Safari

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With less than 24 hours of rest from our climb, we were off 250 clicks west on a four day journey to see some east African wildlife. Our driver and guide was named Wynluck, a very nice and well spoken man in his late 50's. He drove a Toyota landcruiser with a roof that popped up for game viewing. On the drive out there, we passed through Moshi and the second largest city in Tanzania, Arusha, as well as many small villages dotted along the way. We also spotted many indigenous Massai people, identifiable by their colourful garbs and heavy jewelery. They lived in straw huts and primarily herded cattle. We arrived near Lake Manyara, and would be staying at this inn called Haven Earth at the top of a small hill. It lay in a vegetative area and didn't often have power but it was nice and had decent food. Our first two days we would be visiting the Lake Manyara wildlife park, and although the lake was dried up at this time, there was plenty of wildlife to see like baboons, velvet monkeys, lizards, buffalo, giraffes, elephants. The terrain was mainly heavy jungle. Dad and I had our SLR camera's out and a big focus for us was the photography that followed.

On our third day we visited the Ngorongoro crater, and this was pure magic and almost exactly what I had envisioned a safari to be. High hills surrounded massive lowland crater filled with a lake and acres of grass, as well as multitudes of beasts. For kilometres we could see thousands of wildebeasts, zebras, buffalo, antelope, impala's, and on and on. We saw hyena's scaring off herds, thousands of flamingo's drinking and a lion couple lounging right in front of our vehicle as we ate lunch. The most amazing part of our day occurred when we headed back out of the crater. As we drove along the narrow dirt road, we caught a male lion lounging around by the side. Incredibly, we were only about 6 feet away from it and snapped great photos. As we were almost out of the crater, a tire blew out and we helped Wynluck change it with a spare.

On our final day we checked out Tarangire park, a heavily wooded area with a river running through. Plenty of acacia and baobab trees were strewn about. We witnessed a herd of 60 elephants of all ages cross our path, giraffes eating from the high branches, zebras, buffalo, and black faced monkeys trying to steal from stopped vehicles. It was a great adventure overall and we got some great pictures out of it too. We left this park and made our way all the way back to Marangu, amidst some crazy night driving.

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Comments

[RENanDREW]

Stunning
That's an amazing photo!