Not Another Lion... We want to See a !@*$ Porcupine!

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There was a slight change of plans with our safari, due to weather. We were supposed to go directly to Amboseli National Park (which is at the base of Kilimanjaro) but there were such heavy rains, that we had to cut that part out of our trip, and Savuka Tours was nice enough to refund us the difference. So, we headed down on a small bus across the border of Kenya/Tanzania to Arusha. It was a short stopover in Arusha, where we looked everywhere to find a towel (so we could shower on this part of the trip) but absulutely refused to buy one from a guy trying to sell one (with what looked like blood stains all over it) for 10 USD! No showers for us, I guess... Ha ha. Our driver met us the next morning and, although we thought it was just going to be the two of us, they managed to find someone else to join. They always do. This was a 23 year old Canadian named Adam, who had been traveling/"living in" Uganda for the past 3 months. It was pretty interesting to hear all of his stories while in Uganda, there is quite some unrest there. He watched from 100 yards away a man get stoned to death and then a boda (motorbike taxi) made him jump on his bike to take him away, as he might look like an Indian to them and that's who they were targeting. Pretty intense stuff. 

Our first night, we stayed in Lake Manyara camped out in the yard of a pretty nice hotel!! Still have yet to have any "real" camping. I had to take the picture of our tent pitched next to the building with a wooden zebra peeking out from behind it. Classic. Now that's what I call camping. Here, I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to charge the camera battery ever and we have been able to charge it everywhere we go! No solar panel for us... maybe for the Everest Basecamp trek...?? Lake Manyara was alright, we did almost get charged by a protective mother elephant and saw our first leopard! Leopards are very hard to see, so it was pretty exciting for us. They are so lazy, though, always dangling in a tree. And our driver this time, Mike, was a "YES" guy. He went above and beyond. I got had by a Massai shop in the village and bought two beautiful ebony candlesticks with Massai faces on them - I'll be knocking them around in my bag for the rest of the trip, but it'll be worth it. Kevin and I are kicking ourselves for not bringing a bunch of American gear (jerseys, hats, t-shirts... anything!) because all the Africans want to trade their stuff for yours, so we would never have had to actually buy the souvenirs. I can't tell you how many times these guys tried to buy/trade things right off of Kevin. Next time...

Next stop: The famous Serengeti,  where the sky is wider than anything I have ever seen! It is so beautiful in the Serengeti and (despite what a lot of tour companies say) worlds away from the Masai Mara. It is full of much larger expanses of plains and, at this time of year, is overflowing with wildebeests. Upon entering the Serengeti, our land rover was just swarming in a sea of wildebeests and you could see millions of them for miles, as far as the eye could see. Where there are wildebeests, there are hunting lions. We still wanted to see a kill. We saw pretty much everything in the Serengeti, but the highlights would have to be the tree-climbing lions (we saw them everywhere!) and a lion feeding on a wildebeest kill in the late afternoon. The vultures were scattered all over a nearby tree waiting for the lion to leave so they could feed. If they swooped down, the lion would rip them apart, she's very protective. There was a scene of spooked zebras and wildebeests nearby that almost walked right into the lion eating one of their family members and darted away, tripping over themselves when they saw her. It was all really cool to watch. When you can just put the camera down and the binoculars and just observe, those are the greatest parts of the safari. Mike had kept us out too late that first afternoon (after the park closed), so we were high-tailing it back to our campsite, when, what do you know... we see a cheetah rolling in the dust all over the road. She looks up at us like, "What are you guys doing here? The park's closed!" and sauntered away. I got a great picture though.

The Serengeti was great (very hot) and Mike took us all over. We even managed to get stuck a few times and almost flipped once. And we finally had some "real" camping! We had our little tents and got to sit around the warmth of our camp fire with great food that, David, our cook, made us (the chapatti was delish!). Which brings us to our last day in the Serengeti, known as the "Safari Rum Incident." You see, Kevin had bought a ridiculously cheap little bottle of "Safari Rum," just for the sake of tourism. Well, the cap wasn't staying on, so we couldn't bring it with us, so he gave it to our cook because he seemed interested. Unbeknownst to us, the bottle would be gone before 7:30 AM. During our final Serengeti game drive out of the park, our cook got so wasted. He went from this tiny little quiet man to a rambunctious loud mouth, constantly poking me and trying to get me to have a sip (I didn't). At one point, when we came upon a fresh lion kill (which we came upon when the mother and her cub were eating it, but they quickly walked out of site), he tried to get out of the land rover and "call to the lions" just  feet away from the wildebeest carcass. Oh, the disaster that I was picturing... David mauled against the car by a mother lion. Safari Rum.

Leaving the Serengeti, we stopped at a Massai village, which was pretty interesting. They did their welcoming dance for us and then performed for us. We even got to get involved in their traditional dances. The men do this thing where they jump in the air as high as they can, and man, these guys can jump high! David, the drunken cook, had been getting sick during our lunch at the Serengeti picnic ground and the last we had seen of him, was him passed out in the car. Well, while we were watching the Massai traditional dance, he apparently escaped from the vehicle, planting himself right in the middle of all these dancing Massai guys. He seemed to be unbuckling his belt, but I won't ask. Got it on video, though. Another classic. Checked out a Massai school and checked out the jewelry they were selling. My problem is that I never want to buy the stuff they are selling, only things directly off of them, so I got a cool beaded Massai ring from the finger of one the women.

Then we were on to the Ngorongoro Crater, the most beautiful of places we have seen. We had a really great campsite right on the edge of the crater and there were tons of other groups around to hang out with. Mike insisted we get every bit of food out of our tents, as the wild pigs go on rampages during the night. We managed to get everything out, but right before we went to sleep, I saw we had forgotten a bag of chocolates. I buried it in our bag. 2 AM, we awoke to men screaming, hitting their tent. The sound of a snorting wild pig was sniffing outside our tent. Luckily, he didn't smell the chocolates (or maybe he's on a diet) and we were in the clear. It was an early wake-up the next morning (we couldn't see a thing there was so much fog!) and we were the first group into the Crater! We didn't see our kill, but we saw a ton of lions. Let me explain the title of this journal... we were reading the safari section of our Lonely Planet and it says something along the lines of, "It is easy to get safari fever, being with the same people in the same cramped car for days on end. You'll be thinking, Not another zebra, I want to see a @!#$% cheetah!" Well, we had been seeing so many lions and had given up on our kill, that now all we wanted to see was a porcupine, as they are pretty hard to see. Usually, people don't care about seeing them, but not us. Oh no, not us. It was a beautiful place to end our safari and I think some of our greatest pictures are from the crater.

All-in-all, it was a fantastic safari, and we saw everything we wanted to see (minus a porcupine). I guess our requests to see an albino leopard getting speared by a rhino were all in vain... Ha ha. And, yes, we did make requests such as this, to which Mike and David (when he wasn't passed out) would laugh at us.    

We headed back to Nairobi, where we met up with David to return the binoculars, had a night out on town at a place called the Florida 300 (that was in a Jetson-like building over a gas station and oozing with "women of the night") and headed to his property in Lukenya the next morning. Good stuff.