Safari Bond

Tanzania abounds in national parks with dramatic landscapes. Devanshi Mody scouts a few with her mother, encountering captivating wildlife and insightful guides on the way.

MUM IS IRKED. Our Masai guide at Serengeti Bushtops (bushtopscamps.com) is a tad cavalier. She wants him dismissed for insensitivity to her orthopaedic impairments. However, we realise Timun has that startling instinct that only those raised in the wild do. He ferrets out the 'Big 5' in one game drive, descrying a rhino snoozing under a bush with that keen Masai eye.

He also speaks with astonishing intuition and empathy about travelling families of animals and their physical and psychological challenges. Just then, we see a wildebeest baby that has followed zebras across the Mara River jagged with crocodiles, leaving behind its family in the frenzy of the Great Migration. Some zebras peer anxiously across the water: Timun elucidates they too have crossed without their families and will risk the crocodiles to seek their kin. As for the little lost baby wildebeest, too disoriented to cross back, Timun forecasts the zebra will adopt it.

When we encounter solitary elephants or disgruntled old buffaloes, Timun says they can't keep up with the herd or have been expelled by virile youngsters. As for lazy lions, they demonstrate the law of karma-their wives hunt, purveying victuals which the lions expropriate, conceding but left-overs to the lionesses and cubs. Unsurprisingly, lions find themselves forsaken in old age, not always able to hunt and perish from starvation.

As we linger by the river to see some straggling wildebeest cross, Timun, startlingly well-informed about Mahatma Gandhi's freedom struggle, reveals how the white man implemented 'divide and rule' in Africa, as in India, creating conflict between tribes and boundaries between people. An artificial line the British drew separates Kenya from Tanzania so he needs a visa to visit family in Kenya across the river.