This weekend, I spent two nights on safari. For anyone who thinks it's expensive, a safari is as expensive and luxurious as you want it to be. For me however, with camping and preparing my own food (consisting of peanut butter sandwiches, apples, carrots, peanuts, and other small staples), the two nights cost US$292 for driver/guide + tip, camping, and park fees, + 15,000 TZS for food and water.
Everything came together very suddenly on Friday when someone called Phil to respond to a sign I placed at The Coffee Shop. I met up with the group at 4pm to understand the detailed logistics, headed back to KCMC and had a half hour to pack before I needed to head back downtown to catch a bus to Arusha. That night I stayed at a place locally called the Danish Centre, although it has a longer, more official name. The room cost a hefty $48, but included dinner and breakfast buffets. We departed from the centre at about 7:30 am and made our way to N'gorongoro Crater with a brief stop in Arusha for me to buy food.
Saturday was spent mostly in the crater, but we did stop for a moment along the way to get a view of Lake Manyara, home to a huge flamingo population. We were a bit far away to be able to actually see the flamingos, but I'm sure they were there. We saw quite a variety of animals in the crater including elephant, gazelles, zebras, hippos, etc., but the highlight was probably seeing some lions laying in the road, relaxing in the shade of a Toyota Land Cruiser. At some point, the Land Cruiser took off and one of the lions moved over into the shade of our vehicle.
Sunday morning, we discovered that a recently dead elephant was being eaten by spotted hyena a few hundred meters from our campsite. I'll post the photo. I thought I had taken some video of this also, but apparently did not. (I'm up to about 5.5 GB of photos and videos from this trip by the way. 7.1 megapixel images take up a lot of space!) Along the drive to the Serengeti, we stopped at Oldupai Gorge, the site of some early homanid tracks and a significant amount of other items that are relevant to human evolution. The Serengeti is an amazing expanse. The amount of space is really breathtaking, not to mention the variety of wildlife. We saw many of the same animals as in the crater, but in much larger numbers. At one point, we were surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of zebras. As we drove toward our camp that night, we found a sizable herd of wildebeest (this was not the migration though- those millions of wildebeest are already near the Tanzania-Kenya border, too far for us to go given our time constraints).
Monday, we got up at 5:00 am to make the 7 hour drive back to Arusha. I'll try to post a Google map of our route at some point if I can figure out how to make Blogger like Google maps. We were the first to re-enter the park when it opened at 6:00 am and saw a little more activity at that hour as we drove through, although we didn't see as many animals. The route back to Arusha also took us along the rim of the crater. I got back to Moshi at about 3:30 pm and took a much needed shower!
We also watched the USA/Czech Republic World Cup game last night. The USA didn't look very good at all.
Update on the electricity: we have power but it has been spotty and the voltage has been generally lower than it should be. Usually at 7:00 am, the power goes out completely for an hour or two.
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