Entrance fee to Serengeti and how to visit Tanzania safari tours
Ideally, visit Tanzania safari tours combined with Tarangire, Manyara and Ngorongoro on a multi-day camping safari, like the many offered by Udare. The one we did is this one. Not only because transportation, specialized guide and in Spanish, all meals and camping fees are included in this way, but also because the entrance to the national park, which is 80 USD, is covered . Although you can visit independentlyWith their own or rented vehicle, it seems essential to me to do it with a specialized safari guide, because only they know the invisible trails of the park, the gouaches where elephants gather, at what time and where it is more likely to meet lions, giraffes, etc. In other words, on our own we would not have seen even a quarter of what I share in this post. From now on, I recommend the services of Udare Safaris.
Camping in Serengeti
We spent the night at the Nyani Camp which, much more rugged than the Twiga, is located in the middle of nowhere, with no fences separating the camping area from the "endless plain". The showers only have cold water, but like all the camps in the park circuit, it has a covered area for meals. Those who do not go on an organized safari must pay the fee of $ 30 per tent.
If you also made a Tanzania safari tours and have comments and tips that can enrich this post, we are all ears. The same, if you plan to make one and you have any questions, leave it as a comment that I will try to help you. It is an adventure that every traveler deserves to experience once in a lifetime.
No two herds are the same
A second herd of elephants made me realize that no two elephants are alike. They always appear in different contexts, with different light filters, at a greater or lesser distance, and one always focuses on different aspects of animals. The herd of the second day captured me by the temperance of its making. The bones of the skull of the adults gave them severe expressions and they advanced as if changing their size.But when they got closer, it struck me as an attack of tenderness, because I noticed that the leather was cracking like a venerable old man, one of those unreal long-lived creatures that appear in children's fables. There was also a hint of sadness in his eyes and a bird perched on the back of one of them. I was able to see it all and hear their labored breathing as they passed a meter away from the Land Cruiser, sparking us with a start of tenderness and dread, a mixture that can only inspire an elephant.
The cultural manipulation of the lion
We saw this male lion collapse under the shade of a tree, a few meters from what was left of a buffalo hovered by dozens of vultures eager for carrion. He was not resting after the hunt, since it is the lionesses that hunt and serve the food on a tray to the males, and those who sleep up to 16 hours a day. Leaving aside the debate on what kind of society we could build by taking inspiration from leonine gender roles, the fact is that this male, suddenly, stood up and walked to the remains of the dam, bit her and dragged her to his immediate domain under the tree and he lay back down. When I saw the force with which he thrust his claws, I remembered only the body of a Japanese 4 × 4 that saved me from not becoming prey at that moment.
At that moment, some reliefs came to mind that I observed in the ruins of Persepolis, Iran, where after two thousand years the scene perfectly carved in white marble continues to stand out clearly, a lion digging its claws into the back of its prey. But the artisans, with the macho bias of their culture, chiseled a male lion and not a female, as it should have been. On account of their own cultural fantasies, moreover, they had added wings. And it is easy to laugh at the Persians, but the West was not so far, declaring the lion as the "king of the jungle", a nickname that says much more about cultural representations of the exotic in 19th century Europe than it does about lions real, who live in the savanna. The progressive dictators of nineteenth-century Paraguay, who did have jungle but not lions, did not hesitate for a second to make him cross the Atlantic and choose it as a symbol of his republic and mint it in his coins. Apparently, the jaguar was not looking good enough. The moral is that neither the claws nor the fatal tusks served the lion to prevent its manipulation by our culture.
Buffalo raising
The next morning we discovered that the lion had finally abandoned what was left of the buffalo and a legion of vultures bucked its carcass, tugging at its guts, rescuing every ounce of its being. In the cracks between the ribs and in any Tanzania safari tours nook where the lion's mouth did not reach, the vultures' beak triumphs with surgical precision. And so the eight hundred kilograms of the buffalo, in less than 24 hours, rise through the air and reach the sky in the entrails of the vultures.Although the data transfer was not spotless: these Valkyrie vultures had their priestly functions interrupted by gangs of loud, screaming and more scavenging hyenas than they, who dabbled to peck a piece of meat, which they then had to defend from the other hyenas. of the herd. This is how life and death work in the Serengeti, where recycling and reincarnation are the same thing.
When we were leaving, on the morning of the third day, we came across this lion walking slowly towards the sun that was just rising. The image comforted me, enveloped me in the hope that Serengeti would last forever, with its cycle of life, death, vultures and reincarnation, that it would save itself from the much less sustainable human cycle. For a second I didn't think about the overwhelming trend of overpopulation, and the consequent Tanzania safari tours planting of food for humans on land formerly owned by wild beasts. I wanted to believe, in one way or another, tourist dollars would keep national parks on the fringes of lands affected by human settlement. There is still hope, the lions still tread slowly and strongly, greeting the sun with the first lights of the African dawn.
