Dassies Everywhere at the Serengeti Visitors' Centre

Friday, September 2, 2005

At noon we had a pleasant stop at the Serengeti Visitors' centre.


There was a picnic area with thatched-grass umbrellas over tables and a kiosk that sold pricey instant coffee.

Several of our group descended like vultures on the coffee opportunity. It wasn't that we had no coffee on our little camping-trip, explained someone, it was that this was coffee served in a proper cup and saucer .

Ah yes, civilization. :)

At this centre there were peaceful wooden walkways which led through leafy glades, past informational displays of maps, stone-age artifacts, animal bones, and buttons you could press to listen to recorded animal sounds. Eventually the walkway led to a look-out point with a view of kopjes, and the many-armed euphorbia candelabrum trees .

The way was dotted with whimsical metal animal sculptures, and such things as a life-sized model of a termite mound which you could step inside to see how the inner passage-ways were formed. We've driven past a number of these mounds, but I'd never gotten either a close look or a decent photograph.

But my favourite memory, and the single-most prolific wildlife presence at this stop were the hyrax. They were everywhere. We'd caught quick glimpses of them on the savannah, sunning themselves on rocks and then dashing away. Here they were much less elusive.

Also known as dassies , these little animals were as bright-eyed, button-nosed and about as cute and tame as a wild animal can get.

Emma disagreed vehemently and pronounced them vermin, but I privately added them to the list of favourite animals encountered on this trip.

The dassies reminded me quite a bit of the furry little marmots of Vancouver Island fame, but in a strange twist of DNA evidence, their nearest living genetic relative is actually....the elephant .

Believe me, the relation is not obvious to the casual eye. It's got something to do with their teeth I believe.

Tree hyrax climbed in the branches over our head at our picnic spot and along the forest-walkway, while rock hyrax scampered among the boulders and peered at us from the porch foundations of the visitor centre itself. One of them crawled ever closer and closer to my camera as I sat on the ground watching it. Closer, closer, closer. There was no need for a zoom-lens in this wildlife encounter.

They seemed so oblivious to our human prescence that we even saw several occasions of a little dassie-on-dassie action. One pair were right in the middle of the path and we had to either wait politely for them to finish their amour or step over the little enthusiastic lovers.

Back at our lunch-spot by the truck, a little cloud of birds of several varieties descended on a spiny acacia shrub and began to peck for seeds almost at my feet. They were pretty to watch, and also very used to humans.

I read about this visitor centre before coming on this trip. It stuck in my mind because the author of the journal I read encountered a lion here. She and her boyfriend passed by a shrub along the path somewhere here on the grounds and a lion was behind it. Somehow the tale ends happily with the lion running off in one direction and the people in the other. She emphasized that no way would she have thought an animal as big as that could hide behind a little bush like that.

But no lion for us. Just birds, dassies, and a mongoose. Oh, and a big metal crocodile.