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Published: December 3rd 2007
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Nairobi - 25th November: Met the new team (Bernard - trip leader, Vijay - driver and Wilson - cook; same truck though! - and don‘t ever get caught calling it a bus!). Also some new travelling companions (yet more Aussies and Kiwi’s).
Apparently, Maasai Mara (got the spelling right this time) means land of spots - because it has lots of trees dotted around. Serengeti means lands of the open plains and Nairobi means cold.
Also learned Asante sana (thank you very much), habari or mambo (how are you), nzuri or poa (good or well), karibu (welcome),kwaheri (goodbye), and hakuna matata (no worries!). Will have mastered them just in time to move into non Swahili speaking areas!!
Longish journey to Arusha in Tanzania and increasingly hot as we move south. Tanzania is a beautiful country. More lush and tropical once away from the Serengeti/Mara areas. The predominant colour for clothes and robes is purple and more people wearing traditional African dress. Here Maasai houses are different too from the Maasai Mara; round with thatched roofs and made with wooden frames infilled with stones and mud. Some are decorated externally with shiny pieces; haven’t yet found out why, could be
just decorative??
Greater use of cattle to pull carts etc (mainly donkeys that we saw in Kenya) in rural areas. Roadside towns/villages remind us of India; tend to be linear, with lots of stalls and shacks selling everything - general stores, eating houses, butchers (usually next to a mechanics yard!), and lots of fresh fruit & veg along the roadside. Saw red bananas!!
Passed Mount Kilimanjaro but couldn’t see the top for cloud cover.
Arrived at the Snake Park campsite in the dark and had a lesson from Bernard on setting up the tent. Great fun to try with a head torch as the only light!
The safari is in 4WD vehicles and our driver (and the trip leader) is Beerman; great guy - great smile and laugh and a brilliant animal tracker/spotter. The others in our jeep are Simon and Katrina from Queensland (Katrina is from the biggest city in the world - Mount Isa. No, we’d never heard of it either!), Helen from NZ (North Island), and Ruth from Birmingham - the only other Brit on the trip!. All good for a laugh.
Once in the Serengeti NP the roads are extremely bumpy and
rough but Beerman steers a great course and misses all the animals that are intent on walking out in front of us!! Had lunch being dive bombed by a hungry kite! It managed to take one woman’s chicken piece out of her hand when she wasn’t looking!
Loads of gazelles and some zebra and wildebeest. And then suddenly everything! Just as we think we can’t see better, we do, and all really close. Elephants and lions (including one male poser that was definitely planted! He looked beautiful - well fed and sat, moved, yawned and preened to order!) , giraffes, hippo’s, warthogs (love ‘em) and suddenly a cheetah stalking gazelle. We couldn’t see it for ages but Beerman had spotted it (all the while driving perfectly!)
More elephants - a whole family including two little ones and two (males) trying to hump each other (they obviously practice early)! ( Catchphrase “sex in the Serengeti!” courtesy of Simon who also coined the “quicky in the crater!” when we saw a female and male lion mating in Ngorongoro!), and a lion cub on a fallen tree - quite cute.
And finally as dusk fell, a leopard in a tree.
Really hard to see him - thank the lord for binoculars. So very lucky to see him.
Bush camp that night was interesting! Signs warning you not to go outside the camp in case of attack by wild animals. Drank very little: no way we were going to get up in the night!!! In the morning there were zebra prints about the place and we heard a lion roar over breakfast!
Next day we had an early game drive in SNP which was a real disappointment after the day before; still saw lots but nothing new. Until Beerman spotted the leopard again! Two of them - male and female - on some rocks. Absolutely fantastic! Beautiful powerful creatures and they came pretty close. As all the other trucks arrived it started to resemble the M25 on a Monday morning!!
I’m not sure what the Leopard world equivalent is to playing hard to get but the female was clearly a tart! Preening and looking for the male - but every time he came near she’d send him away with a proverbial thick ear. (Takes one to spot one says Michael! Is he in trouble!!!)
After lunch we headed
across to the Ngorongoro Crater - beautiful with a lake in the middle and a completely different terrain; lots of green and quite lush.
Camp that night was fun! Having been warned not to keep any food in the tents in case animals came and sniffed it out, we woke to a woman screaming at 3 in the morning! A bush pig (huge apparently) had ripped open her tent and was in her bag. Hey ho!!
Drive down (610m) into the Crater next day (6-45 am start) and once more the wonder starts. Such an amazing array of animals and all so close! Almost like they were programmed, all the zebra and wildebeest started moving towards the water at about 7-15am - lines and lines of animals heading for water; really surprised no predators seemed to take advantage. And despite not going to Lake Nakuru we got to see swathes of pink flamingos; including mass take offs. Surprising how much noise they make en masse - a real rumble that you only notice as you move away.
The only one of the big 5 we hadn’t seen was the rhino and we were confident Beerman would find one.
And he did! Hidden in the grass so very hard to see and very slow to come out into the open. In fact he only came out when we moved so Katrina could have a comfort break; poor girl had to run back into the jeep doing up her trousers so we didn’t miss it!!
Great rainstorm as we were headed back to camp after seeing some more hippos & a beautiful tusker - really dark skies you could see moving through the crater. Got back to camp just in time to put the tent down before the rain really hit.
Back at Snake Park, had a great BBQ (except for the bug in C’s coleslaw) - and the bar run by a middle aged very friendly South African couple, did fantastic fried peanuts; really simple but v. tasty. Went down a treat with a couple of cold beers.
Next day we’re off for more long journeys as we head across Tanzania for Zanzibar, stopping on the way at Pangani and Dar es Salaam. Also stopped at the cultural centre in Arusha - some great paintings, ebony and rosewood carvings and jewellery; could spend a fortune but
it won’t fit in the backpack.
Pangani was beautiful - on the banks of the river and with hills/mountains as a backdrop. Very tropical and humid but the grassy campsite was just like sleeping on a mattress. Trip to Dar was long but made more interesting with a card competition (500’s) - never played before and we lost spectacularly!
A couple of the guys very sick so really rough for them to be travelling so much. Our campsite was by the sea on a peninsula so we caught a ferry to get there - two hours queuing!! Dark when we got there but some of the gang still went for a swim. Woke in the night to water pouring into the tent - short and sharp rainstorm! M leaping around in the buff closing the tent flaps!!!! Just what we needed before a 4-30 am start to Zanzibar….
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joan
non-member comment
I'm soooo jealous
Hi, I've been where you are and where you're going. Yes I am jealous. You will love every minute. Cape Town is georgous. You can rent a car and spend the day in the wine country. and drive to cape Point as well. A GREAT resteraunt in Capetown is "The Africa Cafe" 108 Shortmarket Street. Tel 27214220221 www.africacafe.co.za Hopefully it is still open. knowing how "we" love food :) you'd really enjoy it. If you scuba dive the aquarium let you dive in their tank!!!! Love reading your story and looking forward to the next instalment. Love, Joan