Safari Beauty
The natural beauty that we saw on the safari portion of the trip — both plant and animal — were truly spectacular. In the Ngorongoro crater, Serengeti, and Lake Manyara regions, we drove around in vans that had pop-up roofs so that we could stand and get an unobstructed view of our surroundings. Each van held just seven participants and a local guide, so everyone had a window seat. The expertise of the guides was apparent as they identified not only every obscure animal that we encountered — dik-dik, topi, and jackals, for instance — but also a huge range of plants and birds.
In my van, our first animal sighting was soon after we’d driven down into the Ngorongoro crater, a 105-square mile plain that is sometimes called the “eighth wonder of the world.” Home to some thirty thousand animals, the crater is the largest, unbroken volcanic caldera in the world with a 5,000-foot drop in elevation from top (7,600 feet) to bottom (2,000 feet). Surrounded by crater walls and driving on a dirt road, we saw a buffalo in the distance and took dozens of pictures while our driver waited patiently. With sixty people, there were probably ninety cameras, from point-and-shoot models to 8.1 megapixel digitals.
As the days went by, our sightseeing grew well beyond the initial excitement we experienced when we saw our first zebra — whose exoticism wore off as their numbers grew (we spent fifteen minutes photographing them at first but three days later they had become wallpaper) — and wildebeest. These two species, which we saw migrating by the hundreds during the trip, are naturally compatible. Both prey of the lion, the wildebeest has keen hearing and eats short grass, while his companion the zebra has excellent eyesight and eats tall grass.
The maned dignity of the male lion captivated us and caused many of us, especially those with children, to showcase the knowledge we’d gained from watching The Lion King. Our guides, and guidebooks, explained how the prides — the groups they live in — work: The males can copulate some one hundred times in a 24-hour period, and the females do most of the hunting and cub care. Needless to say, there were many amusing remarks made regarding the similarities between the animal kingdom and the human world.
As we looked out the window on our drives, we’d often see the gnarled branches and beautiful bark of the acacia trees that dotted the landscape. Their various shapes — umbrella, flattop, or camel back — were made even more spectacular in silhouette when the sun went down. The sausage trees also captured our eye, and we learned that while most consider their odd-shaped fruit inedible, some primates — including a small number of humans — dip into the plant’s intoxicating nectar on occasion. The best part of the scenery, however, was the mere vastness of the unobstructed views of the landscape: no power lines, no billboards, nothing but natural beauty.
