B. Clark

What is your favorite place in the entire world? Mine is a small outcropping of granite rock.

Serengeti is a wonderful wildlife place. Before it was a national park it was the home of the Serenget clan of the Maasai tribe. The small northern part of the ecosystem in southern Kenya is called “Masai Mara” and the larger area in Tanzania is called “Serengeti.”

The most famous event there is the migration of about one million wildebeest (gnu), hundreds of thousands of gazelles, zebras, other grazing animals, then carnivores and scavengers availing themselves of the feast. Serengeti is a wonderland of wildness unmatched anywhere in the world. The eastern portion of the ecosystem outside of the National Park is called “Loliondo Division.”

It is Maasai cattle grazing country and important livestock disease-control area due to close contact with wildlife. We lived in Loliondo village where I was the veterinary officer for three years — some of the best years in my life.

The southeast portion of the Serengeti is the open rolling plains often seen on TV wildlife shows. From a high ridge you can see for miles across the plain.

During the migration one year I stood on a high place, surrounded with wildebeest, and tried to count a 5-degree sector. Multiplied out I could see more than 200,000 wildebeest. In the open plains there are occasional outcrops of granite rock called “inselbergs,” meaning “island-mountains” in German.

The herbivores graze in the open areas and the carnivores, especially lions and cheetahs, inhabit the inselbergs. One isolated inselberg is called “Lemuta”. It is relatively small, quite isolated from the other inselbergs, and shaped like a tight horseshoe with a narrow entrance and a tiny meadow in the middle. That little meadow is a perfect camping spot because it is enclosed so that your vehicle is not evident.

The wildlife is all around and the sounds of the African night are undisturbed and natural. Lions roaring, hyenas chortling, jackals barking, zebras braying, wildebeest grunting — a wondrous wild symphony of animals communicating with one another.

One evening on our way to town (Arusha, a drive of 220 miles), we pitched our little tent in the Lemuta meadow, had our dinner and went to bed. Our son, Samuel, was a little baby at the time, snuggled safely with Barbara and me and sleeping peacefully. Deep in the night there was a shattering, snarling roar of a lion, very near our tent.

Barbara and I were instantly awakened, but Sam our baby was not. OK, great. That’s good. But, if he did wake up and cry, there were lions almost within spitting distance and a crying baby would occur to a lion as a very nice midnight snack.

Under the circumstances I made a bottle of baby formula in world record time and the was nipple comfortably ensconced in the mouth of said baby before he had time to even whimper. Time went by. No more snarling or roaring. We went back to sleep.

In the morning dawn I unzipped the tent door, looked out into our tiny meadow, and was pleased to find not only one, but a whole pride of lions had joined us for the night. Generally speaking, lions do not want to be in close proximity to humans so when they saw me, the lions got up and slowly headed away from our secluded camp.

The reason for the snarling roar during the night was immediately evident, as one lioness had great difficulty making her hind legs work properly, evidently due to an injured back. She limped slowly after the others with great pain. Probably another lion had disturbed her during the night, causing the snarling we heard.

Months later, Sam was double-baptized in our beloved Lemuta camping place by a Lutheran missionary and a Catholic priest/physician who lived in Loliondo village where we did. Good cooperation there.

Lemuta is the place that I truly love as my most favorite. Fond memories, total and complete wildness, wonderfully isolated. What about yours? A place of nature? A beautiful city? An ocean beach? A good fishing lake? A mountain?

This is a truly “for each his/her own” decision.