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Published: July 25th 2009
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June 28
Ngorongoro Crater & The Serengeti
I am woken up by the alarm at 5:00 am, have a quick breakfast at 5:30 and leave our campsite by 6:00. We are off to two game parks: The Ngorongoro Crater & the one and only, Serengeti.
Nine of us piled into a plush yet rugged “Bush Rover”, the African safari edition of the Land Rover. Our tour guide/driver seems to know everything about Tanzania. On our drive to the Crater, we drove past a wide open plain filled with huts all over. He told us that the oldest Masai lives there. This Masai is 109 years old, has 30 wives, 150 children and over 160 grandchildren. The Masai people are a tribe residing in Kenya and Tanzania. You can tell how many wives one Masai may have by the number of huts on his land. One hut for each wife.
The drive down into the Ngorongoro Crater was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. The crater was formed millions of years ago when the volcanic mountain erupted and collapsed into itself creating a wide crater in which wildlife reside. This mountain is said to have
been larger than Mt. Kilimanjaro. We drove up to the crest of the crater top and descended down into it. What a scenic sight it was. The morning mist and fog swiftly moved across the sky and flowed down over the mountains like a slowly moving waterfall. A streak of thin clouds made a straight line across the crater with cascading clouds that made it look like a bridge.
Here is the process of game driving: We drive through the park and look out for any type of wildlife. Sometimes it is far in the distance and you can’t easily tell what animal it is. Other times, it’s as easy as driving past a herd of zebras, antelope, buffalo, impalas, ostriches, baboons, warthogs and giraffes. When we spot an animal, we stop the car to take pictures. Sometimes there are several different cars all stopped looking at the same thing.
The Serengeti entrance is connected to the Ngorongoro Crater. We drove around the crater from about 9am until noon. By then I was ready to call it a day. I felt like I have seen enough animals and really did not want to do another 2 days in
the Serengeti. We stopped and had lunch before we started the Serengeti. I was tired and hungry. I didn’t have much to eat at breakfast since we ate so early, I wasn’t hungry then. All morning I was excited for when I could eat the boxed lunch the tour provided. As I was walking to the lunch spot carrying my much anticipated lunch, I dropped it in the dirt and my lunch went everywhere! I was not a happy girl. I ate what I could salvage from the dirt mess, got back in the car and began another 5 hours of game viewing.
Compared to the crater, we didn’t really see much in the Serengeti. Because the Serengeti is so large, animals are widely dispersed throughout the land; whereas animals in the crater are in a more condensed area. We drove and drove and drove…spot an animal in the far distance and then drove and drove more.
A cool thing about the Serengeti is that we saw a handful of lions up close. We drove up and saw a female lion right by driving path. She got up and walked over about 10 feet and lowered her head.
Baby Elephant
He was minding his own business, eating, when someone in our truck sneezed...this is his reaction before he ran away. :) Then we saw three cubs scurrying out of the grass and into a hiding place! She must have told them to hide because of danger. We were fortunate enough to see a hyena chase a zebra and a lion about to hunt a gazelle. Although we didn’t see an actual killing, it was interesting to see them stalk their prey. It is said that only 10% of game viewers see an actual killing.
Part of our Serengeti package tour is to camp out in the bush with the wild animals. This means, there are no electrical fences, enclosures or guards to keep wild animals out. We arrived to our camping area and it started to pour down rain! It was getting dark, raining, cold and windy. We got soaked setting up our tent and it sucked that we didn’t have warm dry clothes to change into.
Later, the cooks prepared a nice dinner for us. The rain let up but it was still drizzling. They set up the serving table and we had to eat in the rain. Leah and I ate in our tent. We had a couple visitors through the evening, some elephants and giraffe were
Hyena
They are uggggliiieeeee!!! wandering near our tents!
When it became completely dark, that is when you get scared and think every little sound in the darkness is a wild animal coming to get you. The tour guides were strict that if we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, go in pairs. One person to pee while the other shines the light around for any animals. Of course woke up around midnight having to go. I felt bad having to wake her up, but it was a fun experience being awake in the middle of the night in the Serengeti. I laid awake for a while listeing to all the different animal sounds. I heard a low, deep cat purring type of noise. It was very loud and sounded like it was coming from more than one animal. In the morning we found out that there were lions, zebras and hyenas nearby. Yikes!
The next day, we had a halfday drive through the Serengeti again. Leaving the park, we had to check out with the office. As our tour guide was doing that, the rest of us were hanging out in the parking lot. Of course,
there are baboons everywhere trying to get food from cars. Earlier, our tour guide said that baboons are smart and know that white people are scared of them, that is why they can steal easily from tourists. He told us to be confident around them and not act scared. With that information in our heads, a large baboon slowly walks his way to our group. We acted like it was no big deal and didn’t pay too much attention to him. He got within 2 feet from us, stopped, looked at us, scratched himself down there and walked away! We all busted out laughing. This was a more positive baboon encounter than the macadamia nut van attack….that’s for sure. All in all, I am glad I got to experience the Serengeti, but for me, it was not worth the 250 dollars.
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Lynn
non-member comment
Love It!
Jen, Just love being caught up in your action with the blog/pictures!!! Looks like I have more to look at!!! I can't imagine the adrenaline rush you must get when you get to see those animals in their own habitat....and not behind bars or in a cage. The best I have ever had is feeding a bottle to a six month white Bengal tiger at our fair. Sitting next to it with it's paw on my knee(which was bigger than both my hands and feet) and knowing it was close to it's grown size was amazing. Keep a tighter hold on your lunches!!!! Love, Lynn