A safari is an overland journey. It usually refers to a trip by non-Africans to Africa, traditionally for a big-game hunt and in more modern times to watch and photograph big game and other wildlife. Entering the English language in the late 19th century, the word safari means ‘journey’ or ‘to travel’ in Kiswahili — the Swahili language. The word is originally from the Arabic safar meaning ‘journey’.

Today, we understand safari as a trip into any exotic area to see and photograph wild animals in their own environment. There are safaris even to the Arctic, the Amazon, Micronesia, and maybe soon to the outer space.

Our safari will visit the inner space - the life in water at small scales. I will report what one can see and experience there. The animals are wild — but tiny!

Our excursion goes into a territory unknown to most of us, into a space where no-one has gone before, a space which is exotic and strange to the human experience. We will experience the ‘dense bush’ of biology, mathematics, fluid mechanics, and natural history. What we will find is the environment where small animals live, behave, interact. Where they search and find food and mates while avoiding predators. This space exists in every water body, in ponds, in lakes, and in the oceans. It is the space where plankton lives – cyanobacteria, algae, rotifers, micro-crustaceans, jelly fish, and many other creatures small enough to belong there.

Because our target space is so small, a few centimeters in every direction, we can only go there with our brains not with our bodies. We will have to conduct thought experiments, observe through lenses very carefully and in great details, and use the sciences to understand what goes on, how the parts of this environment survive, how they get along with each other, and how they contribute to the well-being of their larger ecosystems - the ponds, lakes and oceans.