My Week In Tanzania During The Great Migration

I’ve just come back from Tanzania, having had what was, one of the greatest safari experiences of my life.

Now, as part of this “job” — and the quotation marks there are doing an enormous amount of work — I am often going to go and look at properties. But this trip had one objective: the Great Migration. And more specifically, I wanted to watch a crocodile take down a wildebeest, and I wanted to see lions hunt in daylight. Eaaasy. I’ve only been going on safari, near religiously, for the last decade, and never seen either. What I have seen, at a conservative estimate, is four thousand sleeping lions.

I got it all. The jackpot. The crème de la crème. The lion-o on buffalo-o. And a great deal more besides. This, to me, is the absolute best of safari. Well, aside from the complete absence of wild dogs, but asking for wild dogs in these parts is like asking for a kebab at 3am that doesn’t give you exploding diarrhoea the next day.

I appreciate I harp on about the lodges, but ultimately the wildlife is the entire point of being on safari. I’m normally hurtling between properties — still doing extensive game drives, I hasten to add — with one eye permanently on the good, the bad and the luxurious. Not here. This time I turned up with a single thing in mind: blood. And the wildlife gods decided to pay out, like I was a donor bank.

Luck be a Lady

One of the first questions I get asked is when’s best to go. And whilst we can lean on history to help, ultimately, which historian called Covid-19? Or foresaw an entire generation of children shouting “six seven” for no reason anybody has yet been able to establish? This is a natural event, and nature does not answer our Teams calls, the son of a bitch.

So you control what you can. In my case that meant working around the fact that Singita Grumeti shuts for roughly four weeks a year, bang in the middle of peak, because the owners take the whole thing on a full buyout. Fair enough. I’d do the same.

Everything after that was a guess made twelve months out. I gambled that the herds would be in Grumeti and up at the Mara River. They were. By this stage they’ve sometimes long since cleared out of Grumeti. But not this year, where there were still hundreds of thousands of ’em knocking about. And on my first morning, I saw the first significant river crossing of the entire season.

I would love to tell you that was judgement. But, I’m feeling extremely full of myself, so that’s exactly what I shall tell you. Bow down to my genius.

Croc and Roll

It’s a weird thing that when you say “Great Migration” everyone thinks of the river crossings, but seeing the migration is a circular event that occurs throughout the year, it’s really a very, very small part of it. But it is clearly the most recognisable. Like we don’t remember many Super Bowl performances, but we all know Janet Jackson’s.

I spent three nights at Singita Mara River Tented Camp, out around ten hours a day, and I saw two crossings, with only one having a croc show up.

This is the parable of “we’ll see”, as once the river crossing started, it went from mildly calm, to feeling like cars had been sucked out of the ground and suddenly appeared there. Dust everywhere, cars galore, we couldn’t get into a good position, even though we’d been there all morning, for hours and hours. It felt like the moment was gone. And yet, us being pushed into a corner was an absolute blessing, as only us and a few others happened to have the perfect view of the croc that just wanted to go in for a little nibble.

After around 15 minutes of trying, it eventually caught one, and out of nowhere another croc comes in, then another, and within no time it’s all over.

Beauty and the Beest

Having a professional photographer gave me the chance to appreciate the more mundane end of safari, which is a skill when you’ve reached the point of seeing several hundred thousand wildebeest and no longer registering a single one of them. He made me look at the animal I’d stopped seeing. I came home with pictures I’d never otherwise have taken.

Lions vs buffalo

That Nat Geo moment you dream of. If you’re a bit crazy like me, and your dreams are made up of animals killing other animals. This is the ultimate fight. It looks one-sided written down, but buffalo are among the most dangerous animals in Africa, and you should be considerably more frightened of walking into a lone buffalo than a lone lion. In the end it took four lions, working across fifteen minutes, to bring this monster down.

Lions vs wildebeest

Oh, so close.

At Sasakwa, right by the main road, a lioness dropped into position as thousands of wildebeest began to cross. She was poised. She was waiting for that precise, delicate moment. And then a passing truck — not Singita’s, before anyone starts — spooked the herd and that was that.

But this is where “we’ll see” pays out. If that truck hadn’t come along, perhaps the buffalo never happens the following day. Same pride. Full bellies think differently.

Then, on my final day, in the Serengeti National Park, another so close. My guide became convinced that the lions we’d found eating a wildebeest were now hunting. I called bullshit on this, because I’ve been let down by lions since roughly the beginning of time, and because guides have been known to gently oversell a sleeping cat. But no, this dude knew his stuff. Two hours of gaining elevation to get eyes on the wildebeest, three lions lining up for a textbook ambush, everything in place.

And then one of them went too early and missed. What an ending that would have been.

Lions vs hyaena

More of the madness. We came across some lions asleep by the road, left them to it, and then found thirty-odd hyaenas milling about, the odd one sprinting off for no obvious reason. Then a roar. We move round and find two sub-adult lions lying there while the hyaenas keep arriving, cackling, closing in.

What was odd is that the hyaenas never actually went in for a bite, despite the numbers being wildly in their favour. Plenty of growling and some genuinely terrified looks, and then the lions bolted. Two more lions turn up, and one of them makes straight for a tree and tries to climb it.

A lion attempting to climb a tree to get away from hyaenas is not something I’ll be forgetting in a hurry. It might be my favourite photograph I’ve ever taken.

Everything vs everything

Three prides in the first ninety minutes of a morning drive, all with kills. Lions playing with cubs. A lion taking down a wildebeest six minutes into a game drive. It felt so absurd, I actually had even forgotten about the last point, as it took place in near pitch darkness. And it just became the norm. It’s just what the Serengeti decided to deliver for those five nights. What a time to be alive.

Quite a lot of lion, you might be thinking. Well, yes, cos I went there for lion. I saw a cheetah that looked to be readying itself, and a leopard we were convinced had gone into stalker mode as a herd of wildebeest ran past. But if you want to watch lions hunt, you go and stand around near some lions. That is generally a decent rule. Certainly better than going to the zoo and loitering by the penguin enclosure.