November 1, 2026 — 5:00am

“It’s a beautiful day in the office,” our Maasai guide Lemomo Lesaito jokes, his smile beaming as brightly as the sun as it rises over the highlands on the outskirts of the Tanzanian town of Karatu.

We’re on safari, Serengeti-bound, via the Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest inactive volcanic caldera and its promised plethora of African animals. Uniformed local school children lining up for the school bus wave enthusiastically in the piercing morning light. An ordinary day for them, and what promises to be an extraordinary day for us first-timers to Africa.

A “tower” of giraffes in Serengeti National Park. iStock

The hot and dusty red-dirt road gives way first to a dense patchwork of small farms growing subsistence crops, then coffee and banana plantations that thrive in the volcanic soil.…