giraffes running are apparently one of my emotional triggers

zebra's chilling with the wildebeast... awesome to see in their gigantic migration herds
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I don’t even know where to start, the $575 USD I spent on 5 days at Lake Manyera, Serengeti and Ngorogoro felt painful to dish out but I can’t think of a better reason to dive into debt!

On the first day at Lake Manyera baboons tried to climb up into our vehicle, I saw dik-dik’s galore and enjoyed make enough jokes about their name over the next few days to write a small book. Then as we were driving past tree, tree, monkey, monkey with bright blue testicles, tree, tree, I saw (and screamed) ELEPHANT!!!! Although this was just an elephant’s ass I felt pretty awesome (in a safari-ish way) about spotting it. Within the half hour though I felt that my reaction to an elephant’s ass was wasted after driving towards gawking giraffes, a sexy warthog, zebras, a bandit mongoose's "honeymoon" as Hailise called it, and to top it all off elephant bath time!

Hippos and crocs in Serengeti
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And that was all in day #1!

The next few days were surreal, we saw the “big 5”, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos and lions and so much more. The leopard gnawing on a reedbuck in a tree was intense and got all of us vegetarians bloodthirsty and dying to see something kill something else. The cheetah mother with her four cubs that our guide spotted from so far away was great, especially since the longer we waited the closer and closer they came.

Of course coming into the park we were all excited about seeing lions but all the ones we saw were so boring and just sleeping, that is until day 5 in Ngorogoro when as we were watching a rhino we noticed that a bunch of vehicles were parked up ahead, when we reached them and stopped the car a lioness walked straight towards OUR car, stopped looked at us crazy muzungu’s with our heads popping out of the roof like kebabs and then crossed the path and walked to her pride about 10 meters away on the other side, it was amazing. Did I mention that the entire time was amazing? It was amazing!

Vervet monkey, super smart and has bright blue balls.
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Anyways, I’ll save other stories for when I get home and let the pics do the talking for now ;)