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December 30, 2002, Hi gang! Merry Christmas! I hope you are all well and enjoying the holidays. Just wanted to let you know that I was not eaten by lions. THE SAFARI WAS GREAT!! we went with a company called easy travel and it was just that! Freddy, our driver/guide, met us at the bus stop in arusha, to my vast surprise, got us a hotel, picked us up in the morning and took us on four days of nonstop Animal Planet action - wow! we did lake manyara the first afternoon after driving through masai territory, plus farming villages (more like home, with scattered family houses, and then intermittant towns, than Gabon, where everyone lives within 500 feet of eachother). we drove into the park which is tucked between lake manyara (a basin lake, shallow, good for birds) and the Rift Valley wall. we saw baboon, giraffe, elephants (babies wrestling!), antelopes of several kinds, vervet monkeys, blue monkeys, more elephants....something at every turn. we took lots of pics and video there. at the campsite we had dinner and got to know the couple sharing our safari. Ibrihim is 50 and from Bombay but has spent his life in Oman and Saudi Arabia and Uganda and TZ - he makes brakes. His girlfriend Aicha is tanzanian and he ordered her around the whole time. He was disappointed with the size of the animals we saw (he is very small, very small - the animals dey are not big) and with their lack of activity (he is looking looking looking...not chasing. no chasing. just sleeping. he hides his face, no good for picture). the next day we saw oldupai gorge (a big hole in the ground with a mediocre museum, but awesome by gabon standards. kara, the anthro major, flipped out) and went through serengeti. on the way from O to Serengeti we drove through miles and miles of wildebeest and zebra and thomson's gazelle. i fell asleep for an hour a couple times and the wildebeest were still there. we drove through the gate and immediately saw the plain stretching out, flat as illinois....no trees, because the ground is so hard underneath the soil (volcanic activity, flood basalt, yada yada). but rocks (inselbergs, which then weathered away) where lions were snoozing dotted the landscape. that first afternoon was nuts! we saw seventeen lion, in three places, and one Big Boss, as ibrihim said, who was right next to the road and of whom i got some good pics. also a leopard in a tree, warthog babies, antelopes, ostrich. we got into camp and it was COLD, poor kara had not brought any long sleeves so i loaned her some. neither had ibrihim but he was SOL. he was afraid of animals coming into the camp at night and our cook made fun of him to us. in the tent around 3am we heard hyenas and when i got up to use the toilet at 4am there was a jackal coming over, yipping, to investigate. spooky! in the morning we went looking for cheetah (five, babies far away, and three juveniles just finishing lunch) and cape buffalo. we saw a mama lion and her three cubs. then in the pm back through the herds of zebra and wildebeest to ngorongoro crater, where we camped and had dinner. it was WAY COLD and somewhat hard to sleep, but the next day was worth it - the crater is gorgeous, misted in the morning, a whole little garden of animals (280 sq km), gazelles, rhino (five, one baby), big male elephants (they hang out in the thorn tree forest, a big bachelor pad. at mating time they go up out of the crater), wildebeest, buffalo, zebra, lions. (oh my god, so many lions. six of em just waltzing through our truck parade as we frantically shot film. we had 19 trucks at one point all trying to see them, and the lions just plopping down and rolling over in the road, just to taunt us.) more jackals and hyenas (the jackals seemed jealous of the attention the lions were getting). it was so beautiful. then, back to arusha, they put us in the hotel, and picked us up (!!!!!) the next morning to take us to the bus - way nicer than the shitty one we had on the trip there, toilet and snacks and ac. and cheaper, since we got RIPPED by the first bus company. we have our ferry tickets for zanzibar where we will ring in the new year and stay until the 9th. we will keep you posted! i hope everyone is enjoying the holidays and the snow, if you got it - be careful out there. the accidents made the German news network this morning.
bye! |