5 star hotels in

Safari in Swahili means simply “travel”. Meanwhile, this concept has become a synonym for an adventure trip in the African bush to observe wildlife. A safari in Tanzania or Kenya is a particularly fantastic and exclusive experience. For an African safari Kenya has been a destination for long.

The first photo memory card is full, even before we reach the lodge. Each zebra, antelope each, each baboon is scanned ten times, standing, running, eating from the front, from the side. We are in the Serengeti in northern Tanzania, East Africa’s biggest country on the path from the Seronera airstrip in the hotel. On the 45-minute ride we meet an estimated thousand animals including Buffalo, Thompson’s gazelles, impala, Klipspringer, bushbuck, monkeys and an infinite number of wildebeest. In the language of the Masai “Serengeti means” a vast country, and soon turns out that this term could be nowhere more appropriate than here.

Here in the Serengeti, Tanzania’s oldest and most famous national park, Africa is the way one imagines it in his dreams: wide plains where the wild animals can roam freely. This determines the nature of life and sets the pace – and not the yield of natural resources. All this is mainly the merit of one man: Bernhard Grzimek. The Frankfurt veterinarian and zoologist, whose name the Africans, even 50 years after his beneficent activity is still heavy on the lips. He was supported by his son Michael. Both made the world famous Serengeti to their life’s work and to a national park. Without them 14 763 square kilometers of land won’t have the comprehensive protection it enjoys now. “Serengeti shall not die” is a movie that won an Oscar, the book became a bestseller. More than 140 000 tourists, many of them staying in 5 star hotels in the bordering african countries, are visiting the Serengeti each year – the only park in Tanzania, the self-financed without state subsidies. The $ 50 admission per person per day does the National Park Authority TANAPA to maintain tight controls and protect the animals from their greatest enemy – man.

The rainy season from December to May, the wildebeest spend mostly in the plane of the volcanic Ngorongoro crater, where the grass grows lush and very rich in nutrients. Here they give birth to their calves. Then make the end of May each year more than 1.5 million wildebeest on their migration through the Serengeti. Right up to the north adjoining Masai Mara in Kenya, hundreds of thousands of galloping hooves; always clockwise, always looking for fresh pastures. In tow, they have about 200,000 zebra and large herds of gazelle. “This Migration is the greatest show on earth,” said Borner.

About a quarter of a million of the animals that move, become the prey of lions, leopards, hyenas and crocodiles, to finally eliminate completely the carrion vulture. This is just the cycle of nature. Life is born, eaten alive, that is the often harsh life in the African savannah. But who has seen the gigantic spectacle even for a day, is certain: The Serengeti lives.