THE GREAT MIGRATION HAS BEEN BOOKED!!!

This week I booked my Masai Mara trip for the 3-10 August.    

I have been checking the Intrepid website each week waiting to see if the tour would be discounted just trying to save money where I can and that it is the bonus of living in a city where the tour starts-I have the flexibility of picking any of the dates in August and with it being peak season for the migration there are weekly departures from now till September and they are all guaranteed, which is even better.  I checked the price the other day online and it was 120AUD cheaper on an instant purchase booking, meaning when you book you had to pay straight away.  I did this and was able to secure the discount and I have now booked AND paid.  I just hope that there is not just me on the tour, as I would love to meet some fellow travellers, but if I am then that is okay as well.  It is a camping tour-so I will be back in a tent for 7 nights and I never thought I would say it but I’m looking forward to it and it will be a soft introduction back into ‘travel/camping mode’ 4 weeks before I set out on my West Africa trip and then have 10 weeks of camping on that trip.  That sounds like a long time to be in a tent, but I have done a long stint of camping before.  I camped on my last African overland trip back in 2011 for 60 days and then I did a 6 month South America trip in 2012 and out of the 156 days I think I worked out we had camped for 42 days.  I have also camped in Ethiopia for 4 nights, so I am no stranger to camping and the last place I camped was in Paraty-Brazil just before Carnival and that was February 2012.  So I DO camp, I’m not normally a camper, but I do like camping and I hope that Dragoman have easy tents to erect as this will certainly be the longest stint in a tent so far. 

My main reason to do the tour in August was to see the GREAT MIGRATION.  Initially I thought ‘what was the big deal’?  I have done a lot of the major game parks in East Africa, camped in the Serengeti and saw hundreds of wildebeest while we were there so I asked again ‘what could be so great about the Great Migration’?  Well I looked it up online and after seeing the pictures I can certainly see what the big deal is and to see the mass numbers of the African wildlife on the move has now got me excited indeed.  The double bonus for me is that I also get to see more of my new home at the same time-it was an opportunity I could not pass up.   The great thing is there have been a lot of comments on NES the last few days that the migration has started and the animals are on their way!!! 

Each year around the same time (weather dependant) the circular great wildebeest migration begins in the Ngorongoro area of the southern Serengeti of Tanzania. A natural phenomenon determined by the availability of grazing. It is January to March when the calving season begins. A time when there is plenty of rain ripened grass available for the 750,000 zebra that precede 1.2 million wildebeest and the following hundreds of thousands of other plains game.  Can you imagine that many animals all moving in the same direction for the next 3 months?  I am really excited about the prospect of seeing this phenomenon and seeing some African animals-it has been awhile.  During February the wildebeest spend their time on the short grass plains of the south eastern part of the ecosystem, grazing and giving birth to approximately 500,000 calves within a 2 to 3-week period: a remarkably synchronised event. Few calves are born ahead of time and of these, hardly any will survive.  As the rains end in May the animals start moving north-west where they typically remain until late June. July sees the main migration of wildebeest, zebra and eland heading north, arriving on the Kenyan border late July / August for the remainder of the dry season. 

In early November with the start of the short rains the migration starts moving south again, to the short grass plains of the south east, usually arriving in December in plenty of time for calving in February.  Literally the circle of life for these amazing animals that is for sure and I CANT WAIT to see it with my own eyes.  Some 250,000 wildebeest die during the journey from Tanzania to the Maasai Mara Reserve in lower Kenya, a total of 800 kilometres.  Death is usually from thirst, hunger, exhaustion, or predation.  The second-largest is the South Sudan animal migration.

So bring on the 750,000 zebra, the 1.5 million wildebeest, 350,000 Thomson’s gazelle, 12,000 eland and the hundreds and thousands of other plains game animals.  Add to that the trip of a life time and something that you won’t get to see anywhere else in the world, I am a lucky lady.  The Great Wildebeest Migration is one of the “Seven New Wonders of the World” and I’ll get to see it, watch it and experience it as there is nowhere else in the world a movement of animals as immense as the wildebeest migration.  My camera will be charged and I will snap like a crazy woman for the 3 days we are in the Maasai.