SECRET SERENGETI
by Brian Jackman
Published in Travel Africa Magazine , Winter 2003/4 edition
For years I had longed to explore the Gol Mountains, those mysterious, rounded summits that rise from the Serengeti Plains as you descend from Ngorongoro on the road to Olduvai. Now my dream was about to be fulfilled. With Nigel Perks of Gibb's Farm Safaris [now Amazing Tanzania] as my guide, I was going to camp in Ol Karien Gorge.
We set out early from Ndutu Lodge on what has to be the most beautiful drive in Africa. It was migration time in the Serengeti and the short grass plains were black with game. Sandgrouse called from a cloudless sky and already the heat was causing the air to tremble, distorting the distant shapes of gazelles and zebras, the strutting silhouettes of kori bustards and the endless columns of marching wildebeest.
No road lay before us: not so much as a tyre track. Only the winding, rutted trails cut by generations of migrating wildebeest. Compared to the Serengeti most visitors see, we were falling off the map into uncharted Africa: a boundless steppe of grass and cloud shadows in which solemn giraffe stood out like markers, measuring the distance between us and the horizon.
Ahead rose Lemuta Hill, a blue iceberg melting in the heat haze, and beyond, to the east, the Gol, still a long way off. Released from the tyranny of roads, we cruised on over ash dunes overlaid with a rug of turf, close-cropped by the hungry mouths of Grant's gazelles. Here the land has a rise and fall to it, like the immense rolling waves of an ocean, and I understood why Perks, an ebullient New Zealander, fell in love with these plains the first time he saw them. "I knew this was where I had to be," he said.
On we sailed, past granite kopjes and herds of eland. By lunchtime we had reached Nasera Rock, the giant, weather-stained monolith that guards the western entrance to Angata Kiti. Through this broad valley our route now lay, into the stony heart of the Gol Mountains and out the other side to see the Salei Plains reaching away towards Oldonyo Lengai, the Maasai holy mountain, 40km away. Unlike its neighbouring volcanic summits - Mosonik, Empakai, Olmoti, Ngorongoro - Lengai is still active. Its conical flanks are stained white with the ash of recent eruptions, and through my binoculars I could see plumes of smoke drifting from its crater rim.
Now we turned north and drove along the foot of the Gol until we reached the mouth of the Ol Karien Gorge. Waiting for us here was a typical no-frills bushcamp with olive-green walk-in tents, terrific food and a stunning location. Of all the campsites I have been to in East Africa, this was the wildest, the most remote. And yet it never felt hostile. Later in the year maybe, when drought reduced the plains to desert. But not now, when the grass was green and the golden light on the evening summits made me think of Glencoe.
That night, before falling asleep, I heard the hacksaw cough of a prowling leopard echoing against the cliffs; and next morning when we set off to explore on foot, we found fresh tracks at the edge of a pool.
The Ol Karien Gorge is an awesome spot: a giant cleft running deep into the mountains. Everything glitters with quartz and mica. In the dry season the Maasai drive their cattle here to drink at the pools left by the last flash floods, and in places the sheer walls squeeze together until they are scarcely wider than a vulture's wingspan.
And it is the breeding colonies of Ruppell's griffon vultures that have made the Gorge so well known. They nest in their hundreds on the upper ledges, and from here every day they loft into space to sail out across the Serengeti on their endless hunt for carrion. The griffons share their guano-spattered crags with lammergeiers and black eagles and clouds of Nyanza swifts. Baboons keep watch from the clifftops. Klipspringers bound on tiptoe over the rocks with the agility of mountain goats, and all day long the shadows echo to the deep-throated chanting of speckled pigeons.
The Maasai, too, are part of the scene. For them, said Pakapuni, our local Maasai guide, the Gorge is an important source of ochre, which they grind to a paste to adorn their bodies and create the elaborate coiffures of the morans, or warriors.
Indeed, whenever we set out on a game drive across the Salei Plains we would see Maasai herdsmen with their crimson robes and shining spears, walking with their cattle and fat-tailed sheep, sharing their wild meadowlands with wildebeest and zebra and European white storks in numbers beyond counting.
By midday it was so hot in camp that by siesta time I was compelled to resort to an old dodge known as 'Botswana air-conditioning' - lying down in a kikoi which I had dunked in cold water and then letting the breeze blow through my tent. But by late afternoon when the air grew cooler we would set out again to look for cheetah.
The Salei Plains are classic cheetah country: lots of gazelles and hardly any lions. "The Maasai leave them pretty well alone," said Perks, "so they are under very little pressure." On our last day we drove out into the heart of the plains, putting up several marsh owls which rose from the grass on silent wings, like huge brown moths. Here the land had dried completely, the grass reduced to dust and stubble. The air dissolved in the quivering heat, creating cruel mirages of blue lakes, across which floated ghostly images of wildebeest and Maasai cattle; and it was here that we spotted a fringe-eared oryx, one of the rarest inhabitants of these immense grasslands, cantering away towards Ol Donyo Lengai.
Perks has a phrase for clients who like to stand and look out of the roof hatch while he is driving. "Rommelling" he calls it, after Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the German tank commander who fought Montgomery's Eighth Army in North Africa. So Rommelling back to camp we went, with the sun setting and the storks streaming away to roost in the thorn trees. Shadows clothed the hills in purple, while the wildebeest and zebra which had waited all day on the plains for the Maasai to return to their manyattas came trooping in to drink at the pools of the Sanjan River.
SECRET SERENGETI by Brian Jackman
was published in
Travel Africa Magazine
,
Winter 2003/4 edition