Exploring Tanzania (Day 4)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! Today we will be diving back into our adventure in Tanzania!

Today we woke up and said goodbye to Chem Chem. As much as we missed the lovely people and animals we saw, we had another stop in our journey: Serengeti National Park!

We took a short one hour flight to the Kogatende Airstrip and hopped into another open jeep! Here we stayed at Lamai, which had the most drop dead gorgeous view of the rocky terrain of the Serengeti. This landscape was much different from that at the Chem Chem concession. While the Chem Chem concession was packed with vegetation, this part of the Serengeti, which was at the north and bordering Kenya, was much drier with more rocks and open land.

Springers - Serengeti

Dik-Dik's - Chem Chem

Even some of the animals here were different! There were springers that were similar to dik-diks we saw at Chem Chem. They were so cute and tiny, and as per its name, it sprung around insanely quickly!

Another new animal was the antelope! Which were very different from the many impalas we saw before.

Soon we headed out on our first game drive, and we learned about the great migration! While we saw barely any wildebeest in Chem Chem, but wildebeest were almost all we saw here thanks to the migration! Just when we came to the Serengeti the hoards of wildebeest were passing through as well. Fun fact: vultures migrate!

For some reason, my family had some insane luck because our next sight was insane!

The Serengeti was much more packed with tourists, so the guides were always conversing over radio over any new finds. After we had driven for some time our guide was notified that there might have been a potential leopard sighting. We rushed over and squeezed our jeep amongst all the others looking for the leapard, and we saw it!

You can see how hard it was to spot this guy!

We watched and observed, but since it was so dark I couldn't properly get a picture. So, as our guide advised, we patiently and waited. So as everyone else left, we sat and watched. It eventually disappeared for a second and we still waited, until my dad saw it climbing through some nearby boulders!

Look at how cute it is! This one was just a baby, and our guide hypothesized that the mother was somewhere nearby. So, after getting our pictures we headed out in search of the mom.

As it started to get dark, we decided to call it. But all of a sudden, my sister saw something sticking out of the tall grass, it was the mom!

I was only able to get this picture (which is now one of my favorites) because the leopard was walking up close to the jeep! But as soon as other jeeps came, she dissapeared. Only to reappear on the side of the road taking a dump!

I mean, just look at that gorgeous pattern, no wonder we couldn't see her in the grass!

After a thrilling evening, we headed back to Lamai. And after quite the large dilemma because of a particularly large spider, we had a much needed sleep.

Thank you for reading today's post, I'll see you in the next one!