Ok I am finally sitting down and telling you all about the camping trip to the Serengeti! It was an interesting trip from the start as the car I was in broke down about two miles from our camp. This meant that I spent the ride from Rhotia to the gate of the Ngorongoro crater in the front seat of another car, sandwiched between my Ecology professor and the Student Affairs Manager. We stopped at the gate of Ngorongoro and then were luckily able to borrow a car and switched around yet again. My friends and I were sitting in the car waiting for one of the professors to get us a permit when we saw a male baboon approach. The male baboons in Ngorongoro are known to be fearless of tourists, and we had already seen several jumping onto the hoods of cars. We only had a second to be concerned  before the baboon charged at the open window on the driver’s side of the car. My friend Megan tried to roll up the window but wasn’t fast enough, so her face was right next to the window when the baboon leaped up and grabbed the half-closed window and stuck his head in the car. Baboons, by the way, do not look quite so harmlessly amusing when they are 2 feet away (they have crazy sharp teeth and nails).Our reactions were varying and hilarious. Megan jumped back, Emma (who was sitting in the seat on the opposite side of the car of where the baboon was clinging) tried to make a run for it but couldn’t unlock the door, I was sitting there deciding whether to push the baboon out or get out of the car, and the two girls in the back seat started yelling for help. Megan opened her door and was about to make her escape when our driver wandered over and scared the baboon away. Needless to say, we were laughing about this the rest of the day. 

We drove a total of 10.5 hours to our campsite, bumping along the dirt roads through the vast grasslands of the Serengeti. A running joke among the students is avoiding the species association charts that our Wildlife Management Professor makes us do. On these charts we have to count every mammal we see, write down the habitat, if there is a kill, if there is water, etc. The night before we left he asked for volunteers to do the chart, and assured us that we would not really be seeing a lot of wildlife on the way in so it should not be that difficult. Unbeknownst to him, the yearly wildebeest migration was currently making its way through the Serengeti, right along the road we were traveling on. This poor girl who volunteered ended up counting thousands and thousands of wildebeests! When we got there we set up our tents and then had dinner around the campfire.

Every morning we got up at 6am to do a morning game drive, and would then eat, have a lecture, and then do an evening game drive. During the drives we did some activities which got us to practice observing a specific population. This was fun because it meant that we were allowed to name the animals according to a selected theme. I named the elephant population after ski resorts, and my favorites I named Okemo and Killington :). We also saw a few leopards on the evening game drives, who were sitting in the trees not noticing the swarms of tourist cars around them. On our very last game drive, only 10 minuets before we got back to camp, we saw a cheetah! They are almost impossible to see because they blend in with the tall grasses, which come up to their heads.  

We were all sitting around the campfire on our last night in the Serengeti when we heard a low grunting noise. It was so close and so loud that it might as well have been in my ear. We all looked up, unsure of what to do, when our guard Burah (who is usually relaxed and funny) started yelling Tents! Tents! Tents! I’m pretty sure this is one of about 20 words he can speak in English, so we knew it was serious. At varying speeds we all made our way to our tents- some went for the run and dive method, and unsurprisingly to most of you I was one of the people who sat there and thought “can’t I stay and watch?” It turns out a male and female lion had found their way onto the campsite and were making their way by some of the staff members’ tents. Burah and the hired TANAPA guard hopped into one of the Land Rovers and started chasing it away while everyone stuck their heads outside their tents and watched. After about 10 minutes we were allowed to come back out, but were told to not to wander too far. Oh, and if there was a gunshot nothing was dead, it was just used to scare away the lion. Luckily we heard no such gunshot and the rest of the night was uneventful. Overall a great camping trip!

Location: Serengeti, Tanzania