Lions are not the main reason to visit Serengeti. Watching odd lions is rather interesting for these thousands of pre-booked tour operators, which have to economise fuel for their driver’s challenges in daily live. Definitely Serengeti’s highlight is rather wildebeests.
Without any fuel constraint we headed to the western corridor of Serengeti in search of the wildebeest-migration – the trek of up to 2 million of Gnus within Serengeti and Maasai Mara on the Kenyan side of the national park. On their way they have to cross Grumeti and Mara River where thousands of hungry crocs await them. Rumours claim, that the whole migration is just about nourishing the poor crocs.
So we headed towards one of these croc feeding places at Grumeti River to observe wildebeests committing suicide to feed their starving friends. After a few hours’ drive and several stops along the river (where we could observe some of the fattiest crocs ever seen), we finally found the wildebeests on their migration. One animal behind the other – a queue of several kilometres just besides the road – on their way to meet the crocs. Finally we found the place where they crossed the river – not all of them, but still a few thousand trying to move to the other side of the river and having its neighbouring colleague eaten by a croc. Strangely, we were almost alone observing this spectacle, sharing the place only with all the animals and one single safari car from one of these super exclusive tour operators which seem to be slightly less limited by fuel constraints. The 2 super visitors – of course in a fully-fledged safari outfit they bought in Tokyo’s Ginza, spending every day of their tour a month’s salary – seemed to be slightly disappointed by having 2 odd tourists with old, washed-out T-shirts and a dirty car with Lesotho number plates as a foreground to all their pictures. Consequently, we took the pictures of the wildebeests on migration and they probably took the pictures of us taking the pictures of wildebeest…
