My Serengeti Experience During Quarantine Frontiers Friend, Richard Beatty With the sudden onset of COVID hitting Tanzania, and tourism taking a mighty blow we make the decision to keep our Pembezoni Camp in Tanzania in place with a skeleton staff…of two!… in each to look after them. A couple of months (and several skeleton staff changes!) later we felt we should take a trip out there to check on the staff and the camp. Glorious weather and bristling with cameras we set off from our home in Arusha. We scooped our youngest daughter and her boyfriend up enroute as they had spent a couple of night in Tarangire where his family owns a lodge. Passing through the villages and small towns as we crossed the Rift Valley we were struck with how ‘normal’ everything felt – farmers were out tilling their fields, red robed Massai were herding their cattle, shops were open and brightly dressed people were walking the streets – maybe half of them were wearing masks but that was the only sign of the upheaval shaking the world.
A Maasai woman catching a ride on a motorbike. We wound our way up the steep road to the crater rim and popped out onto the viewpoint overlooking the vast Ngorongoro Crater spread out 2000 foot below us… and again, had the place to ourselves. We spend 15 minutes staring though our binoculars…easily spotting herds of buffalo and zebra and a few elephants – the challenge became to spot any vehicles…even on a quiet day there will normally be 50 of more safari vehicles in the crater, but we failed! We couldn’t spot even a single vehicle. Even more eery.