Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

An African adventure part #1 | 8.24.23 - 8.28.23

Oct 01, 2023

I met two friends in Tanzania, and after a few days of safari warmup in Lake Manyara National Park and the Ngorogoro Crater, we were ready for prime time: Serengeti National Park. From the flight in, we could tell it was spectacular. The Serengeti is a breathtaking expanse of endless grasslands, spotted with acacia trees across the vast savannah. It honestly makes you feel like you are in the plot of The Lion King.

The wildebeest crossing

Northern Serengeti is famous for The Great Migration, where more than 1.5 million wildebeests migrate with the changing rains. For those of you who’ve forgotten your wildebeest facts, here are a few of their important behaviors:

They smell rain from hundreds of kilometers away and migrate toward it.
They have an extremely short memory. If they are running away from a lion, they sometimes stop because they forget why they are running.
They have a herd mentality, so when one of them goes in a direction, the rest of them will follow without question.

We started our day determined to see a crossing, which is when a herd of wildebeests crosses the river in stampede fashion. We drove down the Mara River until we found a crossing location that had a massive herd of wildebeests on the other side. We waited as one wildebeest after another would walk to the river, look at the water, and then eventually turn around. After about an hour, one wildebeest decided to cross, and all hell broke loose.

The wildebeests started rushing across the river. The safari vehicles (aka us) drove toward the river. Each wildebeest was rushing across the river faster than the next. Each person was trying to take photos faster than the next. The wildebeests were jumping off of the river banks to get across as fast as possible. The people were standing on their cars to get the best angle possible.

I guess people and wildebeests have more in common than I thought.

All of the animals

The animals in Serengeti National Park were truly spectacular. Watching these animals in their unaltered natural habitat is like nothing that I’ve ever experienced.

Cheetahs