What nobody tells you about safari in the rain

The dry season photos are all over Instagram. But the short rains in November bring something else entirely — a stillness, a green, and a predator-to-tourist ratio that will ruin you.

The Serengeti in the short rains smells like the air just before a thunderstorm, permanently. The grass, which in August is brown and flattened and photogenic in an austere way, has turned electric green. The wildebeest are gone — they've pushed south toward the Ndutu basin — and without them, the drivers stop pointing at the horizon and start paying attention to the middle distance.

That's where the leopard is. Draped over an acacia twenty metres from the track, watching us with the expression of a cat who has just been asked to do something beneath its station.

In November, in the rain, we found four leopard in three days. In August, with thirty vehicles and a million wildebeest, we would have found none.