Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti is without a doubt the earth’s greatest wildlife spectacle. Three million or more large mammals–elephant, cheetah, wildebeest, zebra, lion, gazelles by the gazillions, rhinos, giraffe, and going on 60 more large mammal species inhabit the great plain, its riverine forests, and bustling set-piece kopjes. It’s in the Serengeti that something the great Isak Dinesen once wrote rings especially true: “There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.”

The Serengeti is amazing in its enormity, its almost infinite skies and long, golden reaches, its million-year quiet. “How can one convey the power of Serengeti?” Cyril Connolly asked in The Evening Colonnade. “It is an immense, limitless lawn, under a marquee of sky….The light is dazzling, the air delectable; kopjes rise out of the grass at far intervals, some wooded; the magic of the American prairie here blends with the other magic of the animals as they existed before man. There is a lightening of the spirit….”

Things we love about, and love to do in the Serengeti

• Flying to the planet’s most populous animal kingdom over the Great Rift Valley (which “makes the Grand Canyon look like a line scratched with a toothpick,” John Gunther wrote).
• Watching a lion lolling on its back, warming its furry belly atop a rocky kopje.
• Picnicking under a cooling acacia tree before heading out to see more of the Serengeti’s charismatic creatures—elephants, cheetahs, gazelles by the gazillions, giraffes floating across the plain, miles-long processions of wildebeest and zebras tracing ancient migratory paths.
• Quad biking, horsebacking, guided walks with our Micato Safari Director, followed by dips in our lodge’s pool.
• Scintillatingly airy early morning balloon flights over the Plain.
• Watching a cheetah as it sits on a boulder, its eyes attuned to every shifting Serengeti molecule.
• Sipping sundowners from our deck, watching animals at the waterhole below, and “frothy mountain ranges of clouds,” as Elspeth Huxley wrote, “piling up, one atop the other.”
• Paying respectful, heartening visits to traditional Maasai villages.
• And at night, breathing in the Serengeti’s pure air, looking up at the Milky Way, “arching across the heavens,” as the great Ms. Huxley said, “like a vast and frozen plume of frozen smoke.”