Wednesday (June 6) - Serengeti
Steve: Over dinner last night, we were discussing how much we had seen and what we still wanted to see. For me, it was lion cubs and for Rosemary, it was a cheetah. Well, today’s the day!
Rosemary: What a day! We saw a lioness in a tree. Nearby at the water hole was her whole pride - five females, a big male, assorted cubs of various ages.
When we went back to see the male, we found a creekbed next to the rise with an entire pride of lions. For me, this was the highlight of the trip!
Rosemary: We spent a long time watching their activities. It was such joy to see them. Little cubs following their mother, lions greeting each other, playing in the grass.
Steve:
There were three adult females on the bank of the creek with four or five kittens about two months
old and four or five cubs about six months old. The kittens and cubs played with each other as
the females rested. All looked like they had eaten recently.
A couple of other females (including the one from the tree) came over and the lions
greeted each other by rubbing the sides of their faces.
As the females left the creek, their offspring followed. To watch the family
dynamic here is amazing. At one point, one of the kittens started crying for his mother,
as if he was lost. As a couple of females and their cubs went back to the tree,
they passed within about 5 -10 feet of our jeep.
The two females climbed into the tree and the kittens and cubs tried to follow, but
couldn’t. The male also followed and tried to climb the tree, but he was too heavy.
Rather than lie down and be bothered by the kittens, he left.
One of the females came down and went off into the brush, maybe to hunt, but had to come
back when her three kittens started to follow her. After clicking off three rolls of film in
30 minutes, we left this pride. Not long after, we came across three young males and two
young females lying in the road, with another four to five adults lying in the grass nearby.
A big day for lions, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
Rosemary: Hassan points out that if the male we saw is the only one the pride has, the cubs' chances of survival are slim. Most prides have two or three males, brothers who defend the pride from invasion. (Although eventually, age gets the better of them and new males move in.) If a pair of new males ousts the current male, they will kill the cubs. Without cubs to care for, the females will come into heat, and the new males will father the next generation. It's possible, though, that this one has a brother who was resting in another location. In any case, Hassan commented that this guy looked very fit - obviously the females are doing a good job of hunting and keeping him well fed.
Steve:
The Serengeti is full of herds of zebra, wildebeest and gazelle. There are
literally thousands of them at this time of year.
We arrived at the picnic site just in time to see a
vervet monkey climb into an open jeep
and steal a Snickers bar.
As we walked through the nature exhibit, a large group of
vervet monkeys stampeded right past us, obviously frightened by something.
After lunch, we passed a pool where some hippos
were lying on the shore. This is the
first time we have been close to them out of the water. At another small pool, we saw a
crocodile
in the water, waiting for his lunch to walk by.
Later, we came to a male and female lion lying in the sun. Hassan thought they were a
mating pair, so we waited to see if anything happened. Lions mate for seven days.
At the beginning, they copulate every five to ten minutes, but towards the end they slow
down from exhaustion. These lions were near the end of the seven day cycle and were
going to rest for a while, so we went back to see if the cheetah had moved.
When we arrived back at his location, the road was full of jeeps, with more on the way.
Every once in a while, the cheetah would raise its head, but then would lie down again.
A lot of people lost patience and left, be we noticed some behavior, similar to our house
cats, of potential movement. Sure enough, within a few minutes, the cheetah stood up and
walked out into the open. In that brief moment, I was able to get some good shots -
I hope they come out.
On a hunch, we went back to the mating pair of lions to see if anything had changed.
They were in slightly different positions and the male started to appear active.
After a short wait, he went over to the female and woke her up. After a bit of
mutual growling (foreplay?), he mounted her for the best 10 seconds of her life.
That quickly, it was over and they both went back to sleep. With several jeeps around,
I said (perhaps a little louder than I expected), "So THAT’S the king of the jungle?".
As we headed back to the lodge, we saw a long line of wildebeest, all moving in the same
direction. We believe that this is part of the Great Migration
that takes place around
this time of year.
Hassan got word that a cheetah had been sighted, so we rushed to the location.
There was a cheetah lying under a tree, but all you could see was his white tail
flicking upward every so often. We waited for a while, then went off to have lunch.
Rosemary:
In the late afternoon, the air was heavy with smoke. The rangers burn the dry grass
so that new grass will sprout as soon as it rains. This helps provide more food for
the herds.
Some of the animals we saw today: Lion, cheetah, baboon, vervet monkey, zebra,
hyena, rock hyrax, elephant, vulture,
egret,
goose,
stork, crocodile, hippo, giraffe,
buffalo, mouse, weaver bird,
gazelle, impala, water buck, and the usual variety
of small birds.
Steve: We reached the lodge at 5:30, exhausted, having been out since 8:00 AM. We showered and went to dinner.
Thursday (June 7) - Serengeti
Steve:
We awoke at 5:30 AM for an early morning game drive. The baboons that had been along the
road yesterday morning were still asleep.
We saw the "usual" herds of gazelle, wildebeest and zebra, plus a few hyena along the road.
At one point, we saw a number of hyena all in one spot. A closer look showed them getting
ready to attack a baby zebra, which was not more than a couple of days old.
Hassan kept saying, "They’re going to kill the baby zebra." As exciting as it was to
possibly see a kill in action, we were obviously rooting for the zebra.
As the hyenas tried to attack, two adult zebras tried to keep the baby shielded from them,
with a third adult chasing them off.
Rosemary: The zebras were amazing. They would face the hyenas, lower their heads, and charge. This was just intimidating enough to get the hyenas to back up. If the hyenas tried to attack from the side or the rear, the zebras would kick with their powerful back legs. No hyena wants to risk broken bones.
Steve:
At one point, we thought the hyenas would be too many
to fight off, but the zebras won this battle, to a sigh of relief from all of us.
It was fascinating to perceive the strategies of each side as it unfolded.
On the flip side, we saw a female lion who looked hungry. We followed her for a while as she
tried to sneak up on a wildebeest, but she kept getting spotted by them.
Fickle humans - rooting for the prey, then the predator. We gave up and
headed back to the lodge, barely making it in time for breakfast.
A couple of hours off, then lunch and an afternoon game drive.
At lunch, we were the only people in the dining room until around 1:00,
with everyone else having a picnic or hadn’t returned from their morning drive.
After lunch, Hassan got a report of a leopard in a tree on the main road from the lodge.
It took a little while to find him, but he was stretched out on a limb, asleep.
We went off the road and got right underneath him, but he didn’t move.
Hassan commented that the leopard "was supposed to be in another tree" which raised several
questions to us, such as: How do the guides tell one tree from another? It’s not like
there are street signs here.
Had the leopard moved since the report?
We saw lots of zebra again and saw a spot with a lot of vultures in a tree. Down below was
the corpse of a zebra, killed by a lioness. The vultures were nervous
because she was still in the area and soon she walked out of the tall grass.
The rest of the afternoon we spent sightseeing, going to see some interesting rock formations.
One was called "Gong Rock", because one of the boulders, when struck with another stone,
made a ringing sound. Long ago, the Maasai used it to communicate with each other.
Still more enormous herds of zebra everywhere as we headed back to the lodge, arriving
just as it was getting dark. A long day, as we were tired an hungry as usual.
All during the trip, we had been hoping to sample some local dishes.
Dinner tonight was a buffet of what was supposed to be African cuisine,
but it was the worst meal we had at this location.
We loaded up on what was edible and went to bed.
In another place, we saw some Maasai paintings on some rocks where they once lived in a cave.
The Maasai lived in this section of the Serengeti until around 1950, when the
conservancy was formed and they were displaced.
Friday, June 8 to Saturday, June 9
Serengeti to Arusha
Kilimanjaro to Amsterdam (via Dar es Salaam)
Amsterdam to Los Angeles
Steve:
Our last day in Africa started early so that we could pack for the trip home.
We were going to fly from Serengeti to the Arusha airport. On the way, we saw two female
lions stalking a herd of wildebeest, but they ended up lying in the shade after
passing a few feet from our jeep. Our last lions, as it turned out.
We went to a small grass airstrip we named "Serengeti International Airport".
Strangely enough, the parking lot began to fill up as there were three small planes
of about twelve seats each all getting ready to take off at about the same time.
We said our goodbyes to Hassan, thanking him for all he did and the great time we had,
leaving him with a bottle of Deet, before he started the nine hour drive back to Arusha.
We then went back to the Mountain Village Lodge (our original stop) for lunch and a day
room. The buffet lunch was the best meal we had all week.
And now another word from one of our sponsors:
Pepto Bismol
chewable tablets. By
regular use of these and careful avoidance of any local water, dairy or raw vegetables,
neither of us have had any stomach problems during the trip.
We attempted to nap in our day room but it was too noisy. While getting dressed, I realized
that I had left my belt pack with my passport, airline tickets and money in the dining room.
After looking all around and getting the hotel staff involved, I found that one of the
waiters had discovered it on the floor and had given it to Ibrahim, who locked it in his jeep.
We took off for the short flight to
Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania. We deplaned for
the 90 minute layover. This is a nasty little airport, with not a friendly face on any
of the staff, including the receptionist at the first class lounge.
We reboarded for an eight hour flight to Amsterdam Service on KLM was good as usual and
we both got a little sleep, arriving at 8:00 AM local time in Amsterdam.
As our flight to LAX wasn’t until 11:30, we spent a couple of hours in the lounge.
The flight to LA
was twelve hours long which, despite being in first class, is WAY too
long to be on an airplane. Neither of us slept, so we watched parts of the several
movies on the personal video screens. KLM gives out little
ceramic houses, representing
different styles of homes in Holland, filled with a liqueur. We had four of them from the
two trips (and Rosemary has started collecting them on eBay).
We got through customs in a breeze, still having only carry-on luggage, and I
called the limo service we had arranged for, who said that the driver would meet us at
the curb. Upon surfacing in the terminal, we were met inside by our driver, a stocky
Russian who seemed familiar. Turns out he was the driver that picked us up on our return
from St. Barth in December. We only realized this, though, as we pulled up to our house.
The problem was that his company was NOT the one we hired to pick us up.
Martine did call them to get a price and had to give them our flight info in order
to get a quote, but they were never hired. The driver of the company we DID hire didn’t
show up while we were waiting for the other driver to get his car from the parking
structure, so their on-time record couldn’t have been too good. I had to
fight with both of them when I got back into the office to avoid being charged full
price for both drivers.
All in all, we arrived in Tanzania tired, we stayed tired the whole trip and we returned
home
tired.
Nevertheless, this was a trip of a lifetime for both of us.
Although it was Rosemary’s dream to go, I was also eager to see what we could see.
Judging by others we’ve spoken to who have made similar trips, we were very lucky in
all regards, from having our own driver, to the amount of animals we saw, to our
health, etc. The pictures will help us remember the specifics, but what I’ll remember most
is the look of joy on Rosemary’s face for the whole two weeks.
Our flight took about an hour, during which we could see the circles of the
Maasai villages below us. We were met at the Arusha airport by Ibrahim, who took
us to the Bushbuck Safari
offices for a "de-briefing" by Mahool, the head guy.
We praised Hassan and gave good comments to all of their services, while telling
him about our minor complaints regarding some of the hotels and the food.
A short drive took us back to the airport at Kilimanjaro and a relatively easy immigration
process. We had a snack in the first class lounge after buying one last souvenir in
a gift shop.
Anyway, we got home Saturday about 4:00 PM (4:00 AM Sunday in Tanzania) after being
awake for almost 48 hours, and immediately collapsed into bed for a few hours sleep
before waking up hungry a few hours later. We went out for a quick bite and fell back
asleep until Sunday morning.
Rosemary: This trip was a lifelong dream for me. I had often said that if I could take only one trip in my life, this would be it. And I still say that. It was everything I could have asked for. Steve, thank you for making my dream come true. I'm so glad I got to share it with you.
Steve: I love you, Sweetie Vai!
May 31, 2001 (Thursday) Arusha town and Tarangire National Park
Rosemary: We packed up and moved on. The day started with a tour of the town of Arusha. Dirty and poor, very busy with people going places and doing things. The workers use hand tools, with little or no machinery to do big jobs. Casually dressed men do road work with big pickaxes and shovels. Men pull big wooden carts loaded with whatever they have to haul. Goats, cows, chickens, and bicycles compete for space along the edge of the road. Women and girls carry enormous burdens on their heads. There are many stores in town selling secondhand clothes from Europe and America. Amongst all this, an Internet cafe.
Steve:
This is more 3rd world than any other place
we have been, including Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. People build their homes out
of anything they can find
(bricks, wood, sheet metal, thatch, etc.) on land owned by the government. At several
locations, we saw homes marked
with a big red “X”, indicating that they had been condemned for being too close to a road
that was to be widened.
Women carry really heavy loads of everything balanced on their heads. Men haul huge loads
in pushcarts or on bicycles.
Most cars we saw ran poorly (there’s smog in Africa, Mr. President), if they ran at all.
We saw numerous vehicles
broken down on the side of the road.
We stopped by the "Cultural Center" for shopping and bought a couple of things.
At least here, the souvenirs don’t say
"Made In Taiwan".
As we drove through the streets, which are noisy and crowded, we saw people selling
produce and used clothing
in the street, along with the farm animals brought to sell for meat.
Some houses are built
with framing and plaster much like those in the U.S., but most are put together from whatever
is available. Obviously, there are no building codes. People rarely paint their houses, or
if they do, they just paint the side that faces the street.
Rosemary: Dropped off for shopping at Cultural Heritage, we bought some carvings to be
shipped home. Bargaining is invited, but if you don't want to bother the manager will
just tell you the bottom-line price (about half the sticker price). You can visit the workshop
where men sit on the floor working on more carvings.
Steve:
We lunched at the Impala Hotel, then drove from Arusha to Tarangire National Park.
On the road, we passed many
Maasai people and villages. They live mostly by raising cattle and goats. The more cattle
a man has, the richer he is and
the more wives he has (funny, in this country, the more wives a man has, the poorer he is),
each of whom has her
own "home", built in a cluster.
The Maasai have lived this way for years and have no intention of joining the 20th century,
much less the 21st.
The main highway was in pretty good condition and any breaks in the asphalt were marked with
white paint so that they
could be seen easier and avoided.
Rosemary: In the countryside, Maasai houses and villages. They are herdsmen who measure their wealth in cattle. Children tend the herds instead of going to school. Cows, goats, sheep, donkeys. They like to live far from other people and don't mind walking long distances to get water, which is carried by donkeys or on the heads of the people. The Maasai around Arusha have broken somewhat with tradition and taken up farming.
Steve: After reaching the entrance to the national park, we spent the next couple of hours looking for game and saw:
|
giraffes elephants baboons warthogs dwarf mongoose Grant’s gazelles impala vervet monkey zebra |
guinea fowl ostrich jackal vulture eagle dik dik cuckoo lilac-breasted roller storks |
Rosemary: Here we also met tsetse flies. They are very aggressive. We are grateful for Deet.
Steve:
We tried to spot a leopard but didn’t have any luck.
Hassan told us a story about catching guinea fowl, which (not surprisingly) taste like chicken.
He said that they were hard to catch by hand but that he would add some cognac to rice,
feed it to the birds, they would get drunk and pass out, so all you had to do was walk
over and pick them up.
We checked into the Tarangire Sopa Lodge,
our home for the next two nights, and were again welcomed with orange juice.
Our room is OK - two double beds, not enough light, hot water that was rationed twice a day
and no sound proofing. We kept hearing a German couple in an adjacent room every time they
said anything.
Dinner was only fair (the food here turned out to be the worst on the trip) but we were too
tired to care. We went back to the room, listened to the Germans for a while and finally
got a decent night’s sleep for both of us.
June 1-2 (Friday & Saturday) Tarangire National Park
Friday
Steve: Started the day with breakfast at the lodge, where both the waiter and manager came over to apologize and explain about something unusual at dinner last night. Seated at a table next to us was a group of about eight or ten very official looking people, some of the men wearing ties. Two of them were listening to something on transistor radios, which was very annoying because of (1) the sound quality and (b) because we couldn’t understand what was being said. I mentioned something to the waiter when we left about how unusual it was to have people listien to the radio during dinner. It turns out, they were government officials, listening to the evening news which only comes on once a day. Fortunately, we were not arrested.
Rosemary:
We began with a morning game drive. We had a brief glimpse of a leopard
as it jumped across the road and vanished into the grass. The grass is very tall
this time of year, making it hard to see animals. They could be just a few
feet away, watching us.
The tsetse flies begin to go away in the late afternoon, but other insects remain persistent
until sunset. Then the night insects come out. We are always greasy with sunblock and Deet.
The afternoon was a festival of elephants. There was a huge group spread over a large area.
Some of them crossed the road. They didn't like us, and showed it in the way they looked at us.
Lots of babies. Another group was involved in some kind of dispute over mating. There was
a chase partly obscured by bushes, and loud trumpeting. Then they stopped arguing and went
back to eating.
Steve:
The morning game drive started fairly routinely with a giraffe standing very close to
the road. Other animals seen were dik-dik,
herds of impala,
which were usually
one male with numerous females. (Hassan's joke: "That impala has so many wives, he must
be a Maasai.")
We also saw elephants,
The sighting of the day (so far) was a glimpse of a leopard, first in the road and then
running across the road.
It’s hard to see much game because the grass is very tall. Most contact came with the tsetse
flies, who are everywhere and like to bite.
And now, a word from our sponsor DEET. Formally known as diethyl-meta toluamide,
this is an
amazing insect repellant. Most commercial sprays like "OFF" have 15% DEET. We have
"Jungle Juice", which is 100% DEET. Expensive, but I’m worth it. The flies were so bad that
even Hassan used some of it.
Back to the lodge for lunch, a brief break and then out again at 3:00 PM for another game
drive. Today’s featured animal: elephants, and lots of them. We encountered numerous
herds, one of which must have had 50 members.
The first large herd we saw was about a dozen elephants, mostly females with some children
and some babies. We were in their way as they tried to cross the road (insert your own
elephant joke here) so we saw them lift their trunks to smell us and show some
aggression. We moved up the road a little so they could cross behind us, and one teenage
male came within about 20 feet of us, trying to show what a big guy he was. Got some
great photos here.
A little further up we saw the large herd of 50. As we were leaving, we saw two males
starting to fight, with tusks aimed and trunks high locked, charging each other.
It only lasted a couple of minutes but was fascinating to watch.
Later we found another herd where Hassan thought there was a female in heat
because one of the younger males had "five legs". Unfortunately for him,
the older male kept him away from the female.
Hassan’s eyesight is unbelievable. While driving, he saw three vervet monkeys
nestled in the
"Y" of a tree from about 200 feet. The tree was gray and the monkeys were small and gray.
It took us a few minutes to see them even after he pointed them out to us.
We made it back to the lodge just before dark, showered (there is hot water only between 6-8,
both AM & PM), had another mediocre meal and went to bed. We both slept pretty well.
Saturday
Steve:
It was still dark when we left the lodge
at 6:00, but the sun began to rise around 6:30 and the flies were still asleep.
Saw a couple of jackals in the road in our headlghts. As dawn broke, we saw families of
baboons come down from the tops of palm trees.
We were hoping to see some big cats in the early morning but the grass was so tall, they
could be right next to the road and we wouldn’t be able to see them.
We did see more impala, zebra and a small group of elephants, including a baby of about two or three
months.
Rosemary:
There were baboons high in the palm trees, eating the fruit. We saw more elephants with
little babies. They still don't like us! Wild rosemary
is in bloom throughout large areas.
It fills the air with fragrance. Occasionally we have gone off the road, and the scent
is especially strong as we drive over the plants. Not much to see in three hours. The tall grass hides everything. The tsetse flies being
to come out at the morning warms up.
Hassan obviously feels sorry we haven't seen much game here, but we knew there would be no
guarantees. Arusha was great, and we are confident that Ngorongoro and Serengeti will be
full of animals.
Breakfast is the best meal here. Fruit, juice, breads, meats, an omelette chef, yogurt.
The coffee
is good, as is the local honey. Lunch and dinner are hard to eat. They are
trying to provide "contenintal" cuisine with unskilled chefs. I'd rather try some
local dishes. So far we have been careful about what we eat and drink, and have
remained healthy. (We brush our teeth with bottled water.)
My description of this room: Imagine a Motel 6, remove the TV, phone, and thermostat. Make
the electricity uncertain, ration the hot water, and add a mosquito net. And, of course,
put some monkeys on the roof.
Steve:
We came back to the lodge at 9:00 for breakfast (easily the best meal of the day at this
location) and a couple of hours rest before lunch and a trip to Lake Manyara.
The trip to the lodge at Lake Manyara was fairly uneventful. We saw some more zebra,
elephant, impala and giraffe leaving Tarangire. Strangely enough, we’ve become somewhat
jaded from seeing so many of them the last few days.
Upon reaching the main highway, we had to double back towards Arusha before taking the road
to Lake Manyara. Saw lots more Maasai with their herds of cattle and goats, many tended by
children under 10.
Hassan told us that the Maasai believe that all cattle
belong to them, so if anyone else has
any cattle, the Maasai think that that person’s grandfather must have stolen them from their
grandfather and that the Maasai have the right to steal them back. In fact, when
the Maasai sell their cattle to other people for money or goods, they often try to steal
them back also.
Rosemary: The road was what I had expected all the roads here to be -- very rough and dusty. The road is built of huge jagged rocks partly embedded in hard dirt. Our vehicle carries two spare tires, with good reason. This is not a trip for anyone with a bad back, sore hip, stiff neck, or inclination to get car sick.
Steve:
Passing through some small towns, there were fields of crops on one side of the road and
forests full of baboons on the other, sitting along side the road waiting for a chance to
cross and get some dinner. Many homes are marked for demolition to make room for a new,
wider road, allowing for more travel (and more tourist dollars) in the area.
We arrive at the Serena Lodge at Lake Manyara and are again welcomed with juice. A
small woman carried both our bags to our room. (Note to self: start working out!)
The room had twin beds, which looked OK on first inspection. Later, however, when they
hung the mosquito netting
and tucked in the edges, it was quite claustrophobic.
Had a little time before dinner, so we went to the pool bar for a drink and a great
view of the lake, which more than tripled in size after El Nino a couple of years ago.
There was a marimba band at poolside, playing a strange version of "Guantanamera".
Dinner was buffet and was actually good, far better than any of the meals at Tarangire.
The lodge and grounds are very nice and we went straight to bed after dinner.
