Olduvai Gorge to Lake Manyara

After all the game drives in the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire National Park, our safari was coming to an end.  we stopped quickly at the Olduvai Gorge and heard a brief talk about the archaeological finds from the area.

On the way from the Olduvai Gorge to Lake Manyara we stopped at a place with a view of the Ngorongoro Crater.

Game Drive 2 Serengeti

 

A lion pack.  A leopard with a snack.

And some other animals for your viewing pleasure.

Lizard

Boar

baby monkey

snake

Game Drive in Serengeti

Up late (8:30).  We got in the truck for a game drive in the Serengeti National Park.  First we saw a big group of giraffes eating trees, far away from the road.  Over the day, we lots of many kinds of animals.  Hippos, lions, zebra, elephants, impala, baboons, gazelles.  One of the more notable things we saw that day was a zebra giving birth to a dead foal.  That, and the leopard jumping out of its tree to take a pee.

Ngorongoro Crater

Third day on safari, we all got up and had breakfast early. We were in the truck and descending into the crater by 7am. It was still foggy so we couldn’t see anything. The weather was nice, around 18 degrees C. The first animals we saw were two cheetahs casually laying around, with big bellies, leading Issa to guess they had just eaten. Now in retrospect and looking at the pictures, I believe one of them was pregnant.

Inside the crater and in our vehicle, we all had a cup of coffee to warm up.

And as magic, we began to see many other animals. I remember seeing 5 lionesses and a young lion. For a while, we waited around hoping we would see them hunt, but they did not.  We saw a rhino which is a rarity. We saw hyenas running alongside herds of zebras.

After driving around the crater for a few hours, we stopped at the hippo swamp to eat lunch. After lunch, we took off to the Serengeti.

Lion

Lion yawning

Cheetaj

Zebra

Ngorongoro Crater

Cheetah

Cheetah

Tarangire to Ngorongoro Crater

Our second day on safari we got up and went back into the Tarangire.  For me the elephants were the best.  We saw a baby elephant drinking its mother’s milk.  We saw a group of them “bathing.”  Bathing in elephant terms has nothing to do with getting clean.  It’s a matter of changing from the old protective layer of filth to a new protective layer of filth.  First they roll around in water, then scratch themselves on any available rock or log or tree, then roll around in the dirt and pick up dirt with their trunks and shower it on themselves like cologne.

After lunch we got on the road to the Ngorongoro Crater area where we would spend the night so that we would be there bright and early the next day.  Tarangire is near lake Manyari and at the edge of highlands which sit dramatically on the horizon.  On the drive to Ngorongoro we headed straight for the wall in the west with the sun in our faces.  I sat up front with Issa.  The sun was brutal.  But as we started to climb up into the highlands the temperature dropped.

When we got close to Ngorongoro and night was falling we saw a leopard in the road.  It was a lucky coincidence because they are known to be so shy.  We tried to stop and see it better but it was gone in an instant.  When we got to a point with a nice view of the crater after sunset we stopped to admire the view and take some photos.  We stayed in a place close by.  We had a good dinner and I went to sleep.  It was nice to sleep because it was cold.  T- stayed up and worked on organizing all the photos she took during the day.

Thinking about our trip

Its been too long that this blog about our trip is unfinished.  I think about it almost every day… A new less ambitious dream would be to finish writing about the experiences.

Safari – Tarangire

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On a fine Saturday morning we woke up and did the pack-up routine; eat breakfast, shower, pack, pay for the room, etc.  Issa, our driver guide, came to get us in the Land Rover.  We went to get the last of what we owed for the safari from the bank and then off we went.  I was so happy with the Land Rover.  It had a small refrigerator.  It had electrical plugs.  It had lots of space.  I can safely say we were all happy.  The ladies chatted away.  We got to the first park, Tarangire National Park, at about 12:30PM.

I wanted to go to Tarangire to see the massive Baobab trees.  They didn’t disappoint. They were truly enormous.  I learned and saw that many of the trees have dramatic scars where elephants have carved big chunks out of the trunks with their tusks.  The elephants do this to get water.  We saw lions, warthogs, birds, waterbucks, zebras, giraffes, baboon, vervet monkeys…

At the end of the day, just about sunset, we went to the Maramboi tented camp.  We had a nice dinner, talked with Issa about the next day, and then the Marias got on the internet.  Yes, there is WiFi available in a tented camp in the middle of Tanzania.  You shouldn’t picture this “tented” camp anything like the little safari tent we had in Bujigali Falls.

A “tent” at this camp was bigger than 90% of the places we’d stayed in on the trip, and luxurious.  The bed was picturesque with its mosquito net hanging from a wrought iron frame.  The whole tent was pitched on a wooden structure; a raised wooden floor with a deck outside and a staircase leading up.

We went to sleep content and were woken up in the middle of the night by what sounded like animals in the room.  I dreaded finding a warthog rooting around in our bags – what am I gonna do about that?  But T- insisted that we should find out what it was.  It turned out to be a herd of zebra who came to use the wooden frame of the “tent” as a scratching post.  T- got excited and took some photos.

The Plan

The first night we stayed in Arusha ended for me with an African Lounge singer doing “I can be your hero baby,” right outside our window just before I fell asleep. The highlight of the evening was seeing Maria’s face when her chicken soup arrived with an enormous chicken leg hanging out of the bowl.

The next morning we all got our bags and went over to take rooms at the Everest Inn. Then we went over the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) to check out Ajabu Adventures. Maria and Clarinha had hitched a ride from the airport the day before with a guide from Ajabu and thought we should arrange our safari with them. We had called them and gone to talk about itenerary.  So after we checked them out at TTB (they were on the recommended list) we called up and said it was a go.  We spent the rest of the day scrambling around town to get enough cash out of ATMs.  At some point our banks wouldn’t allow any more withdrawals so we would have to get the rest the next day, Saturday.  We had a some fun counting our millions (of Tanzanian Shillings).

We hung out the rest of the day at the Everest Inn using internet, watching Tv, basking in the love of Mommy.  The next morning we would start the Safari!

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Moshi to Arusha

We met a german couple just before we left from Moshi to Arusha.  They were really sweet and about 10 years younger than us.  They were traveling very low budget and having a good time.  The girl was going to stay in Tanzania to do some sort of work.  They’re the ones that told me how cheap it was to get a local sim card.  They also wanted to set us up with a couple of locals to take us on a tour.  They were kind and tried to persuade me off of my complaints about the incessant hovering of hustlers and beggars on the street.  They left on a bus for Dar Es Salaam a day before we left Moshi.

We took a taxi instead to Arusha. One of the guys at the Kilimanjaro Coffee Lounge set it up for us.  The journey was basically a straight line with a couple of turns at the start and finish.  There was some confusion when we arrived because we had no firm destination in Arusha and we didn’t have much luck explaining this to the driver.  We ended up close to the clock tower at the Everest Inn where we had lunch. It was a chinese restaurant with a few rooms and we considered staying there for the night.  We were really indecisive about taking a room there because we were waiting to hear from T’s mom, Maria. Maria and her long time friend Clarinha came to travel with us for a couple weeks and arrived that day.

Part of our weeks worth of doing nothing prior to this had to do with being tired out in general.  Part had to do with trying to put together a game plan for our time as a foursome.  T’s mom had traveled to Europe for a week of so before we all met up.  With our spotty access to the internet and the cost of making international phone calls, it was impossible for us to make a definite itenerary for our time together – an itenerary that we would all be happy with.  I had never met Clarinha before.

So we ended up just waiting, not doing much and being in a bad mood about it.  For instance we thought, “we could go for a hike around Kilimanjaro but what if they want to do that too?”  Looking back at our wish list of what we wanted to do on the Safari and knowing what we actually did on the Safari, I realize we should have done some of the active (e.g. hiking, canoeing) type things during that time before they arrived.

We waited the afternoon at the the Tanzania Tourist Board office and the Africafe Coffee House knowing that the flight of Maria and Clarinha would arrive around 15:00.  There were three foul mouthed well dressed buffoons in the Coffee House babbling on and on about “tree huggers.”

Small Expenses

I was looking back at our expenses for Moshi.  Two expenses I wanted to comment on: a local sim card and a bean bag.

The sim card was with the Tigo company.  It cost me 5,500 Tanzanian Shillings or 3.60 USD.  The only real difficulty I had getting it was walking down the street to get to the shop.  I was highly irritated by the near constant hounding of street peddlers and hustlers.  I got propositioned to buy pot and all kinds of useless little things.  But having a local telephone number really helped out.

T- wanted a bean bag to set her camera on while shooting photos during the safari – which we wouldn’t arrange until we got to Arusha.  So what we did was sacrifice the shirt I got when I had the cooking class at La Vecchia Scuola.  We asked at the Kilimanjaro Coffee Lounge where we could get someone to make a bag out of it.  She took over and talked to someone out on the street to sew it for us.  It costed 1,500 Tanzanian Shillings – less that a dollar – and it had a zipper.  The idea of the bag was that T- could set her camera down on odd surfaces – like the roof of a Land Rover – and make the camera level and steady to take photos.  Later we bought some beans from a roadside vendor and filled it up.  When we were done with it we left it behind in a hotel room.