This will be a pretty long post as I'll try to cover all of our safari fun all at once. However, a visit to Nathan's blog to read the entire list of what we saw and a hilarious list of "Lessons Learned" is also encouraged:
Africa: Lists & Lessons.
The day after finishing our Kilimanjaro Climb, Nathan and I left for a safari. We visited four parks: Lake Manyara, Tarangire, Ngorongoro Crater, and the famous, Serengeti. We saw a MASSIVE amount of animals. It isn’t like our National Parks where you stay for a week and might be lucky enough to see only one grizzly bear. No, animals were everywhere and the beauty of seeing the parks with a guide was that you had someone trained in spotting the animals right next to you the entire time! Each night we would stay at either a lodge or a “tented camp” which consists of permanent tents with some kind of permanent roof over them and beds/plumbing inside. It’s kind of like a hotel room with canvas walls. All of our food was included, so we would eat breakfast at the hotel, have a box lunch in the park, and eat a really nice dinner prepared by a chef in the evening. The whole experience was very good, so if anyone needs the name of a good tour company/driver, let me know!
September 29: Lake Manyara Lake Manyara is a bit different from the other parks in that it is covered mostly by forest. We saw a lot of birds and a lot of forest animals all day. The highlight of this park is its hippo pool, which is always inhabited by hippos with a backdrop of wildebeest, zebra, and lots of different birds.
Just like every other park, you’ll see lots of giraffe & zebras, but the elephants here seem to be very, very friendly – so you see plenty of them right next to your car.
The other major highlight of Lake Manyara was seeing our first Bush Hyraxes, but we also saw dikdiks (tiny deer-like animals), baboons, blue monkeys, black-faced vervet monkeys, impalas, bushbacks, warthogs, flamingos, and dwarf mongoose.
September 30: Olduvai (Oldupai) Gorge & Serengeti We started our second day with a jolt. We drove on a road that directly rivals the one my team took from Dodoma to Arusha, around the Ngorongoro Crater rim and on to Olduvai Gorge. The road was so bad that I started feeling like I was in the next motion ride at Six Flags Great America: “The Road to Serengeti”. Our driver was speeding along, jumping over bumps like they were nothing, swerving back and forth to avoid the worst potholes and sometimes other vehicles and animals. I have to say, it was actually pretty fun.
Olduvai Gorge is famous for its ancient human skeletons. Found in this gorge were Homo Habilis (“Handy Man”) who was around 1.75 million years old and Homo Erectus (1.5 million years old) – both our ancestors. In a nearby site called Laetoli, the famous footsteps formed by a 3.6 million-year-old Australopithecus Afarensis stepping in fresh ash were found by Mary Leakey. This one was important because it is the oldest evidence of a bipedal creature with big toe and foot arch just like ours. I had wanted to see those footsteps, but in the late 90’s they covered them back up to preserve them, which I guess was a good idea. I always find it interesting when I’m in these kinds of places to try to imagine what it was like back then. Nathan made a good observation one day when we were sitting around on a particularly hot day. “How could you not think humans evolved here? It’s always the perfect temperature in the shade!” He’s right. The weather here in the “cradle of mankind” is always nice.
After Olduvai Gorge (or Oldupai as it should really be called as it is named after the Oldupai plant), we took another “fun” road to the gate of Serengeti National Park.
Through the gate we were immediately thrust into the vast plain that gave Serengeti its name. Serengeti comes from the Masaai word “Siringet”, which means endless plain. There were tons of Grant’s and Thompson’s Gazelles and giant birds called Secretary Birds running around as well as a Hartebeast or two.
We spent an hour at the main check-in center to get all of our permits in order, and then we were off! What a first day it was! We saw many Kopjes, small areas of rocks left over from ancient mountains that dot the prairie.
We got our first look at a lioness with some older cubs and then found two lionesses eating a warthog just a little ways up the road. It was interesting to listen to them eating – both were purring away, just like house cats!
Then, we came across a kopje with a bunch of other cars looking at something. Our guide, Dennis, told us that we were about to see something special and when we pulled up we saw…..nothing. Supposedly there were two leopard cubs hidden in the grasses, but we learned that when a mother wants to hide her cubs, she does a really good job of it!
Suddenly, Dennis started tearing off after talking to another driver in Swahili. We were lucky to be in a LandRover because he veared off the road and joined a group of drivers chasing something. We didn’t see anything special, but we did pass a giraffe and some more gazelles on the way. Finally we stopped in front of a tree. On the branch was a beautiful leopard. I didn’t know it at the time and I still don’t believe it given the luck we had in finding leopards, but they are supposedly the hardest cats to find. We were lucky to see one on the first day.
While we were in the Serengeti, we stayed at Ngome Tented Camp, which was Swala Safari’s new camp near Robanda Village. I have to say that it took a while for me to get used to this camp. The tent was nice, and in front of it we got to wake up to hundreds of wildebeests migrating down from Masaai Mara in Kenya. Their morning concerts of seemingly orchestrated gnuing was something that you really couldn’t beat! However, the bathrooms, which were located outside the tented area had giant holes where all kinds of things could get in. The first night I went in there to wash my face, I was met with an 8-inch in diameter spider (from leg tip to leg tip) on the mirror. Only today, did I find out that Nathan was actually scared of the thing too, as he'd noticed its proportionally large fangs in the mirror that first night! Another day we found a 6-inch giant millipede. It was all part of the experience, yes, but it took me a LONG time to get used to the spider, whom we later named Frederick and grew quite fond of.
October 1: Serengeti Day 2 in the Serengeti was quite good. We stayed in the Seronera Section, which means “permanent waters”. We saw our first four cheetahs today, a lion about 10 feet from the vehicle, and a giant Nile Crocodile.
These, of course, were just the highlights. We also saw four black-backed jackals, thousands of wildebeests, hundreds of zebra, giraffes, a giant heron, hippos, other lions, another leopard in a tree farther away, taupe, impala, one buffalo, gazelles, an eland, and half a zebra carcass being ripped apart by a vulture.
Live Zebra 
Dead Zebra In the evening, we were treated to one of the largest thunderstorms of our lives. We were in a tent with a thatched roof only, listening to a downpour that lasted about three hours. The camp crew served us dinner in our tent, which was nice, but there were two horribly loud, simultaneous thunder cracks and lightening strikes. I was pretty sure the large wooden structure they were building had gotten hit by lightening since the storm was right overhead. It blew over 10 of the 12 tents in a neighboring campsite, but we were lucky and ours stayed intact.
October 2: Serengeti & Walking Safari Originally, we were suppose to do a walking tour in a place called Olmoti Crater on October 3rd. However, our guide suggested that would be too much driving for one day so we opted to do a short drive today and then a walking safari around camp instead. On the drive, we saw the usual suspects. We also stopped at the visitor’s center and got to see a video of four cheetahs eating a rabbit that wasn’t even dead yet and wildebeests having their babies. It was gross. The good part, was that we got to see some cute little rock hyraxes about a foot away from us. This one posed and smiled:
Our two-hour walking safari was pretty fun! You won’t believe this, but we needed protection, so a local warrior walked with us ready to shoot anything that threatened us...with his bow and arrow. Yes, our protection was this guy – I only regret not getting a better picture of him:
We also had a guide with us and we saw a lot of neat things. My favorite were the two leopard tortoises we found.
We also saw a bat-eared fox, actual bats, baboons, plenty of wildebeest, and a dung beetle with his ball of dung. They are quite large in real life:
October 3: Serengeti to Ngorongoro Crater Rim Instead of walking in Olmoti, we decided to have another leisurely day in Serengeti National Park. This is the day we had my favorite siting. We stopped at the Serengeti’s version of the Hippo Pool, which was really neat. Here, we got to get out of our cars and come within feet of one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. Luckily most of the hippos were preoccupied with sleeping in the pool and they weren’t very close. A few feet downriver was another giant croc.
We then proceeded to drive out of the park, but not until we had another “off-road” episode. This time, our driver suddenly veered off towards a termite mound. He stopped only feet away from a cheetah looking for lunch. No, we didn’t see it kill anything – that I’ll still need to watch the National Geographic Channel for. However, she did sit there for about 30 minutes, we got to watch her very closely and got some amazing pictures along the way:
Here are some other miscellaneous pictures that we took while in the Serengeti:
Gazelles
Wildebeest Migration
Giraffes
Vetter Monkey Family
Serengeti LandscapeWe got to stay in the Ngorongoro Crater Sopa Lodge tonight. I think it was my favorite place to stay. After sleeping in terror that I would wake up with a giant spider on my face for three nights, this luxury lodge was a nice surprise. I honestly didn’t think we paid enough to deserve to stay there, but I’m glad Swala booked us there!! Our room had a view of Nogorongoro Crater and this was the first place we slept without bed nets – the lodge was high enough so that it was too cold for mosquitoes.
October 4: Ngorongoro Crater & Nathan’s B-Day The Ngorongoro Crater was my favorite park of all we visited. First of all, the view of the crater from the top and during the decent into the crater is amazing.
Secondly, this was the only place we got to see two things I really wanted to see: Grey-Crowned Cranes & Black Rhinocerous.
Even though we only saw Rhinos from a distance, we were incredibly lucky to see them at all. There are so few left in the wild that many people never get to see any. We saw five, including a mom and baby. Grey-crowned cranes were everywhere and it was really nice to see them outside of the cages of the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, where we first discovered the bird.
Ngorongoro also had an incredibly beautiful hippo pool with drainage and wind, which made it smell much better than the other hippo pools we saw. It also had an abundance of birds that kept Nathan and our guide busy for a long time.
At lunch, something surprising and hilarious happened. We stopped at a pretty lake with a tree and several Kites (hawk-like birds) flying around. It was very picturesque and we wanted to eat lunch outside, despite our driver warning us that the birds would try to steal our lunches. He told us, “Ok, sit by the car and make sure you keep your lunch boxes closed.” Nathan wasn’t listening. We had a great BLT sandwich for lunch that day and that’s the first thing he pulled out and started eating. A minute later, Dennis told Nathan in a motherly, nagging fashion, “Nathan, be careful of how you hold that sandwich….” And not two seconds later did a silent bird swoop over his shoulder, flick his hand, and we both watched as Nathan’s sandwich exploded into a fountain of one hundred tiny pieces on the ground. Two more seconds later, and there was no trace of any sandwich at all. The birds were that good!
I had screetched, Nathan just sat there with the funniest look of shock on his face, and I just picked up my box and headed toward the car. I really wished someone had gotten that on tape. It was a moment that will go down in safari history. Of course, it stinks that Nathan lost his sandwich on his birthday to one of his beloved birds...but I thought it was pretty hilarious.
That night, we stayed at a place called the Bougainvillea in the city of Karatu. It was a very night place where we got a cute bungalow and a very nice service staff. Since it was Nathan’s birthday, I had already arranged with the staff to have a cake made for him. What I wasn’t ready for, was the pomp and circumstance with which it arrived. At the end of dinner, a congo line of staff members emerged from the kitchen singing the “Jambo Jambo song”.
They walked all the way around the room and then sang Happy Birthday to him in English. The rest of the guests were getting into it and suddenly the table across the room broke out in Happy Birthday too – in Hebrew! When they were done, the other table of guests sang it in French, and the staff finished in Swahili. It was a pretty amazing spectacle and the cake was great too!
October 5: Tarangire This was our last official day of our safari. We were both pretty dead tired by this point and the tse-tse flies are abundant here, so I started off the day not incredibly excited to be in the car again. However, we had a good time, seeing plenty of elephants, a dikdik, giraffes, mongoose, impalas, giant baobab trees, waterbucks, ostriches, zebra, wildebeests, and a baboons stealing someone else's lunch.
Dikdik
Impala
Zebra
Elephants at the Watering HoleOctober 6-8: Arusha – Zanzibar Our safari was officially over, and just as I expected we were exhausted. Luckily, I had foreseen this and scheduled two days on the island of Zanzibar, where we could enjoy the beautiful beaches of the Indian Ocean.
We stayed in a hotel called Arabian Nights on the East Coast beach of Paje. We weren’t there very long, so the first full day we were there, we did a really good job of just lounging on the beach, swimming, and doing some more lounging.
Day two, Nathan wanted to lounge some more and I wanted to snorkel, so I joined a group going to a reef a little ways down the coast. We hopped in a boat and sailed for about twenty minutes to the reef. I really wished I’d brought my camera for the boat ride, but the water the whole way, was this beautiful turquoise color. The reef was great. There were tons of starfish and angel fish. I also saw a puffer fish and two lobsters along with a plethora of unidentified fish and coral. I feel slightly bad that we never made it to Stone Town (not my fault, Nathan protested and didn’t want to carry his bag around) or see any Spice Farms, but in the end it turns out I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything. By the end of our trip to Zanzibar, I was more than ready to come home!
Live Zebra
Dead Zebra
Gazelles
Wildebeest Migration
Giraffes
Vetter Monkey Family
Serengeti Landscape
Dikdik
Impala
Zebra
Elephants at the Watering Hole
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