The morning we stopped counting lions

Bend, Oregon·Feb 2025

We are not big-trip people. Before this, the furthest we had gone was a week in Vancouver, so booking eleven days in Tanzania felt out of character for both of us. What settled it was a phone call. We had emailed three companies and two sent brochures. Arusha sent a person, at seven in the morning their time, who spent forty minutes talking us out of the itinerary we thought we wanted because February is calving and we had asked to go north.

He was right. We went south instead, to Ndutu, and spent five days in a landscape that was completely full. Wildebeest to the horizon in three directions, newborns standing up on wet legs, and a cheetah working a line of them for most of one afternoon while we sat and watched and did not say much.

By the fourth morning we had stopped counting lions, which is a sentence I did not expect to write. Our guide kept a tally in a notebook and eventually stopped too.

One honest note: the roads are rough and the days start early. Nobody hid that from us, and we were glad they did not.