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Published: August 23rd 2010
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Stone Town.
Getting lost in the alley ways of Stone Town. Again, we had two more early mornings driving with "African massage" to Dar es Salaam - Tanzania. At Dar we spent the night then took a ferry over to the island of Zanzibar. The ferry arrived at Stone Town, the capital of Zanzibar. Zanzibar was once a separate state with a long trading history with the Arab world and thus has a large Islamic population. It also has a large indican influence as the island is referred to as the "Spice Island". We spent the day walking around the old town getting lost in many of the little alley ways. That night we had dinner at a place called Africa Club which is a popular spot to watch the sun go down and enjoy a "sundowner".
The next day we were transferred to north of the island for 2 relaxing days on the beach. The weather was perfect and the Indian ocean did not disappoint with post card perfect clear blue water. Unfortunately I had an incident with a sea irchin. I went for a swim and as I was walking into the ocean stepped on a sea irchin which is a spikey type sea animal that lives on the
Zanzibar
View from our hotel - Aaman Bungalows. bottom of the sea close to shore. The spikes protruded into my foot and injected some type of poison and it hurt ...allot just as bad as a bee sting. A local remedy for this is papaya juice and a local was kind enough to squeeze papaya juice onto my foot which actually did relieve the pain and swelling.
Albeit, we were all sad to be leaving the beautiful Zanzibar and could have easily stayed a week however we were all looking forward to the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater where we will be going on a 3 day game drive.
We again arrived back at Dar by ferry and we were met by our tour guide (Cassidy) who told us he had some sad news. Our driver (Bernie) had been in an accident. He was crossing the road in Dar and was hit by a car and was knocked unconscious and had broken his arm and obviously could not contiue driving Freddy. He was out of hospital but he had been flown to Harare for medical care. An emergency Nomad tour guide had been flown from Capetown to drive Freddy. At this point we believed our tour
Zanzibar
The beautiful cristal clear waters of the Indian Ocean. was cursed....first Freddy getting bogged and now an accident. We spent the night in Dar and then the next two days were long 10 hour drives to Arusha where we spent the night prior to the Serengeti. On the way we passed Mt Killimanjaro or as the locals call it "Killi". Unfortunately it was cloudy so we only saw part of the mountain. The locals even have a beer named after the famous mountain.
The next day we were picked up by open top safari landcruisers to take us on our 3 day / 2 ngiht safari to the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. We spent one night in the Serengeti and one night on the Ngorongoro Crater. It took us 7 hours to get to there. The Serengeti hosts the largest and longest overland migration in the world which is a semi-annual occurance. The migration across the Mara river to the Masai Mara reserve in upper Kenya had aleady occured and starts in April and then in October the migration is made back south to the Serengeti. During our game drives we saw herds of Wildebeests, gazelles, zebras, buffalos and elephants. In the Serengeti we camped in the
national park and heard all kinds of animal sounds. We were told we could not have any food at all inside our tent as the animals will come towards the food...not even tooth paste though we did leave tooth paste in our tent one night by mistake and we live to tell the tale.
We were very lucky to see a Cheetah on our game drive into the Serengeti. The Cheetah was sitting under a tree and we were very close. Also we did see allot of lions. We were lucky enough to watch a lioness stalking then chasing down an impala. She was close but not quick enough. We spent over an hour watching her and it was awesome to watch. Hard to put into the words how exciting it is.
We spent one more night in Arusha and then the following day we made our way to Nairobi - the end of our tour. It was a long and bumpy drive. We arrived in Nairobi late afternoon and had time to relax and get ready for our final night of the tour. Our tour guide (Cassidy) arranged for all of us to go out for our
Lioness
A Lioness stalks impala. final dinner together to a local Chinese restaurant. We were a bit disappointed about his choice of restaurant however we wanted to go and say goodbye to our tour group we spent the last 3 weeks with getting to know. It was a great night and sad to say goodbye to some people.
The next day unfortunately (bad things always come in threes) Tracey and I came down with a very bad case of food poisoning. We met up with some our tour group the next day and they too were feeling the effects of bad Chinese. It was a fitting end to our tour...
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