When Did Hot Air Balloon Safaris Start in Serengeti? And Why You Should Add It to Your Bucket List

The early 1970s were the beginning of hot air balloons as Alan Root a well-known wildlife cinephotographer, had brought a balloon to the Serengeti for his film on the wildebeest Migrations. Mike Norton-Griffiths decided that a balloon might also be a useful survey tool and brought one too. Mike and Alan both are learning how to fly them, sometimes the hard way. Alan had already made of his adventures, first when the basket settled into lake Naivasha in Kenya, when no enough hot air to lift it out again, and later when they broke a record of flying over Mt. Kilimanjaro from the Kenya side and landed in Tanzania. For which he was promptly arrested for illegal entry.

The unusual phenomenon took place at Lake Lagarja in March 1973. For unknown reasons, a larger group of wildebeest had decided to walk across the lake instead of around it. When the adults could wade through the water and mud. The tiny hundreds of thousands of newborn babies could not; the water was too deep for them. Meanwhile, the calves had gathered on the near side; most were covered by mud, but many had already drowned. After two days, the babies died, numbering over three thousand.

The scientist went to investigate this scene, and Mike Norton-Griffiths brought his balloon so they could survey the scene from above the lake and obtain a better view of the mortality. One morning, Mike persuaded Sinclair to go with him in a balloon; it was a reluctant day since Mike was still a novice Pilot, but they took off after the usual huff-and-puff of blowing up the balloon. Unfortunately, there was a strong East wind once they were up. After shakes and troubles, higher than 50 feet from the ground, traveling sideways and hitting hard, they find themselves invisible and completely buried in a large quantity of wildebeest dung, earth, and grass, but in the usual manner, Mike cheerfully told his friend light of it “just a normal outing”. After this day, they came to conclude balloon is unpredictable and uncontrollable during aerial survey and it was difficult to find genuine data for scientific adjustment compared to a survey done by aircraft.

“Ballooning, we discovered, was not much use for research, but it became a standard tourist attraction in both Serengeti and Maasai Mara and remains so today,” Antony R.E. Sinclair

The beginning of the Balloon safari in Serengeti………………………………………………….TO BE CONTINUED ON 1^ST SEPTEMBER 2025.