The big migration
Tanzania 1984
Two days later I had an excuse to re-visit A to return a pair of sandals he had lent me to allow my feet to heal. I waited for three quarters of an hour before he finally rose at eight, grumbling that he had overslept. He had planned to go to Mwanza that day and would have to delay until tomorrow.
“Do you want to come?”
I had found a way to see the big migration!
Over breakfast A mentioned that he was waiting for the return of one of the scientists currently out on a wildlife-census to fly to Dar es Salam the following week and fetch a new landrover for the park.
“There wouldn’t be any space in the plane by any chance?” I jested.
“Oh, sure, I think so,” he said.
I was elated. Not only had I never flown before but I would get to meet one of the zoologists I had read about in my books.
However, my travel plans were not that straightforward. Later, over coffee back at the lodge I met the manager who told me about the chimpanzees in the Combe National Park near Kigoma. From Mwanza, I could easily hitchhike that way. I was torn. See the chimps in Kigoma and continue down through Malawi or fly to Dar and visit the island of Zanzibar?
Much as I wanted to meet the zoologist and visit the spice island, I would not have another chance to watch chimps in the wild. On the other hand, Kigoma was in the exact opposite direction of where I wanted to go. There was no hostel or camping place; what would I do if I couldn’t stay anywhere? It would cost, it would mean that I had to change the entire journey and it would mean that I would not get to the Indian Ocean. In the end I decided against the chimps. The main reason was that I did not want to leave the Serengeti almost as soon as I got here.
At the crack of dawn the following morning, A and I set off on our trip to Mwanza. The drive was long and harsh. The track was bad, partly marked on the map as impassable during the rainy season. We drove through giant potholes and over scattered boulders, the landrover swaying from side-to-side. Little wonder A had deemed 8am too late to start this particular journey. But we were in the western corridor and I kept my eyes peeled for the rolling herds of millions of wildebeest on their annual migration.
“Look!” A cried suddenly.
“Where?” I had looked intendly to my left and not seen anything.
There to our right, about 75 miles past Seronera, in a valley between the hills and the Grumeti River where the grass was still green, thousands of animals had gathered. It was a breathtaking sight, even though the noises of the wildebeest sounded like the moo-ing of cows back home. More and more animals were joining the gathering, crossing the track ahead so that we drove practically through them in slow-motion.
As we drove through a dried-out tributary, A asked whether I had heard the story about the lion and the boy.
“It was just at this spot,” he began: “soon after the end of the rainy season. A father and son on their way to Seronera crossed the riverbed which at the time was still full of mud. Before long, they got stuck and had to abandon the vehicle. It was the middle of the night. Soon they came across a pride of lions. The father managed to climb a tree but saw the lions pounce on his son. The next morning he recovered the vehicle and continued to Seronera, sure that his son was dead. The whole village was in turmoil and they sent out several jeeps to look for remains of the boy, but he had vanished. Nobody thought that they would see the boy alive again.”
“Well no, I guess he’d been eaten!” I said,
“He lived. He walked through the bush for three days before he was picked up by a tourist jeep. He had a few scratches, that was all!”
Shortly after passing the tiny settlement of Fahno we spotted a jeep in the distance.
“Poachers,” A said simply.
There was nothing we could do about it without armed backup. The rangers undergo para-military training to learn how to deal with poachers.
“Besides,” A said: “even if we could get the guys arrested it wouldn’t make much difference. No patrol goes by without 15-20 arrests, but the poachers are soon back.” Even now the rangers were preparing for a big exercise to flush out organised poachers co-ordinated from Somalia. It was a war out there.
At some point further down the road, A veered off into the bush. It seemed that there was a thing or two he had learned from the zoologists after all. There in front of us the Grumeti river formed a bottleneck which the wildebeest would have to cross. Giant crocodiles were lying in wait. On a sandbank, an enormous specimen at least 5 m long lay unmoving in the sun. We saw the heads of at least eight more crocodiles protruding from the calm water. A family of hippos stood at the bank nearby. Apparently, the giant reptiles do not mess with them.
And on we went. We were close to the park boundary when I asked A to stop. I had noticed something. One of the Thomson gazelles nearby had a wire loop around its neck. I watched it through the binoculars. One end og the wire was trailing between its front legs. it was only a matter of time before it would be caught up in something. A said he had wire stolen from his workshop even in Seronera, doubtlessly for the same purpose. He now kept a close eye on his supplies.
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