Finding a Profound Sense of Quiet On a Trekking Safari in the Serengeti
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Marlo Sarmiento
“Okay, now do the blob,” whispered Mark Thornton, the founder of Mark Thornton Safaris and our guide in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. His words, barely audible, were the first anyone had spoken in an hour, and they spurred our group of five into action. We linked arms and began moving slowly, rugby-scrum style, so as to appear a nonthreatening part of the landscape (a large bush or perhaps a boulder), toward a trio of spirited male warthogs whose long, foppish manes rippled in the breeze as if in an '80s hair-band video.
On driving safaris, warthogs are usually bit players to speed past when on the trail of some splashier main attraction. But we were on foot, so there was no speeding past anything. We had been walking since 7 a.m., and the September sun was high in the sky. Stealthily following these warthogs was the very reason we were in the Serengeti. We had earned this sighting. My husband, Alex, and I were at the end of a four-day walking and fly-camping safari with Thornton and his team: Toroye, who is from a small hunter-gatherer community outside the park and has been trekking with Thornton for two decades; Masanga, a ranger appointed by the park (required if you're not using a vehicle); and Kipon and Edward, who drove ahead in a pickup each day and set up camp—simple yet comfortable sleeping tents and solar bag showers—and handled meal prep while the rest of us hiked to the next destination.
After landing in the Serengeti's Seronera airstrip, we drove for a couple of hours until the dirt road ran out and then continued on through open grassland into the northeastern wilderness zone, one of the park's four restricted areas in which game drives, lodges, and semipermanent camps or structures of any kind are strictly forbidden, and where even a single, wavering bar of cell service is elusive. “The Serengeti is at a critical juncture right now, trying to balance preservation with development,” Thornton explained as we crossed a seemingly endless savanna punctuated by wind-sculpted acacias and the occasional rocky outcropping. “It's really easy to focus on the negative, the dozens of cars racing to see a single sleeping leopard or the traffic jams at the Mara River crossing. But I have to applaud the park for these wilderness zones. They don't have to have them—most parks don't.” Only a few dozen small groups a year enter these restricted, pristine places, while the remainder of the Serengeti sees upwards of 200,000 visitors annually.
These zones have enabled Thornton to lead the kind of safaris that tread lightly on the land. “You're walking, the crew goes by a small pickup truck, we're not creating roads, we're bringing all of our own water in rather than digging bore holes,” he said. Decades in and he's still the only one doing extended treks here. “Groups will come in for a hike and maybe stay overnight. For most, one night is appealing; then they go back to their lodge or tented camp in the main park. But four nights? A week? Two? Not so much.”
The lack of other people, coupled with the near total absence of human presence—no ringing cell phones, no signage, no light pollution from nearby lodges, not even the trace of a campfire or the faded imprint of tire tracks from an earlier trip—meant there was a deep sense of quietude. But not an absence of noise. It turns out that when you strip away humankind, nature can be very loud. The first night, I heard lions huffing and grunting so aggressively I could have sworn they were right outside my tent. Thornton assured me they were across the river from our camp. I became aware of the whistling sound that acacia pods make when the wind whips through the trees. What I was feeling was the absence of noisiness, a stripping away of the visual and aural clutter of modern life.
If a driving safari is a summer blockbuster, a walking safari is an art house film. It's not for everyone: You have to work a bit harder at it than you might like, and part of its appeal is its subtlety. This isn't to say we didn't see the big exciting animals that lure most people to safari. We encountered herds of elephants. We spent several hours one morning comically ducking behind rocks and trees to keep out of sight of a tower of giraffes we were following. Another morning we spied on dozens of Cape buffalo. The truth is, you often get closer to these big animals in a car. But when you go by foot, you get closer to the land.
We felt the smallest changes in terrain and elevation. We marveled at the piles of regurgitated hooves left by hyenas and at the metallic turquoise and orange agama lizards that looked like little Ziggy Stardusts lounging in the sun. We were awed by a seemingly normal rock that Toroye pointed out was a sharpening stone hunters had been using to hone their knives for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.
But I also felt closer to the land in a more abstract way. After spending so much time enmeshed in nature—walking through it, looking at it, talking about it, listening to it, sleeping with our tent flaps open, waking with the sun—I felt connected to it. On our last night the sky was so clear and so big that the stars seemed to come all the way down to the horizon. We talked and laughed easily around the campfire, as we had done every night after dinner. I wasn't in my head the way I usually am at the end of a trip, already dreading the travel hoops and responsibilities that await me or feeling nostalgic for a vacation that isn't even over. I was fully present, absorbing all the sensations of being in that wild, untouched place, and feeling incredibly lucky to be there.
Seeking Silence
More places to find quiet
Norwegian fjords
With steep mountains enclosing a waveless sea, fjords are naturally noiseless cocoons. Glacier-carved inlets create an accordion-like geography that, if unfurled, would form the world's second-largest coastline. These undulations have preserved picturesque rural communities with nothing but red farmhouses and gushing waterfalls to break up vast stretches of green.
Lake Tekapo, New Zealand
Located in the largest Dark Sky Reserve in the Southern Hemisphere, this high-altitude lake far from noise and light pollution is a perfect perch for astronomical experiences that produce an unparalleled sense of tranquility. Join an Indigenous celestial guide for a Tātai Aroraki (Maori astronomy) reading of the stars and planets.
Manhattan Healing Forest, Roosevelt Island
New York City's first “pocket forest” offers a respite from one of the world's loudest urban centers. A year ago, more than 1,000 trees were planted using the Miyawaki rewilding method on a strip of land in the East River that once housed a prison, an asylum, and a smallpox hospital. Now the micro-forest is frequented by peace-seeking city dwellers as well as migratory wildlife like butterflies, peregrine falcons, and red-tailed hawks.
For more on these and other quiet places, visit cntraveler.com/quiet-places after April 17
This article appeared in the April 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
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