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Our daily schedule was to rise early, grab a quick bite and then head out into the park at sunrise. This was our first experience with the great plains of Africa and it was very different from our earlier trip to southern Africa. The land was flat as far as you could see and the vehicles could travel over the roadless landscape in any direction. Over this vast landscape there were animals everywhere. The herds of Wildebeest and Zebra stretched from horizon to horizon with Thompson's and Grant's gazelles everywhere. This large concentration of grazing animals serves as prey for the large predators such as lions, leopards, hyena and cheetah. It is the cheetah that we had come to see. We had not seen any cheetah in southern Africa nor eastern Tanzania. The Serengeti did not disappoint. On our first morning as we drove out of the woodlands and onto the plains we came upon a female cheetah heading out for the days hunt. This was our first of what would be many hours of cheetah watching over the next couple of days. Later that day we would observe that female stalk and attack a Thompson's Gazelle. There is nothing quite as exciting as watching the interaction between these large predators and their prey. As it unfolds before you, you become mesmerized as the two animals that have each evolved in their roles play out the deadly game. In that encounter the quickness and maneuverability of the Thompson's Gazelle won out. The next day we saw what happens when the predator prevails when we came upon a trio of cheetah brothers that had brought down a young Wildebeest. The grizzly aftermath of a kill can be quite gory.

When we planned this trip, one of the motivations for choosing January was that we had been told that this was calving season for the Wildebeest. We were anticipating observing the calving process up close and so we were disappointed when we discovered that we had arrived about two weeks too early. This is the only criticism I will make here about Wilderness Travel because when I had specifically asked our agent when planning the trip, she told me that we would be there for calving. It was not just a case of natural variability because we were told by our guides that the calving season comes like clockwork every year, but in February. So if you are thinking about visiting this are to see the calving, make sure you come in February. I still thought that considering that we were seeing hundreds of thousands of Wildebeest, that there would probably be some outlier females that would drop their calves early. In the four days that we cruised the plains and kept a sharp eye out for calves, we saw only one calf. The calving process is apparently on a very tight schedule and we considered ourselves lucky that we at least saw one calf.

Of all the wonders and wildlife that we saw on our trip, the highlight for us was the discovery of a cheetah mother with four month old cubs. We spotted her late in the day on our first day on the plains. Over the next three days we were to see her several times and spent hours observing and photographing the cubs at play. I can safely say that there is nothing cuter in the world than four cheetah cubs at play. We were also to see several lion cubs in our travels around the plains and while they were adorable, they did not hold a candle to the cheetahs. I could go on and on about all the wildlife that we saw but I will let the pictures tell the story.

I could easily have stayed another week at the park, but unfortunately on the fourth day we had to leave. We headed east out of the park across more plains where we saw many more Wildebeest and Zebra. We also came across a small group of elephants and group of over 60 giraffe. We finally left the plains and headed back up into the volcanic mountainous area of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. We were back on dirt roads that passed through more modern villages of Maasai. We retraced our tracks back past the Ngorongoro Crater and finally back into urban civilization. We arrived at our final night's lodging at the Plantation Serena Lodge a short way from Arusha and spent one last night with the safari group. The next day we drove into Arusha and had a final lunch with the group and then we all went our separate ways to different airports. We went to the local Arusha airport to catch a small plane for our flight to Zanzibar. As we flew out and passed by a cloud shrouded Mt Kilamanjaro, I knew that I had still not had enough of Africa and would be coming back for another trip in the future.

(Click on map for interactive Google map)