Serengeti Trip- August 2007

On 09 August we flew from Dar es Salaam to Arusha, which is a town in northern Tanzania and is considered the tourist capital of Tanzania. It is the jumping off point for all the northern safaris and Mt. Kilimanjaro. We arrived there in the evening, so we went to our hotel and grabbed some food, then went to bed. The next morning we were up early and went to the airport where we caught small plane to the heart of the Serengeti National Park. We were met at the airstrip by our guide and got started right away on our safari. Right away we saw the usual suspects like zebras, wildebeest, gazelles, antelopes, impalas, warthogs, monkeys, giraffes, elephants, hippos, crocodiles, pretty birds, etc. Then we started to see some predators. We saw a bunch of female lions in the Serengeti, but no male lions (we saw those in Ngorongoro Crater). We also saw cheetahs. That night we stayed at a great hotel located in the middle of the Serengeti plains. The next day Taylor and I were feeling sick, so we rested in the morning and then went out on an afternoon/evening game drive. We were heading back to the hotel (this was our last drive in the park) and I really wanted to see a leopard. They are hard to see because they are solitary animals and like to hang out in trees. I had my eyes glued to every tree we drove past when luck smiled on us and I spotted one. Only bad thing was that my pictures turned out blurry since it was getting dark. We spent a total of 2 nights in the park and then left the next morning (12 August) for Ngorongoro Crater, via Olduvai Gorge.

Olduvai Gorge is sometimes labeled as the "Cradle of Mankind" and while it sounds really cool, it was remarkably unspectacular. Just a big gorge with picnic tables on the top. There was a small museum there, but all the exhibits were just copies, with the real ones being in other museums, including the skull of a prehistoric ancestor currently residing in the National Museum in Dar (I've been there and there isn't much to look at.) They also found ancient footprints embedded in the dirt, but those have been covered in order to save them for future generations.

We then headed over to Ngorongoro Crater. Here we were able to get our first glimpses of male lions and the elusive black rhino. We could never get close enough to a rhino for a great picture, but at least we could tell that they were rhinos. So here in the Crater we spent 2 days and 1 night enjoying the animals. The animals were in larger group concentrations that what we had seen in the Serengeti.