The Serengeti is the Africa I think of when I close my eyes.  It’s grasses and acacia trees scraping the sky, fields of puffy white clouds and smears of black as the rains come in.  It’s the ring-necked dove incessantly screaming, “Work hard-er!  Work hard-er!” (or, as some people say, “Drink lag-er!  Drink lag-er!”), and vistas that look remarkably like the different regions of Montana, especially if you squint.

After a couple days in Arusha and then a ride that fell through, Nate and I found ourselves in the border town of Karatu, just outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), which abuts the Serengeti.  We arrived midday and did our darnedest to catch a ride, but ultimately admitted defeat, despite ample help from various bored teenage boys.  We spent the night in Karatu, dining with an American woman, her Maasai husband, and their one-year old daughter, and, with the help of a particularly earnest 14-year old called Fabiano, caught a lift to Seronera, a region seated in the heart of the Serengeti (Karatu is much more of a story than these few brief sentences, but I’m far behind on this whole entry thing as it is, so I’ll just press ahead and you’ll have to trust me that Karatu was all kinds of weird greatness).

Getting to Serengeti on public transport (or other transport) is not particularly easy or cheap.  To cross the NCA, even if you don’t plan to view any animals, is $50, and the Serengeti itself is another $50/day.  Getting a lift was lucky, though, as it at least gave us the illusion of comfort (Tanzanian buses are notoriously packed) and safety (and also flip over a lot).  We also arrived before the bus and were dropped three minutes from where Ali, my good friend who does research on carnivores in the park, was staying with her boyfriend, Jason, a hot air balloon pilot.  Ali bumped into the visitor center in a Serengeti Lion Project Land Rover to collect us, though we ended up staying and chatting with a former teacher of hers who happened to be in the park with his high school students.  I ended up giving a short impromptu talk about baboons to the group, but we soon managed to extricate ourselves and bump our way back to Jason’s.

We could only stay in the Serengeti for three days, but, man did we make the most of it.  We drove through the great migration, the single largest mammal migration in the world, in which 1.2 million wildebeest and an obscene number of zebras and Thompson’s gazelles migrate in a giant loop around the Serengeti and up into Kenya’s Maasai Mara every year, moving with the rains.  I always felt I had a good grasp on what a million looked like, maybe even a million and a half.  I don’t.  When we first found a sizeable number of wildebeest we thought, “This is it.”  It was a lot, but my mind wasn’t blown.  I was vaguely disappointed.  But five minutes later we trundled around a corner and over a hill and my jaw dropped a little.  I doubt my pictures will do it justice.  In addition to the great migration, we also went up in a hot air balloon (free of charge!) and floated over the plains, looking down on giraffe and lions and hippos and topi and a gazillion other things and finishing with a lot of champagne and a killer breakfast (I was tipsy by 9:30 AM that day).  These big activities were peppered among a lot of hanging out, learning backgammon, and good food.

When it came time to leave, our permit said we had to be out of the park by 11:05 AM.  We tried desperately to find a ride, asking everyone we saw, but failed and ultimately resolved to take the bus, whenever it came, and pay the inevitable fine at the gate as we left.  The bus rolled in, rickety and crammed, and we climbed aboard with a new friend, Celestine, who was heading our direction and made our trip his number one priority.  As we rolled up to the gate, I readied our departure papers, but we were waved through after a few minutes, it never occurring to the powers that be that white people would be on the bus.  We passed the rest of the day, bumping and swaying on an uneven dirt road, racing by fields and houses and young girls farming in party dresses (a fairly common occurrence).