Serengeti National Park - Tanzania

We traveled from the Mara Serena Lodge in Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya through the border crossing at Isebania into Tanzania to the Serengeti Serena Lodge in Serengeti National Park. The drive was 155 miles, mostly on dirt roads, through small villages, and it took about five and three-quarter hours. It was a very long and rough drive, by far the toughest of the trip. Serengeti National Park is 5,700 square miles.  

School kids on the way home from school. 

Livestock clogs the road over a bridge. 

Entrance to Serengeti NP.

The road through the park with beautiful clouds and Defassa waterbuck.

Not your typical road hazards.

We didn't get to the park gate until 3:00 p.m. and then had to wait for the rest of the group. We did a short game drive in to the lodge. We had a morning and afternoon game drive the next day, with lunch at the lodge. The next day we drove south through the grasslands on our way out of the park. Of all the parks we visited I think it was the least distinctive and hardest for me to remember: perhaps because it is so large, perhaps because the animals are closer together and seen more readily in other parks. With exceptions, animals we saw in the Serengeti were seen elsewhere and we got better photos elsewhere. 

A hill, right before leaving the Serengeti.

Leaving Serengeti NP.

The following are photos of our time in Serengeti NP:

Kirk's dik dik on the grounds of the lodge. 

The first hartebeest of the trip: Coke's hartebeest. 

Topi. We don't have a lot of gazelle or similar photos and I think we just got casual about them having seen similar game in Masai Mara. We'd also had a hard drive to get there and were a little burned out. We also saw western white-bearded wildebeest, but got better photos in the Ngorongoro Crater. 

One of the guides spotted a caracal shortly after leaving the lodge. It was very difficult to see from our vehicles. 

We saw one leopard, this one in a tree. However, our friends in another safari vehicle saw more and I share some of their photos. 

We saw lions, but the sightings were not as good as at Masai Mara or Ngorongoro. 

These rock hyrax were on the cabins near the lodge. 

Young Masai giraffe

We had some great hippo sightings in the Serengeti, best of the trip. I fell in love with the hippos, big, loud, nasty and dirty. 

Hippos congregate in this dirty pool. I can't even imagine how dangerous and how dirty that pool is. 

At first we thought these hippos were rocks in the river. 

Banded mongoose

Olive baboons.

Vervet monkeys

Eastern warthog

This mother hyena with a baby in her mouth came running under the tree with a leopard in it while we were watching. Apparently the male hyenas kill the babies to try and get the females back into heat. This mother is trying to protect her baby. 

East African (black-backed) jackals.

Grant's zebra

Nile monitor lizards

White-bellied bustard

Helmeted guineafowl

Bare-faced go-away bird, right outside the entrance to the lodge. 

Black-headed heron

Lilac-breasted roller

Marabou stork

With Ruppell's Griffon vultures. 

White-backed vulture (to the left).

Lappet-faced vulture

Rufous-tailed weaver