AFRICAN SAFARI

6/14/09
I feel like the luckiest girl alive at this very moment. Our experiences this weekend definitely contain some of the most amazing moments of my life. I took notes all weekend to help me remember every bit of it. Some of the views honestly almost moved me to tears they were so beautiful. But ok enough sappiness, let’s start with Friday...We left the house and headed to a town about an hour and a half away called Arusha to get groceries and supplies for the safari. Arusha is a pretty big town…it even had a stop light! Kind of ironically, the intersection with the stop light seemed to be running even more chaotically than those without. From there we headed about 2 more hours away to the campsite so we could see how much we were roughing it (tents already set up, real bathrooms, mats to sleep on…my kind of camping). Before dinner we went to a Maasai Village to meet some of the tribe members and see how they live. The Maasai are supposed to be one of the tribes that sticks to their ancient ways despite the influence of modernization. In some ways that seemed true, like for example they live in huts made of dung (mind you I was leaning against one of those dung walls when we were told that lovely fact) with one “room” (i.e. straw bed) for the man, one for the women and children, and one pen for the baby goats and sheep. They cook their food right in the middle of the house floor too. Some other traditional culture they kept included marrying multiple wives as young as 9 years old (usually not for child-bearing until 15, more to help around the house at the young age) and female genital mutilation. Some of the weird modernization aspects were their tables with jewelry to sell and even a website! The best part was when they gave me this traditional necklace to wear and had me go dance and jump (the tribe is known for how high the men jump—that’s how they get the ladies) with the girls of the tribe. The worst part was that dancing next to me was a baby on a woman’s back COVERED in flies…I kept trying to like blow on the baby’s face or wave my hand near it without the mom noticing because it was making me want to vomit.

On Saturday morning, we woke up at 5:30 and drove to Lake Manyara to start our animal safari adventure. Some of the animals we saw throughout the day were elephants (babies and adults), baboons all over the place, velvet and blue monkeys (more on the damn velvet monkeys to come), impala, dik dik, a snake, a kingfisher, hippos, giraffe, wildebeest, water buffalo, thousands of flamingo (literally like tens of thousands…a picture could never capture the image) and……drum roll please…THREE female LIONS in a tree oh SEVEN FEET from our car window!!! Like so close that when one roared everyone screamed, “Valerie shut your window” and Matt jumped like a foot in the air (per the report from the driver of the jeep behind us)…amazing!! The drivers said they see lions like that in the trees maybe 1-2 times a YEAR! We were soooo excited…it took us awhile to come down from the adrenaline rush.

After Lake Manyara, we drove to Ngorongoro Crater where we spent the night and had the final day of our safari. As we approached the crater it was everything we could do to pick our jaws up off the floor. The sight was absolutely breathtaking. It honestly looked like it was straight out of “Land Before Time”. Our campsite was right on the rim of the crater…beautiful but absolutely freezing. It was also a little more roughing it and definitely included peeing into a hole (too many times to count on this trip). Despite some roughing it, it had the same view as the hotel down the road where a room was $1500 a night! It was home to us, some other campers, and zebras…yup that’s right zebras (and a random warthog)…they were strolling through out tents right next to us. They were pretty close, but not quite close enough for Matt and Stephen to touch them…not for a lack of their trying though, I assure you.

Sunday morning, we woke up early again and headed down into the crater itself. Some of the animals we saw were ostrich, zebras, hyenas, warthogs, wildebeest, water buffalo, gazelle, elephants, and lions. We saw 8 more lions (so 11 lions total for the trip)! We saw a female and male lion RIGHT next to our jeep and we saw some lion cubs a bit farther away. BUT by and large the absolutely coolest thing we saw was a fight/chase between lions and water buffalo. It was so much like being in a movie it was crazy to think that it was all nature and nothing like this could ever be staged. I got some decent videos of the lion chasing the baby water buffalo and the big buffalos scaring it back away (they aren’t perfect though cuz I couldn’t watch something like that through a camera, so I just held it down and pointed it in the general direction). It was interesting to see that only the female lions hunt while the male sits and watches…like how in our species females go to the grocery store! It was also crazy to see how the zebra step in too when the lions are trying to attack to kind of shield the buffalo. Unfortunately the lions got too tired after the buffalo chased them away enough times so no kill…but it was still incredible to watch. In addition to that craziness, we also saw the elephant graveyard (lion king anyone?). The old elephants go there when they lose all their teeth before they die because the grass is all mushy and they can still eat some of it. We didn’t see any elephants there, but we saw some huge skulls. Then we headed back to the homebase, with a quick stop to ride some camels. Our 4 hour ride consisted of a great deal of time spent by Matt, Stephen and Drew making us verses to the Diarrhea song(brought on by some not so good inspiration from one of the group members)…yes I know the song sounds gross but the verses were actually pretty funny :-) Ok on that note..Lala Salama (Sleep Peacefully).

Amani,
Valerie