Arrived in Tanzania

 View from Today's Lodge

I haven’t talked about the food yet. It’s been wonderful. However one night for dinner the choice was two types of curry. I don’t like curry. The choices were fish curry or goat curry. But they did have creamed spinach and brown rice so I was fine. They have crepes every day for breakfast plus omelettes plus porridge. And of course bacon! When we’re out all day on a game drive they pack is a hot lunch. The guide cooks it for us. 

I was speaking to one of the guided about Covid. Apparently they were not hit badly with Covid around here. There were some hospitalizations but very few deaths. It’s quite a rural area which makes sense because it’s a game reserve. The hotel closed down for 6 months but paid the employees 1/2 pay. 60% of the employees are local.  

We are now on a 11 seat airplane  to get to the next camp. After this we take a bus to the border, another plane ride then a car takes us to camp. I’m exhausted already. By the way, none of the airstrips except Nairobi have any buildings. They are not airports but air strips. You get off the plane, pick up your luggage from the side, and walk over to the parking lot where there are jeeps waiting for you.

A word about the roads   The primary roads of which there are very few, all packed dirt. All the other roads are grass that have some tire tracks on it. There are, of course , no road signs. It really is quite amazing that the guides can find their way around. They buy new tires for the jeeps every 2 years. 

Last rambling, they put hot water bottles in the bed at night. It lasts until morning. Heaven!

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Last drive in Kenya

This blog is for today. Eventually I'll send yesterdays. 

We started the day seeing baboons, which were running through a local schoolyard. The school looks like it has maybe 50 students and they looked like they were kindergarten to 8th grade. The teachers and kids had to stomp and scare the baboons away. Next we saw two hippos. 

I know we're not supposed to body shame but....

 Then we saw a small but still amazing wildebeest crossing. 

Such perseverance, such dust. The place of the crossing, the Mara river, had 2 crocodiles and many hippos 

Then, our guide, found a male lion with a female and 2 other males.  It was in the prime of its life span. It was laying next to a female and there was an older male with lots of scars by it's eye nearby. Then the guide realized that the lion was mating and we saw it! They mate many times a day for about four days    When the female was done she swatted the male off  . It was interesting to see the behaviors and see how the older and younger male lions interacted with each other. Our guide thinks they were brothers or maybe cousins. 

Next we found a mama cheetah with four very young cubs the size of a house cat. The cubs were playing and the mama watched over them, calling them back when they got too far from her. That was pretty spectacular.

We continued on and found a freshly killed wildebeest with 4 lions eating it!  It wasn't as gory as I was hoping, but it was still very cool. Very wild. 

 In the afternoon we went on the lookout for cheetahs and leopards but only found two young male cheetahs - asleep. They did not care about us and barely moved during the 20 minutes we watched them. After that a large storm was clearly headed our way so we hightailed it back to camp. 

But not before seeing a pair elephants in a minor fight, we weren't very close and one was much bigger than the other.  Then when we had almost made it back to camp we came across a large elephant herd and stopped to watch them. They had some young elephants with them and the king elephant let us know that we were too close by flapping his ears. 

We quickly moved back so they could cross the road only to see the tiniest baby elephant with the biggest ears  It was very cool.

Tomorrow we move to another camp so you won't hear from me 

Melanie 

Big Stretch

 Someone want a tummy rub??

Wake up

We had asked for a wake up call this morning. What we didn't realize is that meant some monkeys would jump on the top of our tent a half an hour before we asked for the wake up. I sat straight up in bed. But I did smile. Josh didn't smile.

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First game drive

We are in the Massai Mara. Massai is an African tribe and Mara in Swahili means the plains dotted with trees. Yesterday was our first game drive. There are 12black rhinos in Massai Mara (which is bigger than Massachusetts) and we saw 2 of them. A mom and her calf. Pretty cool. We also saw 5 female lions and their 7 cubs. A few elephants, zebras, and giraffes. I love Africa. It's hard to say the best thing about the tent but I'll tell you some fun things. It's in the forest and the monkeys jump from the trees to our roof which is very loud and startling. Then we hear them running across the roof. We found out that they get into the tent by jumping on the door handle (yes the tent has a door). The jumping turns the handle and then they're in! Clever aren't they? We found this out because Josh accidentally left a bag of cookies in the room and when we came back the bag was ripped and the cookies gone. When I opened the door to go to lunch there was a monkey sitting there waiting for me. I made josh walk in front. They have red tails and a white nose. Pretty cute really. Oh and their are warthogs all over the camp. Let me tell you they are not pretty.

Melanie

Massai Mara

We are now in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. We have our first game drive at four today. But just on the ride back to the hotel from the airport  we saw an elephant, zebras, gazelles. There are monkeys and warthogs all over the hotel. We are in a tent which is very very nice. They asked us not to leave snacks in the room. I didn’t realize josh,  did leave a small bag of cookies. When we got back the cookies were ripped open and gone and there were crumbs all over the room. Apparently the Monkeys got in although I’m not sure how.

Off to Africa

 Melanie and Josh B. Took off from Rochester this morning on a trip to Kenya and Tanzania. Them plan is that they will be documenting their travels here on Blogger.