Clients often ask: can you guarantee we’ll see a crossing? The answer is no. The wildebeest do not read the itinerary.
But to chance your luck and to wait for it are two different things. For a party one August, we did three things in advance: we booked the camp within twenty minutes’ drive of the Mara’s northern bank; we hired a guide who had driven this stretch of river for nineteen years; and we left a full five-day window for the crossing, four of those days arranged loosely enough to be dropped at any moment — morning tea that could be carried away, lunch that could be boxed, nothing on the schedule so precious that it was worth missing a gathering at the water’s edge.
On the first day the wildebeest hesitated on the far bank until sundown, then dispersed. On the second they came twice, and twice a wavering lead animal turned them back. On the third it rained hard, the river ran muddy, and the guide shook his head: nothing today. The wildebeest, he said, have more patience than people.
On the fourth afternoon, at ten past three, the dust moved first, then the sound of hooves. In no more than eleven minutes, several thousand wildebeest were in the river. What she remembered most, the client said afterwards, was not the crossing but the four days before it — she had discovered, for the first time, that the word ‘to wait’ need carry no anxiety at all.
We do not manufacture spectacle; spectacle is the savannah’s own affair. What we do is make sure that when it happens, you are there — and in no hurry.