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Patience, Predators, and the Art of Waiting on the Serengeti Most people do not realise that a lion spends roughly twenty hours of every day sleeping or resting. The remaining four hours — the hunting, the eating, the territorial defence, the raising of cubs — are compressed into a fraction that does not always coincide with a tourist's preferred game drive hours. This is why patience is the first skill I teach on a Serengeti safari. It is also the skill most resistant to

A Guide's Meditation on One and a Half Million Lives Every year, without fail, I receive messages from prospective guests asking about the great migration Tanzania is famous for. They want to witness what travel writers have called the greatest show on earth. They want river crossings. They want dramatic photographs of wildebeest churning through crocodile-filled water. I understand this. I do not judge it. But I want to tell you something I have learned from watching the w

On Matriarchs, Memory, and the Deep Intelligence of Tarangire Her name — the name I have given her in my mind, because she has no need of human names — is Bibi. Grandmother. She is the largest elephant I have ever encountered in Tarangire National Park, and I have been watching her for eleven years. Bibi leads a family of fourteen through the acacia woodlands and seasonal pans of what is, in my considered opinion, one of the most underrated Tanzania safari destinations on e