The drumming cacophony of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of wildebeest, fills my ears as I sit on the banks of the Mara River today. The chaos is infectious because something is intoxicating about those crossings. One must mostly blink your mind from the other vehicles and people and just go with the flow, I suppose.
Today, as a crossing from Tanzania headed towards the Kenyan side, we witnessed it all alone, which is a rare moment (besides the sixty thousand or so wildebeest). Leaping, jostling, racing animals snaked their way across the deep water. This spectacle again reminded me of this almost miraculous annual event’s uniqueness.
Beverly and I have spent a few weeks in the Maasai Mara, staying between Mara Toto Camp, Mara Nyika Camp, Mara Expedition Camp and Mara Plains Camp. We have enjoyed multiple cheetah sightings and hunts, lions everywhere and leopards almost daily. But for weeks, the river crossings were weak. So we flew across to Bushtops Camp in Northern Serengeti to find the migration, and we were not disappointed. Of course, as we arrived, the herds turned north again, heading back to our Maasai Mara-based safari camps.
One of the additions to our portfolio is now a Destination Management Company at Great Plains. In this DMC offering, we can now book your entire safari into other partner properties, vetted personally by us to look after the whole safari from beginning to end. So no matter where the migration is, we can find it and get you there.
Today’s camp walk-through is from the Mara.
Written by: Dereck Joubert
