Ndutu Lodge and the Serengeti

Our last 3 nights have been at the Ndutu Lodge near Ndutu lake which borders the Serengeti reserve.  This lodge is terrific and definitely a place to stay for as many nights as you can.  It's not luxurious, but it is comfortable, in a great location, and really a pleasant place to be.  The staff is nice, the food was good, and the stars are incredible at night.  There were a lot of travelers to meet at the nightly campfires, and we met a guy (Owen Newsome) who filmed the lions for the next Disney nature movie (which I haven't head about, but apparently is being released on April 22nd). One weird thing about this lodge is that the tap water is not potable lake water which has a lot of minerals in it and is vary basic, so the second you step into the shower, you feel like you are all soaped up already.  It's really a weird feeling to be slippery whenever you are wet and not really knowing how much to rinse the soap off.

Our last couple of days have consisted of getting up super early, and heading out into the Serengeti or the Ngorogoro Conservation Area and driving around to look for animals.  Then we head back to the lodge for breakfast and head out again.  Sometimes, we'll do lunch on the road and head back for showers and dinner, or take an easy afternoon and go out in the evening.  So far, this has been a successful strategy for finding animals.  I think that we have been pretty lucky with the animals that we spotted.  We even saw a couple of fresh kills:  one with a cheetah eating a baby wildebeest, and one with a leopard having stashed a baby gazelle up in a tree.  We have seen hyenas chomping away at some other wildebeest carcase and fighting off vultures, and we have seen many lions, and some cubs.

I found that the plains of the Serengeti were a little bit sparse of animals, and that the Ngorogoro Conservation Area actually seemed to have more.  There, we found a sea of migrating wildebeest for miles and miles.  All these animals attracted most of the predators as well.  Still, the Serengeti area was good to visit and we needed to go through it to get to Serenera where we visited the visitor's center and saw hippos and a couple of other leopards sitting in trees (I am thinking that they were in their normal hangouts).