If I would have to name the number one country in Africa for watching diverse wildlife – it would be Tanzania. It’s a safari giant!  Since northern Tanzania with its iconic Mount Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro and Serengeti is just a day’s drive from Nairobi, Serengeti ist just a day’s drive from Nairobi, we became regular game drivers there. Nothing beats the feeling of driving with your own car from the city you live into the bush. We went so often that we knew the border agent at the Kenyan-Tanzania in Namanga so well that we could each time pass it in a whirlwind. On a somehow crazy roadtrip in October 2020 at the height of Corona we travelled from our home in Nairobi to the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater and camped their in the midst of elephants and zebras in our rooftent.

I think there is no more impressive view in the whole of Africa than gazing from the rim 800 meters down into the vastness of the caldera. It’s so vast that the elephants trotting thorough the caldera plains looked like tiny black haysticks to me. From the Ngorongoro we crossed the Serengeti from east to west on a tiny, more than 200km long track. “Serengeti must not die” was the name of the  German zoologist Bernhard Grzimek which first raised awareness for the unique wildlife there and which put the Serengeti on the bucket list of my childhood, next to Playmobil. Shadow was scarce under the midday sun when we headed west towards Lake Victoria, and virtually under every lonely tree, there was a pride of lions trying to avoid the heat and sleeping, as lions mostly do.

We went further south to remote Katavi National park. In a park bigger than my beautiful German home state Baden-Württemberg my wife and me were the only visitors. In the course of a lonely dinner in our otherwise deserted camp my wife looked  accidentally up and saw – ten metered above in the woodwork – a huge python. Luckily it did not really bother to see its first tourists since the outbreak to Corona. Our roadtrip continued to Zambia and Malawi before we reentered Tanzania to visit my favorite park of all parks in Tanzania, for the second time since 2016: Ruaha, a wildlife gem full of baobab trees, lions and wild dogs. The biggest challenge  still lay ahead of us: Getting a Corona test in a country whose President famously denied that Corona is a serious disease (he later died of it). However, a negative test was a precondition to be allowed back into Kenya. In the whole of Tanzania there was only one test station, of course in its capital Daressalam. The results would come out only after three days – so we chose Mnemba Island, a tiny island off Zanzibar as our waiting hall until we would receive the results.  In the moment we went ashore we knew that there would be no more beautiful place on earth to receive a positive Corona test result.

On another trip to Tanzania we went to turquoise Gin-clear Lake Tanganyika, halfway between the borders of Burundi and Zambia with DRC on the opposite side. Above the sandy lakeshores loomed the Mahale Mountains, habitat of the greatest number of Chimpanzees in the entire world. We hiked for hours, along beaches, through lowland forest, hills and valleys, mostly under canopy, to finally meet our closest genetic relatives. The so-called M group led by alpha male Alfred was in a good spirit when we arrived, eating fruits and jumping from one majestic tree to anorher. But our guides told us about the group’s darker side: Once an Alpha male called Pimu who was very physical and aggressive with the females, had ruled for long by fear and intimidation. Finally he had pushed things too far. The other high-ranking males, led by Primus, formed a coalition and detained him. However, that was not enough: The group started to torture Pimu, cutting out his biceps and ripping off his testicles. Nature can be cruel, but is never mean. Chimps are too similar to us to keep this sentence true.