Back in Arusha Tanzania after a 5 day safari in Lake Manyara, Seregenti National Park, and the Ngorongoro Crater. I have a RIDICULOUS number of pictures, but this connection is too slow to upload most of them since I used my DSLR. We saw lions, a leopard, elephants, buffalo (4 of the "big five" missing the elusive rhino, which has been decimated by poaching and is very difficult to spot), cheetahs, zebras, impalas, Grant and Thompson gazelles, ostriches, wildebeests, hippos, hyenas, jackals a bunch of cool birds and many other things I'm sure I'm forgetting at the moment.
It was a camping sarari so we spent 4 nights in dome tents at various camp sites aroud the 3 parks. Wildlife was very close to us in most cases - including buffalo, zebra and elephants and one unsubstantiated report of a lion sleeping outside someone's tent. There were 14 people on the trip - mostly Canadians and Brits and we were the only Americans. The group was splt into 2 and we traveled in two 9 person Land Rovers that had roofs that popped up so we could stand and check out the wildlife. It was a great group and I had a great time on the trip. Unfortunately the trip was a litle too short...by the time we really started to get to know each other, it was over. We were all ready to get out of teh dust and dirt and back to a shower and a bed at the end though. I need to do some serious landry when we get to Zanzibar tonight.
We hit 3 parks to space out the driving a bit- the Serengeti is quite a long way from Arusha (or anywhere for that matter), so Lake Manyara makes a good first stop and then the Crater breaks up the trip some more. We spent an enormous amount fo time in the Land Rovers. Quite a bit of it was doing game drives in the park with the top open for game viewing, but we covered a ton of miles (or kilometers I guess) on very bad roads to get to and from everywhere. Sometimes our driver would pull off of the road and cruise along thru the open dirt becuase that was better than the actual road. If anyone is thinking of doing a Serengeti trip, be prepared for lots of bumpy car travel. They do have flying options, but they require private charters so they are expensive.
Anyway, I need to go pack for our afternoon flight from Kilimanjaro International to Zanzibar, a tropical island off the coast of Tanzania. We're going to spend a week there and then head into Dar Es Salaam to take care of some business for our trip into Mozambique. The original plan was to travel over land into Malawi and then over into Mozambique. We knew that was ambitious but, the more we looked at it, the more we decided that we didn't want to spend a minimum of 2 days of bus travel in and 2 days of bus travel out to get into Malawi. So now it looks like the plan is to fly from Dar Es ESalaam to Pemba on the coast in northern Mozambique. We'll explore the islands off shore there for 5 days and then fly down to Beira in central Mozambique and pick up the overland travel down there where the stops are closer together. Kili->safari->Zanzibar is a pretty well traveled tourist route so we will be excited to bust out of that into Mozambique next week. Hopefully LAM (Mozambique Air) will cooperate. Booking and paying for flights is not that easy and the flights are only once a week in many cases, so we'll see how it goes.
Off to pack for Zanzibar!
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