These are the realms where endless spectacles unfold, the most astounding national parks
in all of Africa and Europe. Giants Causeway, Bwindi, Grand Paradiso and the Endless Serendipity.
These are lands where marvels recede.
From the mysterious rock formations of Giants Causeway, to the gentle gorillas of Bwindi,
from the storied peaks of Grand Paradiso, to the magnificent wildlife of Serengeti National
Park, here are lands of wonder.
In the East African nation of Uganda, the world's most extraordinary primate dwells
in a wondrous sanctuary called Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Roughly 650 mountain gorillas
survive and half of them live here. Located in southwestern Uganda, Bwindi Impenetrable
National Park covers an area of 127 square miles. The journey to this African marvel
starts at Lake Victoria. King of the lake is the hippopotamus. These 6 ton giants feed
on Victoria's aquatic plants. Fish eagles scan the shallows from key vantage points.
Giant crowned cranes feed at the lake's margins. And roaming the papyrus swamps are
shoebill storks that stand 4 feet tall. Leaving Lake Victoria behind, it's time to head west
for the park. Banana fields line the road from the nation's capital of Kampala to Bwindi,
Uganda's first national park. At 3,000 feet, the landscape changes. Now tea plantations
dot the park's boundaries. At day's end, we enter the misty gateway to the park at
Pahoma. A sound sleep is in order, for tomorrow will come the search for the mountain gorilla.
At first light, we are joined by a park ranger. He will guide us on our quest. We begin at
the Katangiri River Trail, an enchanted world of soft green hues. More than a hundred species
of rare ferns thrive here. Vines as thick as giant constrictors climb towards the sky,
as crystalline waters cascade down Bwindi's slopes. The park is believed to hold the richest
plant community in East Africa due to its range of habitats at ascending elevations.
But life is nourished by up to 95 inches of rain a year. Bwindi is not only famous for
its gorillas, it's also a birdwatcher's paradise. The bronze sumbird is one of 336 species protected
by the park. The collection includes the dazzling blue flycatcher. As our quest for mountain
gorilla takes us ever higher into the park, it becomes obvious why Bwindi is called impenetrable.
Dense bamboo and natural shrubs inhabit the valley bottoms. Climbing up to 4,000 feet
above Bahama, the high forest begins to chatter. A troop of black and white colobus monkeys
hold center stage. Like their distant cousins, the gorilla, they feed only during the daytime.
When they're not eating, they simply sit still to digest their food, like melancholy little
men. Aside from tree-bound monkeys, the forest floor is alive with 120 species of mammal.
Dikers, a species of small antelope, move easily through the underbrush. Their travels
may bring them face to face with a snuffling bush pig as it searches for roots and bulbs
on the forest floor. Forest elephants have straighter tusks and ears more oval than their
lowland cousins. Since they tend to feed in the same areas as Bwindi's gorillas, their
appearance is a good sign. Then, roughly in the center of Bwindi's southwest quadrant,
exciting evidence that gorillas are nearby. It's wild celery, pulled in half and chewed
clean. A gorilla's roar shatters the air. It's coming from between the first and second
ridge lines of the Kigezi Highlands on the park's southwest border. If approached carelessly,
mountain gorillas can inflict lethal wounds. We place our complete trust in the hands of
our ranger guide. Recruited from local villages, their dedication and peerless skill allows
a miraculous encounter to unfold. Suddenly, a massive form of black and silver. It's the
dominant male of the group. Because his back hair has turned white, he's called a silverback.
He is very protective of his family, who are resting close by. While gentle with his group,
this 35-year-old 450-pound male will fight to the death to protect them. One swat of
his immense 12-inch wide hand could easily kill a rival male. The mountain gorillas of
Bwindi National Park have their schedule neatly sorted out. Thirty percent of the day is spent
feeding, 30 percent trapping, and 40 percent resting. Youngsters' priorities tend to drift
towards 100 percent fooling around, whenever possible.
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This mother and newborn are living proof of Bwindi's promise. While lowland gorillas can
survive in zoos, mountain gorillas only exist in sanctuaries like Bwindi. Today, the world
can share the joy of coming face to face with these living legacies of wonder, here, in
the heart of Africa, in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park lies nestled amidst the European Alps. It's a place where
lush valleys and rainbow skies transform the spirit, and alpine flowers emerge from glistening
snow. The Alps are the beating heart of Europe, but Grand Paradiso is where we can find its
soul. Here is a movable feast of contrast and color, worthy of a king. Over each rise,
vistas of rugged mountains and deep valleys define one of the greatest natural sanctuaries
in the world. Grand Paradiso's boundaries embrace 173,000 acres of snow-capped summits.
The park is located in the southwestern corner of the Alps, along the Italian-French border.
Its mighty namesake, Grand Paradiso Mountain, towers over 13,000 feet high. Safeguarding
this haven of flowers and ice are 68 dedicated rangers. They know the alpine grandeur of
Paradiso has another side.
Each spring, the roar of great avalanches announces the magic arrival of the annual
In the central eastern section of the park, melting snows feed a wondrous cascade called
the disappearing waterfall. Due to its narrow spillway and long descent, the falling waters
seem to vanish before they land. In the central valley of Cogne, the heart of the park, larch
trees blaze with crimson buds. Some 250 alpine plant species put on their finest. Meadow
saffron and hardy geums join a host of vivid blooms to create the colors of springtime's
verdant palette.
In one glorious season, this world of snowy summits and chiseled mountain faces sheds
its wintery veil. Grand Paradiso's valleys burst with life and singing waters that lift
the soul.
In the 19th century, a series of stately trails were built throughout the park. Today, they
are among the finest in all the Alps. Fragrantly scented pine trees line the pathways as they
ascend to a secluded mountain getaway.
Built beneath a mountain slope at a location called Orvelli is a simple hunting lodge.
Its plain lines belie its importance. This humble structure was once the summer home
of a king. Grand Paradiso's greatest admirer was the first modern ruler of a united Italy,
King Vittorio Emanuele II.
So fond of Paradiso was the king, he often extended his stay. To maintain communications,
a telegraph line was run up to the lodge. Here, for weeks on end, Vittorio would run
the country through a wire from his beloved Grand Paradiso.
From this eagle's nest, he shared the view with the wild denizens of Grand Paradiso.
The red alpine fox eats almost any creature it can catch, from frogs to field mice. But
it seldom gets close to this creature.
The largest member of the squirrel family, the marmot uses a shrill whistle to warn
its companions of a predator. If it's lucky, a fox might get the merest glimpse of the
creature before it shoots into a subterranean burrow.
The marmots share the rugged mountain slopes with agile climbers called chamois. These
sure-footed creatures are found only in the high mountains of Europe and Western Asia.
Male adults weigh in at about 80 pounds. A member of the antelope family, chamois can
easily bound across a wide ravine. Equipped with wide hooves to avoid sinking in the snow,
these hardy animals can go weeks without a meal.
High above the park's southern gateway of Nowaska, the foothills of Grand Paradiso National
Park are haunted by a string of deserted villages.
This is the village of Maison. It was founded in the 18th century by artisans and shepherds.
It was once a thriving community, famous for its stonemasons. These craftsmen cut the granite
of Grand Paradiso with such care and such precision that their shingled rooftops still
remain intact.
To walk through Maison today is to journey back to a golden time when village children
flocked inside a one-room school. The walls here seemed to echo with the chatter of students
and the sound of chalk on slate.
But ultimately, as their populations grew, the natural resources of Grand Paradiso were
unable to sustain them. Time was also running out for a creature dear to the hearts of all
Italians.
The very sight of an ibex stirs the Italian soul as surely as the bald eagle inspires
Americans.
Ibex are the sure-footed mountain goats of the Alps. Males carry horns as long as three
feet, a fitting crown for an alpine monarch.
In the first weeks of spring, male ibex clean the membranes from their horns in preparation
for an annual ritual.
Young males begin to practice jousting. As mature males, this contest will be fought
in earnest.
The victors will claim as many as a dozen females for their harems.
Hunted relentlessly for meat and the supposed medicinal properties of their great horns,
the ibex had nearly vanished by the mid-19th century.
It was King Vittorio who would save the ibex. His love for this handsome creature led to
Grand Paradiso being declared an official reserve in 1856.
In 1922, this sanctuary was named Italy's first national park.
Thanks to the vision of a king, some 5,000 ibex now thrive in this wonderland.
And the majestic mountains of Grand Paradiso are truly an alpine paradise open to the world.
Lashed by windswept seas, it is the most enchanted spot in all of Northern Ireland, the Giant's
Causeway National Park.
The park owes its unique name to a legend of a giant named Finn McCool.
As the story goes, the basalt rock fortresses of ancient stone were created by Finn as a
labor of love.
According to legend, he built three pathways or cogways of geometrically structured rock
stone by stone.
Looking directly down on them, one is struck by their shapes, some hexagonal, others four,
five, even nine sided.
The main causeway, called the honeycomb, stretches hundreds of feet before it disappears under
the sea.
What are these fantastic stones?
According to the Celtic yarn, Finn McCool built his causeway across the sea to bring
his sweetheart from Scotland to Ireland.
This three-story formation is called the Harp.
Perhaps Finn wooed his wife-to-be with a tune from its stony strings.
The pieces of this rocky mystery lie on the wondrous coast of Northern Ireland.
Finn McCool's mighty fortress is nestled in County Antrim, a magic quilt of shamrock green,
rock and water.
Five miles east of the causeway, a series of wide glens grace the landscape.
Spilled into the Atlantic, Glen Ariff, the queen of the glens, typifies the peerless
beauty of Northern Ireland.
Flowing through it are two breathtaking rivers, the Inver and the Glen Ariff.
The rivers wind through a series of serpentine rocky gorges.
Here a forest of soft mosses and delicate ferns thrive.
And as the waters tumble toward Giant's Causeway and the sea, they fall like notes from the
giant's harp in grand Irish style.
On their way to the Atlantic, the rivers pass through Glen Arm, the oldest village of the
glens.
In the churchyards here are the final resting places of seafaring men.
Those fishermen wade anchor from enchanted harbors like Ballantoy, unchanged since the
19th century.
Signs of the ocean's bounty grace the shoreline just east of the causeway at Port Ballantry.
Trepid cormorants dry their wings after long dives for fish.
The eider is Ireland's largest diving duck.
The down from the brown female was prized as quilt stuffing by Irish artisans.
Behind the surf lie tidal pools bursting with brilliant seaweeds.
Here too are barnacles and limpets of every shape.
They share the salty hollows with a host of more lively creatures.
In Finn McCool's realm, every creature finds its place in the order of things.
At once, the causeway was a part of a world in chaos.
58 million years ago, the region was a battlefield dotted with volcanoes.
From northeast Antrim to southwest Scotland, fishers in the earth's crust spewed layer
after layer of molten rock.
Liquified stone solidified into layers of basalt.
From the youngest sheet of lava emerged the mysterious columns of the causeway.
Like candles of stone, they sit atop a geological layer cake.
Thousands upon thousands of them form the twisted cliff faces.
The Celtic imagination took hold of these natural miracles and made them the property
of Finn McCool.
Here is McCool's giant boot.
In reality, it's a two-ton dollop of lava.
And there's a more down-to-earth explanation for the giant's honeycombed pathways as well.
They were formed from virtual ponds of liquid rock.
As the lava cooled, it cracked into geometric shapes.
At a structure called Giant's Gate, the secret transformation of hexagonal surfaces into
columns is revealed.
As layers of lava cooled, vertical cracks opened downward at right angles to the cooling
surface.
Many of the fissures ran deep enough to form the columns seen today.
Shifts in the earth and irregular cooling of the lava gave the columns of Giant's Gate
their tilt and the harp its curious curve.
Looming above the harp are phenomenal formations.
Shaped by the erosive action of wind, water, and ice, the chimney tops are basalt columns
isolated from the nearby cliffs.
Located in Port Riestan at the center of the park, the chimney tops share the coastal air
space with squadrons of seabirds.
The stiff wings of the fumer allow it to fly endlessly over the cliffs.
The birds stay snug in their cliffside nests until the end of the breeding season when
they disappear into the Atlantic like notes from the Giant's harp.
The causeway's greatest flyers are peregrine falcons.
The world's fastest animals, they dive after prey at speeds reaching 200 miles per hour.
The causeway contains a remarkable range of habitats and a generous bouquet of wild flowers.
Thyme and ladies bed straw, hair bells, sea pinks, sea asters, ferns, and bluebell thrive
in this rocky garden.
The causeway stones unite the worlds of nature, legend, and Irish history as well.
A few miles west of the causeway is the stronghold called Dunlus, the largest castle of the Northern
Irish coastline.
Stones brought from the causeway actually form part of its distinctive walls.
The name Dunlus literally means fort in Irish.
The first part of the castle may have been built as early as the 10th century, but historical
accounts of the castle do not begin until the 1500s.
Until it fell under British rule in the late 16th century, Scottish clans ruled the region
from behind these walls.
Damaged in an English artillery attack in 1584, this complex of eerie walls and spires
was deserted in the late 17th century.
The struggle of Scottish clans and English armies echo through Dunlus, and the prehistoric
history of the North Irish coast is preserved in the causeway's library of stone.
Bound in chapters of rock are towers that touch the past and tales of a giant whose
love knew no limits.
As long as winds howl and waves crash, the giant's causeway will remain a timeless beacon
to the Irish soul.
Deep within the endless plains of Africa lies Serengeti National Park.
These astonishing savannahs are home to the most impressive array of animals on Earth.
And the most important player in this eternal drama is the wildebeest.
Each year these herbivores in the hundreds of thousands lead the world's most spectacular
migration.
From the mysterious crater called Ngorogoro, they plunge into the vast Serengeti.
Surging northward, they pass enigmatic rock formations where predators lay in ambush.
Their odyssey ends with a death-defying swim across a wild river to the rich grasslands
of southern Kenya.
The Serengeti National Park covers an area of over 5,600 square miles.
Its border to the north is Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve.
To the south is the key to understanding the wonders of the Serengeti, Ngorogoro Crater.
The grasslands of the Serengeti literally rise from its ashes.
Two and a half million years ago, Ngorogoro, a volcanic mountain, collapsed into a crater
eight miles across.
Its rim reaches some 6,000 feet above sea level.
Mother Nature made the most of the rich volcanic soil within Ngorogoro.
Today it shelters an extraordinary array of plants and animals.
The yellow fever tree sprouts thorns to protect itself in the first years of growth.
In its shadow, a band of vervet monkeys feed on grass and insects.
And great birds are everywhere.
Saddle-billed storks grow over five feet tall.
And a marabou hunts for frogs.
The crater is a world of color, contrast, and coexistence.
High-shouldered antelopes called harta beasts mingle with crowned cranes.
On Ngorogoro's Lake Magadai, lesser flamingos feed on the blue-green algae.
Without this planktonic diet, their famous pink plumage will fade.
The flamingos share the lake with heavyweight hippos.
Adult males can weigh over 7,000 pounds.
There are no sweat glands in its skin, and the epidermis is very thin.
Without a regular dunking, hippos will dehydrate at several times the rate of other Serengeti
mammals.
Hippos are a good deal more dangerous than they appear.
The jaws of a bull are strong and wide enough to bite a nine-foot crocodile in two.
The center of the crater is patrolled by another awesome mammal, the rare black rhino.
This 11-foot-long bull weighs three and a half tons.
In spite of his heft, he can attack at 20 miles per hour.
The crater's elephants are the only animals larger than the hippopotamus and the rhino.
This male weighs over 11,000 pounds.
Here a female and her calf pass the big bull with due caution and respect.
Great herds of zebras wander the crater.
The units consist of up to a dozen females and one stallion, but of all the animals of
this park on the move, the wildebeest has the biggest part to play.
Vast herds breed here in the crater.
The wildebeest swallows more grass per mouthful than practically any similar grazer.
Wildebeests quickly exhaust a pasture and have to migrate each year or perish.
As the dry season begins in May, they will join huge herds of zebra to begin an incredible
migration across the Serengeti.
From Ngorogoro crater, the herds move into the long grass plains that dominate the southern
sector of the park.
The migration may last as long as three months as the herd eats its way north to the greener
pastures of Kenya.
On the way, they pass Olduvai Gorge, a deep gash in the earth whose importance to mankind
is truly profound.
The gorge is named for the Olduvai plant used today by Maasai villagers to make baskets
and other goods.
In 1959, below this very ridge, archaeologist Mary Leakey unearthed the remains of the earliest
ancestor of man, Homo erectus.
This discovery revolutionized our understanding of human development.
Roughly a million years ago, small hunting parties explored the endless plains.
The descendants of animals seen eons ago still haunt the Serengeti today.
A secretary bird survives on snakes, dispatching them with a powerful stamp of its foot.
The male kori bustard weighs 25 pounds and is the heaviest bird in Africa able to fly.
And last but not least is this ungainly creature.
The ostrich is the world's largest bird.
The powerful wings of the female come in handy during elaborate mating rituals.
Eons ago, the ostrich flew over the Serengeti, but over the millennia, food was so easy to
find it lost the need to fly.
During the dry season, as ostrich and the Thompson gazelle roam the plains, they are
observed from strange outcrops of stone called copes.
Granite islands in a sea of grass, copes were formed some 650 million years ago by molten
granite forced to the surface from the core of the planet.
Copes are key to the survival of resident animals and plants throughout Serengeti National
Park.
Puff adders and other deadly snakes stay cool in the rock crevices, along with a brilliantly
colored agama lizard.
The trees of the copes provide shade from the blistering sun.
And baboons search for insects in their branches.
Troops consist of between 30 and 100 individuals.
They can range in an area as large as three square miles, but venturing beyond the copes
has its risks.
Lions rule the park.
Thousands of these predators are distributed throughout the Serengeti.
During the dry season, breeding pairs of lions mate in the wooded areas north of the plains.
A lioness knows when her cubs are born four months later, there will be plenty of water
and food to go around.
Plant-eating animals, the natural prey of carnivores, are everywhere.
Cape buffalo measure five feet across at the shoulder and weigh up to 1,400 pounds.
These powerful creatures carry massive buffed horns that can easily kill a careless attacker.
Animals have even been known to take on giraffes.
This group moves gracefully through the northern quarter of the park, near a site called Lobo.
Giraffe feed exclusively on the tender leaves of the acacia tree.
Incredibly, their long necks contain only seven vertebrae.
But the most plentiful prey is already migrating towards the lions.
From the air, they look like thick columns of safari ants.
One point three million wildebeests and hundreds of thousands of zebra pass through the central
hills of the Serengeti, headed for Kenya.
Thirty miles north of Lobo, the migration crosses the Grimetti River.
The lions are ready.
A large female closes in on a herd of zebra.
Running in bursts of 30 miles an hour, she fulfills her maternal mission, to feed her
children.
As the migration passes a site called Kokatendi, near the Kenyan border, it's the wildebeests
that come under attack.
In spite of these hardships, the herd rolls northward, like a great and ceaseless wave
of life.
Soon, the wildebeests will stand before their final challenge.
The Mara River lies between the dry grass of the northern Serengeti and the richer pastures
of Kenya.
Giant herds numbering in the tens of thousands, all mass on the Mara's banks.
On the other side of the river, an ocean of green grass.
Ravenous crocodile lay in ambush everywhere.
The wildebeests can't wait forever, and so the dash begins.
For weeks, over a million wildebeests and countless zebras cross into Kenya.
Yet, in this greatest of all migrations, for every animal that falls, thousands will survive.
This is the enduring law of a wondrous, untamed land.
As the sun sets over this unconquered refuge, this wilderness of endless motion, the timeless
sounds of the Serengeti echo across the plains.