My first safari had me hooked before I’d seen a single animal

November 1, 2026 — 5:00am

“It’s a beautiful day in the office,” our Maasai guide Lemomo Lesaito jokes, his smile beaming as brightly as the sun as it rises over the highlands on the outskirts of the Tanzanian town of Karatu.

We’re on safari, Serengeti-bound, via the Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest inactive volcanic caldera and its promised plethora of African animals. Uniformed local school children lining up for the school bus wave enthusiastically in the piercing morning light. An ordinary day for them, and what promises to be an extraordinary day for us first-timers to Africa.

The hot and dusty red-dirt road gives way first to a dense patchwork of small farms growing subsistence crops, then coffee and banana plantations that thrive in the volcanic soil. It becomes noticeably cooler as we climb in elevation to enter the Ngorongoro Conservation Area gates – this is not your standard African dry heat.

Lesaito explains the name Ngorongoro is onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of the cowbells that the Maasai people place around the necks of their cattle. It’s not the last grammar lesson we get on our first safari. We soon discover the collective nouns for the various animals that pass before us: a tower of giraffes, a dazzle of zebras, a confusion of wildebeests, a flamboyance of flamingos, a committee of vultures (unless they are in flight in which case it is a kettle).

Even before we catch sight of any animals, the landscape is captivating: shifting from lush rainforest to alpine-like moorland then sweeping grassland savannah and wetlands. We climb to 2500 metres above sea level and enjoy a misty view from atop the escarpment into the crater below.

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We then descend to the base, revealing a cornucopia of colourful wildlife. Lesaito pops up our vehicle’s roof and out come the binoculars, but we don’t really need them. We get so close to a pride of golden-maned lions, we can see them lick their chops post-kill. It is a feast for our senses as well. Pink flamingos balance on one leg in Lake Magadi; zebras gallop in their standard zigzag fashion; a gazillion gazelles (Thomson’s gazelles in particular with trademark black stripe on their sides) frolic past giant giraffes as they amble towards the acacias to munch on leaves. We are numbed by the numbers of every African animal imaginable.

The Tanzanian government moved the Maasai people en masse out of the base of the crater in 1974 to let the wildlife thrive. They now live in thatched-roof villages that cling to the edges of the caldera.

As we depart the crater, after an ascent through ancient rainforest, we stop at one of the picturesque villages. Just like in Switzerland, to which this lush landscape bears more than a passing resemblance, we hear the low, resonant “ngor ngor” of the bells echoing across the verdant highlands, as cattle move up and down the hills. No wonder nearby Arusha is called the “Geneva of Africa”.

“It’s a very peaceful life for the Maasai who live here,” Lesaito says, pointing with an arm adorned with one of the beaded Maasai bracelets his mother has made. “You can just hear the bells ringing, there’s no stress here, there are people living in harmony with the wild animals and the cows.”

Cattle remain central to Maasai life, Lesaito, our unwed guide explains to us. If he wants to marry, he will need at least 10 cows to offer a potential bride and her family, possibly more depending on her status in the community. Cows, not cash, remain currency in this part of Africa. He lives nearby, in a village called Makutuni. We passed through there a few days before on the way to Tarangire National Park, known as “elephant’s paradise”. Being woken in the middle of the night to the sound of an elephant trumpeting – fortunately far away – is one of the sounds I’ll treasure from Tarangire, along with the sight of mother elephants, bathing their babies in mud baths.

Our long road trips in Lesaito’s “jeep/office” give us plenty of time to ask questions – not just about the animals but intricate details of Maasai life. He tells of a local man who has 30 wives and an “uncountable number of children”. He also details his responsibilities as the eldest in his family after his father died. His guiding work pays for his younger siblings’ education. He’s not sure how old he is, 30-something. His mother remembers his January birth because that year it rained – but he doesn’t know the date.

Leaving Ngorongoro, we continue on the long dirt road to Ndutu Safari Lodge on the edge of the Serengeti. Here, Lesaito swaps his khaki outfit, standard fare for most safari guides, to don his traditional red-checked shuka, the robes the cattle-herding Maasai wear, which can double as a blanket for when sleeping outdoors. “I feel more comfortable in these clothes,” he explains, over a delicious dinner, while above us in the rafters, a mother genet – a small nocturnal carnivore native to Africa – feeds beetles to her babies. Fortunately for us, the mosquitoes don’t feast on us that night, thanks to the mosquito nets in our stone-hewn cottages.

There’s not much time to sleep anyway, as we are up at 5am for a sunrise balloon flight to view the wildebeest migration from on-high. Lesaito shares that the word Serengeti in Maasai means “endless plains” or “the place where the land moves on forever”. And what better way to see it than on my first hot-air balloon ride.

We arrive at the launch site in pitch black, and Geert Piersman, our Belgian pilot, tells us we have to lie down on the ground in the basket and be strapped in. I’m slightly terrified until we are upright. Then suddenly, ah, the serenity of the Serengeti at sunrise. The 16 of us in the basket are smiling and stunned by our sky safari, and its view of the animal activity at dawn as we glide over flat-topped acacia trees and Lake Ndutu. Warthogs (or in local and Lion King lingo, pumbas), cheetahs, marabou storks – often called “undertaker birds” thanks to their dark, cloak-like wings, bare pink head, and skinny legs – pace the savannah, their bleak-looking blood-red beaks glistening in the golden morning light.

It’s jaw-droppingly beautiful up in the balloon, the Serengeti stretching seemingly forever. From on high you see every type of animal and red-dirt roads that pop like the veins on the gnarled hands of some of the old nomadic shepherds we’ve seen in our travels.

Our pilot tells us to lie down again in the balloon to be strapped in for a soft landing, not far from a running confusion of wildebeests. We’re then driven to a temporary camp and treated to a delightful “Out of Africa” gourmet bush breakfast. Lesaito picks us up for a game drive for the rest of the day and we see a mother cheetah and four cubs and a leopard, hanging from a tree. With that, I tick off the last of my “big five” animals, a list compiled by 19th-century game hunters (along with the lion, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo) that refers to the five most dangerous animals to hunt, though today they are the most sought-after creatures for safari tourists like us to photograph.

As our vehicle leaves the Serengeti, and thoughts of my far-off desk-bound life back in Australia return, I can’t help but wish I could swap it for any day in our Tanzanian tour guide’s “office”.

DETAILS Inspiring Vacations’ 13-day Serengeti and Masai Mara Premium Small group tour in 2027 runs from May to November, from $14,695 a person, includes drives with expert guides through five game parks, 12 nights in four-star hotels and lodges, airport transfers and domestic flights. See inspiringvacations.com

The writer was a guest of Inspiring Vacations

Helen Pitt is an Australian author and former journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.

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