Serengeti-Mara Afrika Pur

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Nowhere else on earth can one experience the sheer volume of wildlife, the freedom of wide, wild space, the endless vistas of open grassland combined with rolling plains that are studded with jumbles of weathered granite outcrops and majestic umbrella-thorn acacias, and a huge sky. Nowhere else on earth but in the Serengeti-Mara.

To observe the greatest wildlife spectacle on our planet the annual migration of more than two million wildebeest, zebra, Thomson's gazelle, eland and other herbivores one must travel to East Africa, to the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem that straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Here, on a 40000-square-kilometre stage, the dramatic tableau plays out…

Although the two major components of the ecosystem are Tanzania's Serengeti National Park (at 14 760 square kilometres) and Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve (1 794 square kilometres), other conservation areas, notably Ngorongoro in the south and the Maswa Game Reserve (primarily a hunting reserve) in the west, are also important in its make-up, as are neighbouring Game Management Areas and vast stretches of Maasai pastoral land. In fact, the Serengeti-Mara is the last intact plains ecosystem in Africa, and has a wildlife population that is unequalled anywhere else on the continent and probably in the world.

The Serengeti, today a World Heritage Site and an International Biosphere Reserve, was proclaimed in 1951 as Tanzania's first national park. The Masai Mara dates to three years earlier, although at the time it occupied only 500 square kilometres and was expanded to its current size in 1961 in an effort to control trophy hunting and poaching. Until the late 1970s it was barely visited by tourists, though, and served as little more than a stop on the road to the more popular Serengeti National Park. When Tanzania closed the border between the two reserves in 1977, more visitors stayed in Kenya and several new camps and lodges were developed.

A re-opening of the border that separates these two prime wildlife areas would be a much-coveted prize for the Peace Parks Foundation and its vision of transfrontier conservation, but at present political wrangling makes this unlikely. Tourists wishing to visit the Serengeti from the Masai Mara (or vice versa) have no option but to return to Nairobi and enter Tanzania via one of the more conventional border posts. It is a huge inconvenience, and is undoubtedly harmful to the tourism industries of both countries.

Still not designated a national park as such, the Masai Mara is administered by the Maasai-run Narok County Council and income from entrance fees and lodge royalties directly benefit the local Maasai people. Today, more than 1 500 guests can be accommodated overnight in hotel-sized lodges, more intimate safari lodges and tented camps. Covering a smaller area than the Serengeti, the Masai Mara is considered by many to be more 'user friendly' than its southern neighbour, and its game-viewing generally ranks as among the best in Africa.

One of the reasons is undoubtedly the density of wildlife; the Masai Mara, tiny by most African standards, supports an astonishing average of 100 animals per square kilometre. By comparison, in South Africa's Kruger National Park, which is 12 times the size of its Kenyan counterpart, there are fewer than 10 head of game per square kilometre. During the annual migration periods some 1.5 million animals have been counted within the Masai Mara's borders and on the adjoining Loita Plains.

Nor is it only wildebeest that feature in the Serengeti-Mara, though the migration is certainly the core of its existence. The presence of such a large number of prey species ensures that the large predators lions, hyaenas, cheetahs and leopards are there too in full force. Only the African wild dog is missing, having been virtually wiped out by diseases introduced through domestic dogs belonging to the Maasai.

The black rhino, almost eliminated by poaching in the 1970s and '80s, is making a comeback in both the Serengeti and the Masai Mara, though its numbers in East Africa are not likely to reach again the tens of thousands that were estimated to be in the region before the poaching onslaught. Elephant numbers, too, are recovering at least in the Masai Mara after having fallen drastically as a result of ivory poaching a decade or so ago.

Other game species occurring in large numbers include Maasai giraffe, zebra, buffalo, hippo and crocodile, while among the antelope species that visitors can see are Thomson's and Grant's gazelles, topi, eland, Defassa waterbuck and Coke's hartebeest, as well as the diminutive Kirk's dikdik.

Traveling to Serengeti by road from the south, you drive past Lake Manyara and up into the Ngorongoro highlands, bypassing the Ngorongoro Crater before descending again onto vast, open plains that stretch northward to the horizon. At the foot of the mountains lies Olduvai Gorge, one of the world's most important palaeoanthropological sites where the fossilized remains of some of our earliest ancestors have been excavated. Beyond it, you find yourself on the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti, though technically not yet in the Serengeti National Park.

These open, rolling grasslands have given the Serengeti its name, derived from the Maasai word siringet, meaning 'endless plains'. The park's northern, north-western and north-eastern reaches are very different in character, better described as wooded grassland and wooded hills. It is the grasslands, though of various kinds that dominate the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. In addition to the wooded and bushed grasslands, there are grasslands that are kept open by annual flooding and others (the grassland plains of the Mara, for instance) that are kept open by a combination of fire and grazing. If flood, fire and grazing were no longer to have an effect on these grassy plains, they would in time succumb to bush encroachment.

But the short-grass plains of the south would not change in a thousand years. These, in the words of former Serengeti ecologist Harvey Croze, are the 'real grasslands'. They were formed when the volcanoes of the Ngorongoro highlands erupted over a million years ago, spewing ash over the southernmost third of the Serengeti to create a rich and fertile, but alkaline, soil that produces short, sweet grass when it rains.

It is on these short-grass plains that the wildebeest migration can be said to begin, for it is here that the massed herds, drawn by the magnet of nutritious fodder, generally drop their young each year some 400000 calves are born over a period of three weeks.

Of course, this sudden glut of wildebeest veal is just what the predators have been waiting for. Despite the fact that wildebeest calves are running alongside their mothers less than 15 minutes after birth, they remain vulnerable to nearly every predator from jackal-sized up. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the simultaneous births is to create a gross oversupply of available food for the predators, which can consume only so many calves at a time. In fact, some experts believe that more wildebeest calves die from starvation after being separated from their mothers than fall victim to predators.

From the short-grass plains, where the wildebeest feed their young and fatten themselves in preparation for the long march ahead, the herds move west- and north-westward, to vast plains of red oat-grass that are dotted with clusters of acacia trees and studded with granite outcrops such as Moru, Simba and Gol koppies. It is generally here that the annual breeding cycle begins; over the full-moon period of May/June perhaps half a million wildebeest fall pregnant!

From these wooded grassland plains the Serengeti divides into two 'arms', one stretching westward between the Mbalageti and Grumeti rivers to Lake Victoria while the other extends northward through woodlands and over a series of hills and koppies towards the Masai Mara. The wildebeest, of course, are not constrained by reserve boundaries and simply flow across the landscape as the rainfall patterns guide them. The direct route to the Masai Mara sees them crossing the Ikorongo controlled area, where they are more likely to be preyed upon by human rather than four-legged predators. By early July they should be crossing into the Masai Mara although, like anything else in nature, it is impossible to predict their timetable.

By October (or November, or even December) the herds have turned south again and begun the long trek down the eastern side of the Serengeti, back to the short-grass plains to repeat a cycle that has been operating for more than a million years.

While the months between July and October are the best time to view the migration in Masai Mara and visitors then can expect to encounter herds of wildebeest and other herbivores numbering in the multiple thousands there are no guarantees. As acclaimed wildlife photographer Jonathan Scott, who has spent some 25 years in the Serengeti-Mara, explains in his book The Great Migration, 'You could spend a lifetime in the Serengeti-Mara waiting for a typical migration. The finer details of the herds' movements are always different. It is a dynamic process that defies predictions: no two years are ever quite the same. With the most informed advice you could still miss the peak of the calving out on the plains; the wildebeest might vanish into the woodlands beyond Seronera weeks earlier than predicted; and you could camp on the banks of the Mara River throughout September yet still fail to witness a spectacular river crossing.'

The weather is probably the environmental element most important to the participants in the migration. There are four reasonably well defined seasons each year: the 'short dry', typically from December to February/March; the 'long rains' over a six-week period from March into May; the 'long dry' from June to September; and the two-week 'short rains' anytime from October through November. This cycle of wet and dry has a defining influence on the migration and thus on the entire ecosystem. But the rains in Africa are notoriously unpredictable. In 70 years out of 100, the Serengeti-Mara will receive less than the 750-millimetre average rainfall, it will be unevenly distributed, and it will most likely fall in torrential downpours with a high run-off.

Yet even if they do not witness the migration in full flow, few visitors will be unmoved by their experience of the Serengeti-Mara. 'For some it is a crossroads in their lives, an emotional rebirth, a lightening of the spirit at the sight of so many animals, so much space.' The view across the plains of the Serengeti as 'so immense that it defies description, offering no point of reference, no way of discerning scale or distance as if God had steam-rolled this particular part of Africa into an enormous plain…'

It is so. Once I drove all day across the short-grass plains, simply on a heading due east. From dawn to dusk I was in the presence of wildebeest feeding on the sweet grasses. The memory remains indelibly in my mind, and is impossible to recreate either in words or on film. The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem must surely rank as one of this planet's greatest wildernesses, a vast area open to exploration by those wild of heart.

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