Traveling to the Tarangire
Entering Tarangire is impossible for anyone who has read the "Little Prince" without immediately thinking of it. There are more grand baobab trees here than anywhere in Africa. The Maasai legend which claims a baobab is an upside down tree provides you with enough information to become completely disoriented, as you seem to be moving upside down just under the top of the earth!
Makgadikgadi Pans National Park
Makgadikgadi Pans National Park together with the adjoining Nxai Pans National Park are the only true pan ecologies in Botswana found outside the Kalahari Desert. They were once part of the single massive lake which covered central Botswana and which today has shrunken into the Okavango Delta. The name can mean “driest of the dry” or “big nothing” in San dialects and at certain times of the year that is exactly what it looks like. But now, shortly after the long rainy season, it is still verdant and with abundant game.
The Story of the Serengeti
The Serengeti was the first protected wilderness in East Africa, gazetted to forbid hunting by the British overlords in 1921. There is some speculation today that this was less an environmental gesture than one to punish the previous colonial power, Germany. Germans who were notorious hunters and ivory collectors. Britain assumed governance of the former German colony reluctantly following WWI, and policy was focused principally on what to do with the Germans, not the Africans or the animals.