Safari in Tanzania

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We flew from Kigali to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania with another couple and were picked up by our guide. He drove us to Gibbs Farm where we had an entire guesthouse to ourselves with gourmet meals. We had our first encounter with wildlife when there was a giant spider in the bathroom. Jenn killed it by throwing a mini soap in a direct hit. In the morning, we hiked into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where we saw baboons, elephant caves (where elephants use their tusks to dig into the mountainside in search of minerals), hyena scat, and a waterfall.

We continued driving into the bottom of Ngorongoro Crater where we saw zebras, elephants, rhinos, lions, ostrich, wildebeest, baboons, DLAs (deer like animals), jackals, hippos, and crested cranes. We saw a confused baby wildebeest chasing an ostrich for over a mile. When we were watching a rhino, the safari car in front of us drove too close, and the rhino charged the car, stopping mere feet from contact. That night we stayed on the rim of the crater and watched a beautiful sunset. After dinner, a hotel staff walked us back to our room. Jenn commented that he didn’t do a very good job lighting the sidewalk with his flashlight, and Alex commented, “He was looking for leopards in the trees.”

After a few more hours in the car the next morning, we arrived at the Serengeti. Within ten minutes of entering the park, we encountered two juvenile male lions sitting on the side of the road. Next, we pulled up to a lion pride with a lioness perched on top of a giant boulder while the rest of the lions lounged in the shade. A herd of elephants (upwind of the lions) walked by us on parade. The lions must have been full as they made no effort to attack the baby elephant.

As we drove further into the park, we saw thousands of zebra and wildebeest migrating from the Masai Mara. One wildebeest was walking around with little legs sticking out the back of her, so we stayed for the birth and got to watch the baby take its first steps. Our guide got a radio call that there was a leopard nearby, so we raced to see it, along with 18 other safari vehicles. Then, on the way to our hotel for the night, our guide spotted another leopard in a tree. We also saw a hippo out of water which is rare. Our hotel was inside the park and didn’t have a fence, so lions, elephants, and anything else could wander the grounds.

The next morning, as we were driving out of the park, Alex spotted something sitting on a dirt hill. Upon closer observation, we found five cheetahs who were very hungry and active. We watched them drink water, run from hilltop to hilltop in search of prey. One particularly active cheetah climbed up the spare tire of our safari car and almost came inside through the open roof. All of a sudden two cheetahs were running toward us with three cheetahs running away from us, to intercept a reedbuck DLA. The reedbuck ran directly in between the three cheetahs and blindly leaped over the tope of one of the dirt hills, narrowly escaping the cheetah on its hooves. After the failed hunt, the cheetahs spotted and briefly stalked a full grown Tope, a DLA that’s normally not hunted due to its size. We wished we could have stayed to see their eventual lunch, but had to leave for Lake Manyara.

The lake was more of a rainforest than savannah, so we saw monkeys, baboons, hippos, and birds. On our drive to the airport, we stopped at the Snake Park, where we saw snakes of the region (behind glass) like the black mamba and the spitting cobra. We took a short trip through the Masai museum depicting traditional life, including both male and female circumcision. At the airport, we were waiting for our flight when we realized the camera was left behind in the safari car. Luckily, we contacted our guide who raced back to the airport, and we were some of the last to board to Zanzibar.

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