So went to Ngorogoro on Saturday (still all rather grubby after the Maasai night and getting grubbier by the moment with all the dust). It is one of the few places you can still see the black rhino and there are only 27 of them there. Unfortunately on Saturday they all decided to hide and despite the valiant efforts of our driver trying to tell us that a black speck was a rhino I cannot honestly say I saw one. However, I can say that I saw: hyenas, zebras, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants, hippos, flamingos, eagles, vultures, lions (including lions having sex – REALLY!), leopard, antelope, kudu, gazelle, baboons, monkeys (on Sunday), giraffe (on Sunday), pelicans (on Sunday).
It was just incredible.
In a rather blood-thirsty way we were rather hoping for a kill and obviously so were the hyenas who had become so desperate they were eyeing up a zebra on their own! But they failed so we had to make do with mating (see lions earlier), general lounging (in the next life I want to be a hippo), and grid-lock caused by wildebeest!
It really is impossible to convey the scale of safari and just how exciting everything is and because Tanzanian computers are crap I can’t upload photos but some of you lucky people will probably be bored rigid by them in the not too distant future.
On Sunday we went to Lake Manyara which is much smaller but the animals like elephants, giraffes and monkeys tend to be more accessible so the photos are great.
If you EVER get the chance to go on a safari then do. If you EVER get a chance to go with Art in Tanzania – avoid it at all cost.
I have been trying to upload my skydiving pic but it’s huge so you’ll have to wait until I can show it to you in person – or at least find a computer program to make it smaller.
So I’ve finally managed to wash off most of my safari dust (except of course for my feet!) so I thought I would TRY to blog about it but, to be honest, it’s just too big an experience to begin to write about here.
Unfortunately there were a few technical glitches with the organisation – there’s a surprise but despite these I had the most amazing weekend and will bore everyone stupid with my pictures (that small dot in the distance is a leopard honest!).
So Friday spent the night in a Maasai hut which was undescribable – mostly in “I really don’t want to be this dirty or uncomfortable” ways but also in a “I really never thought I would do this” way. Basically a Maasai boma is a mud hut with a fire in the middle (so it’s very warm) and a cow in the room next door. We had three to a bed, well I say bed more of a cow hide stretched across some sugar cane with just enough room for the rats to scamper beneath! At this point we didn’t know we would also be sharing our boma with some chickens and a host of bed bugs (luckily for me one of the boys manfuly took the brunt of the bed bugs in our boma so I only got a few bites).
As for the bathroom facilities well…as our driver said “you have a very large bathroom” waving his arm over all he surveyed. Oh yes, we were back to nature big time. Some people decided to try and cross their legs but a group of about eight of us armed with the toilet roll I’d brought (wouldn’t you just know I would take a toilet roll!) went off in search of a suitable spot. We then formed a human wall and sang loudly so people didn’t get stage fright whilst ‘performing’ as it were!
In fact toilet quality became quite an interesting adventure over the weekend with top marks going to Lake Manyara National Park and bottom marks going to the restaurant where we ate most of the time (yes, that was worying).
Unsurprisingly very few people got much sleep and we were all bright eyed, bushy tailed and desperate to get out of the Maasai village by sunrise. Interesting night time incidents had included the discovery of the notorious bed bugs (mostly in the other boma not ours – as I said we had a kind volunteer manfully taking them all on), a Maasai trying to break the door down to our hut (he’d obviously forgotten his toothbrush!), a cat jumping from the ceiling and landing in the middle of a bunch of (already) hysterical females and the cows relieving themselves every five minutes – not good when you are desperately trying to resist the urge yourself!
So off we went as soon after sunrise as we could – we virtually knocked our driver over when he returned in the morning in our desperate attempt to get in the car.
