Ngorogoro Crater & Lake Manyara National Park

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Ok, so I'm cheating a little bit. We didn't have internet access so I haven't posted anything since the end of July but I wanted to update everyone on the rest of our trip. The summary would be WAY too long if I tried to do it in one update so I'm going to do a few in order of where we traveled. Yes I know I'm not in Africa anymore but I'm going to put the dates from when these events occurred so I don't mess up the timeline too much!

--Since our plans didn't pan out with the Arusha SPCA we opted to take a final safari (we'd already seen what little there is of Arusha and couldn't handle even one more day of the crazy touts that are everywhere in town!). We headed off bright and early in the morning to Ngorogoro (6am to be precise) which was about 2 hours from Masai camp. As we descended into the crater it was quite cloudy and we were getting a bit worried about our prospect of seeing wildlife until we got under the cloud cover and suddenly it was sunny. The crater was absolutely beautiful with lots of wildlife. It was funny because we came out feeling a bit disappointed that we didn't see a Cheetah or Rhino up close but I think we've just been so spoiled with our other adventures and forgot that we were lucky to see them at all! After an evening at a little lodge outside of Manyara we headed to Lake Manyara the next morning. Of all the parks we visited I think that Lake Manyara was my favourite. It was absolutely beautiful with pockets of tropical rainforest-like areas surrounding brooks and other areas with savannah and woodlands. No predators again but we saw tons of baboons and elephants and giraffes. At one point we were sitting in the safari 4x4 and walking up behind us was 2 giraffes, to our left was a few elephants and to the front was a bunch of baboons- definitely made it hard to forget we were in Africa!

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