul. Masai Women and children

Just as friends who were veterans of similar trips had promised, the two-week game-viewing safari was life-changing in the fresh perspective I gained, despite some potentially hair-raising moments. It was well worth the nearly 24 hours of plane travel from the airport in Portland, OR direct to Amsterdam and then another direct flight to the East African country, a convenient if exhausting journey. Well worth overcoming were all the frightening, if exaggerated, fears of Ebola,  the West Africa epidemic that hadn’t infected the Tanzanians on the other side of Africa, a continent three times the size of the United States.

 ©Photographs by Sonya Zalubowski.  Maasai women and children

How to tell you now what it felt like to drive in northern Tanzania out onto the Serengeti, an experience that even our seasoned guides said has to be lived to understand?  The word in the language of the Maasai, a predominant tribe in the area, means “endless plain.” As far as you could see, all the way to the distant horizon where they appeared as dark dots, (the Serengeti national park is the size of Connecticut), herds of animals cavorted on the flat grasslands. 

Near our jeep, two young wildebeest, so inelegant in their beards, high front haunches and horns — some say God created them out of leftover parts — kicked up their rear legs with joy at the fresh green grass. Though it was only October, the rains were a month early and the annual migration had begun of wildebeest and zebra from the woodlands where they spent the dry season back onto the Serengeti, the largest single movement of wildlife left on earth.

It was almost as though you’d come upon the Garden of Eden, a place where nature and the animals rule, not man.  The only humans allowed are tourists with guides in permitted jeeps like ours and park rangers who work to stop poachers after meat and trophies. Even the Maasai are kept out with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats.  Since man largely poses no threat, the animals seemed oblivious to us, restricted by the rough gravel roads that traverse the park.

The plains were thick with strings of the moving animals, the striped flanks of the zebra jostling into the browns and greys of the wildebeest.  Zablon Sunday, the head Tanzanian guide on our safari with Overseas Adventure Travel, said some park officials estimated the number of wildebeest at three million, double earlier counts, and nearly half a million zebras. Strung head to tail they would stretch all the way from New York to Hawaii.
 
The two species enjoy a symbiotic relationship.  The wildebeest smell that the rains have come but they don’t have the zebra’s brain power to remember how to get there so they team up, Sunday said.  They come for the grasses which contain the minerals needed for their offspring. The zebras are due to give birth  in December and January while the wildebeest give birth in February. They stay till May and June when they again move on to greener pastures.
 
There was a palpable feeling of relief among the dust-covered animals, the smells of the sweat from their long journey and fresh dung everywhere. They joined the year-round resident animals like antelopes, giraffes, elephants and Cape buffalo.  Warthogs with their small tusks ran among them, their tails high in the air.

 
There are over 450 different birds on the Serengeti, including exotics like the ostrich and the pink flamingo. Here in the tropics, even the lowly Superb Starling is bright with its metallic blue green upper parts and contrasting red orange belly.

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