Tanzania

After a quick stopover in Addis Ababa, we’ve reached the Seychelles for a four-night stay on Felicite Island. We’re missing our time in continental Africa already.

On the flight to Tanzania, I finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which I’d highly recommend. The message of that book is that genes are the fundamental and persistent unit of life, brought together temporarily in individual organisms acting as throwaway survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes—“immortal coils shuffling off an endless succession of mortal ones as they forge towards their separate eternities.”

It might feel like this lens casts a detached, mechanical shadow over the diversity of life we saw across the incomprehensibly vast plains of the Serengeti. But I thought that it made what we saw even more amazing and wonderful; that even if individual survival machines are ephemeral, life in some form is inevitable, that life finds a way.

A sea of clouds

On the morning of our drive back to Kigali from Volcanoes National Park, the hills of Rwanda were covered in mist and clouds. It reminded us of the "sea of clouds" that Huangshan in China's Anhui province, where we had spent a day this past June, is famous for.

Ready for safari

After a short overnight stay in Arusha in Tanzania, we arrived at the Serengeti and settled into Singita's Faru Faru Lodge, where we would spend the next two nights. Looking back, it's hard to imagine a better way to do a safari; Singita had every single detail of the experience perfected, down to the cozy ponchos we took on our game drives to stay warm.

Band of brothers

We ran into the same four lion brothers several times on our drives. Our guide Eugene talked a lot about how hard the life of a male lion was. Males who join a pride kill existing male cubs, and those who make it to the age of three or so lead a nomadic life on the borders of territory controlled by older, more experienced lions. They'll band together with cousins, brothers, and sometimes unrelated males to form coalitions to navigate a vulnerable and brutal life.

Sundowner

Every afternoon game drive ends with a couple of drinks out on the plains while enjoying the sunset. On the equator, every day the sun rises at six in the morning, and sets at six in the evening. It was the first time in my life where I was fully experiencing each sunrise and sunset. I thought about how for every organism out there, each sunrise marked both a celebration of making it through the night and the start of a new day of fighting for its survival.

Pinks, purples, and oranges

Every sunset we saw was striking in its own way, but on our second night, something about the scattered rains far in the distance lit up the sky in pinks, purples, and oranges. iPhone cameras are getting pretty good, but I've found they've tended to struggle with sunsets; this time, I thought it did a better job than my Fujifilm of capturing the moment.

Tented camp

We stayed for two nights after Faru Faru at another Singita lodge, the Sabora Tented Camp. Buffalo, giraffes, and ostriches wandered through the grounds, and Alice and I apparently slept through the roars of lions in the middle of our first night. In the mornings, we would wake up to what seemed like a hundred different bird songs and the most beautiful sunrise light streaming through our open-air mesh walls.