Stampy the elephant met us in Manyara National park on our first day. He was hungry. If he could have, I think our Land Cruiser would have been swallowed. Instead, he took upon devouring a large yellow acacia, thundering around it and pulling off chunks of tree about two feet to our right. The tip of his trunk acted like a fine utensil, delicately shovelling grass into his cavernous mouth. The whole trunk served to rip off the tree branches, which he stripped of bark and dropped to the ground unceremoniously. He was really hungry.
Warthogs are unabashedly the most ugly animal I've laid eyes on, but their babies are adorable. These grey, horny pigs travel in families, often with several communal females joining on to help raise the kids. They have a way of kneeling on the ground with their front legs while they graze, which makes them look even sillier since they then become lopsided as well as ugly.
Vervet monkeys have blue scrotum the color of midday turquoise sky. They have expressive, deep eyes and light grey hair that halos around the face. When they see a picnicking jeep, they are very picky about which windows or roofs to leap into (the roof pops up, and we peer out of them like groundhogs in safari hats). They chose our vehicle after we inadvertently left some peanuts on the seat. Silly monkeys! (I mean us)
Giraffes walk with grace and style only matched by America's Top Models. They saunter through the grasslands of the dry Serengeti, and reach into tall acacias for leaves. They wrap their long grey tongues around these, and munch as they sway. When they break into a trot, all the charm disperses, and they become wobbly beasts with centre-of-gravity issues.
Most of the female wildebeests are pregnant, and they will all give birth in February. These are dark grey hooved animals with pearly, disshevelled beards. They should be migrating soon, but since this is the first season in over twenty years that the short rains did not come in Nov/Dec - it's hard to say. Can you imagine herds of hundreds of these animals walking in straight lines through the bush? Can you imagine all of them getting pregnant simultaneously last June? Now that's wild.
Hungry hungry hippos are melting into the thick mud. Bright white egret birds perch on some of their heads or broad backs, waiting for insects to get kicked up by their movements. Hippos yawn like they could swallow the earth. We saw one lone wanderer, dragging his stumpy legs slowly through the grass. He mistakenly loped off to look for food, and was not going to make it back to his pool in time.
The carnivores are active, since the green and lush Serengetti plains have not arrived, they are making up for it with extra kills. The lions eat their fill and leave the rest to jackals and vultures. Hyenas, and the elusive leopard eat quickly and gallop off. Everywhere is murder and mayhem. Life in the real wild. Awesome, but desparate.
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