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During the night I was woken up by gunshots - a typical Muir holiday, I assumed they were coming from the armed guards that were patrolling the camp, just in case I got my pen knife out - Rambo style:-)
I wasn't sure whether it was a dream from my time in 'Nam so I slowly unzipped the tent and peered out, 3 metres in front of me was the biggest Goddam elephant I had seen in my life and behind him were another two. They were feeding from the branches of three and the shots were meant to scare them away, but that had failed misreably. Unforutnately for me my tent was the one nearest the tree and as it was pitch black I was worried that Dumbo would accidentally tread all over me. Plus I couldn't make a quick getaway as I was cocooned in a sleeping bag. I would have looked like a caterpillar trying to crawl away.
At thios point I looked round to see if anybody else was witnessing this midnight snack, but all I could hear was snoring!!
Soon after the elephants had had their fill and the big one passed within
a metre of my tent, so I then went back to sleep or so I thought. A couple of miniutes later I heard this lous sniffing in the distance and it gardually got closer and closer and then all of a sudden the tent started shaking, then I heard my beer cans being opened (I had left a couple of cans outside the tent to cool and forgot about them) - shaking the tent was one thing but drinking my beer quite another so I opened the tent again to see 6 warthogs running away with my cans!!
Then afer that I heard another animal munching at the grass, by this point I had had enough excitement and went back to sleep, I had later that is was a buffalo.
It was very cold at night in the campsite - around 5 degrees C so you need to wrap up.
The next day we went down into the crater which had a lot to live up to after the Serengeti, we didn't see that many animals, however we saw some flamingoes and 3 Rhino's 2 adults and a baby - woohoo. This meand that I have seen
The safari team
L to R
John, Renee, Me, Andrew, Andreas, Coti the big 5.
After Ngorongoro we headed back to Arusha, arriving at 19:00 where I checked back into Arusha Backpackers for another 2 nights.
Boring bits I wanted to travel from Arusha to Kigali and there were 2 torturous land routes available - south of Lake Victoria via Mwanza on truly terrible roads or north of lake victoria via Nairobi and Kampala. Both these journeys would take between 3-4 days depending on bus timings and breakdowns. So I decided to get a flight with Rwanda Air Express for $275 plus $40 for the taxi ride there - ouch.
I met up with a New Zealand chum who was doing the southern route and he sent me this E-mail:
The bus ride yesterday was one of the worst I have ever been on... took 15 hours, so we did'nt get in until 9:30pm last night. The road was so bad that it broke the bus's rear shocks; an entire back row of seats broke loose from floor and I saw a man thrown over 1 metre out of his chair (he would have gone higher but the roof stopped him). The bus driver could only be described
as a ****.. hitting huge potholes at around 100kmph! I am taking a day to recover in Mwanza before I continue with stage 2 of the journey...
I also met another traveller who had made the joureny and he said he needed a day in Mwanza to recover!!
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