CAMERAS REPLACING RIFLES

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 19 November 1932, Page 11

CAMERAS REPLACING RIFLES

Trips to World’s Greatest Zoo

M°re visitors to-day to East. Africa —the greatest natural zoo in the world—arrive armed only with cameras than with rifles and guns (says a writer in the “Daily Mail”). The animals which abound in the highlands of Kenya and Tanganyika have no fear of a motor car, and apjiarently regard it merely as some new and harmless species of black rhinoceros. Most of them hardly trouble to raise their heads to look at it as it passes by. It is only since the war that the secrets of the Serengetti Plains have been revealed. The motor car and the aeroplane have brought this most remarkable of all game areas ■well within the orbit of the traveller and tourist. On foot it takes three weeks —in a motor car in dry weather three or four •days, but in an aeroplane little more than an hour is required to reach it from the railhead. I started from Arusha in North Tanganyika at midday to visit this great game area, landed, lunched, and was back again by 4 p.nk To reach our destination it was necessary to fly over a range of hills some 8000 feet high; on the top is a fertile crater, the largest of its kind in the world, about 15 miles square.

In it there are calculated, to be no fewer than 100,000 head of game, chiefly zebra, wildebeest and gazelle. Great black masses appeared to cover the ground, and apparently they seldom, if ever, move out of their naturally protected area.

Once over this range you see before you the Serengetti Plains stretching out for some 200 or 300 miles toward that vast inland sea, Victoria Nyanza —as big as Scotland. A few little lakes here and there, rocks, scrub and bush cover the ground. Every square yard appears to be covered with some form of wild game. Round the edge of one lake we saw a magnificent leopard and family—further on a magnificent specimen of the king of beasts, together with a. lioness and three cubs. We circled for a second time over the lioness, 'who, so far from being frightened by us, proceeded to run after us. We alighted for lunch, and while we took our refreshments, a swarm of locusts passed by, looking like a reilbrown cloud obscuring the sun. After lunch we started back, being, very careful to avoid the locusts, for fear they would cause obstruction in our engine. We retraced our steps only once in order to get a closer look at a dozen giraffes who appeared to be as interested in us as we were in them. It is customary, when camping for a night or so in the plains, to tie some meat behind a lorry in the morning, and it is the exception rather than the rule if a dozen or more lions do not come and accept your invitation to breakfast. There is a photograph on record of no fewer than 32 lions surrounding a group of interested photographers. So tame are these superb animals that few, if any, hunters care to shoot them.