Heading out

 

It’s Thursday morning and we’ve begun our trip back home.  These airstrips are wild. They’re just dirt and there is animal poop all over them. Too funny. The whole trip will take about 40 hours from beginning to end. We left our camp this morning around 8 and got to our first plane. It’s another 11-seater. Lake Manyara is the second of four stops we are making. Our final destination is Kilimanjaro, located right next to Mt Kilimanjaro Africa’s tallest mountain. We are here now but it is so cloudy that we can’t see the mountain at all. From there we fly to Nairobi, then a 9-hour flight to London, 7-hour flight to New York and an hour back home. We wait for 4-6 hours at most airports! Yuck. 

We didn’t see much new on our drive yesterday. Most of the animals were quiet and grazing. Still I could look at the zebras giraffes elephants and lions all day. I have a picture of a baby Zebra nursing. When we were driving towards the baby and mommy, the mother tried to move off the road but the baby insisted. So we stopped and watched. It was very cute. This morning when we left the camp there were vultures feasting on a dead wildebeest. It had been killed by a lion last night and it was about 1/2 mile from our tent and camp! It’s been an amazing trip and I had so much fun. One of our favorite things is that the asst manager at our last camp, kept saying “you are MOSTLY welcome”.  Josh and I keep saying that we mostly like each other and giggle.

In the Wild

 I think I mentioned that we are now in our final camp. This camp is the most rustic. What I really mean is it’s the most in the wild of all the camps. So it’s only a tent just like any other tent in the US. I was really nervous last night. Nobody attacked us but the wildebeest definitely came through. 

And came through very close. We know this because of the smashed grass around the tent and also because of all the poop. But the real clincher was there are 12 tent polls and one of them was knocked down as the Willder beast made their way through our camp. They were that close to our tent to knock down a pole. 

We took a shower which is just a bucket full of hot water that comes out of a showerhead. It’s kind of in the open. There is only one hairdryer in the entire camp and it’s down by the public toilet. So my hair looks horrendous but it is clean. 

This morning we went on a great game drive and saw close elephants, lions and a gazillion hippos. 

I had a little moment with the hippos. Two brothers started biting each other and knocking each other down and it felt like déjà vu at the Blumkin house when the kids were little. 

I decided to skip this afternoon‘s game drive just to relax a little at my tent. Josh went on the game drive so I’m just here writing and reading. Our “Butler“ brought me some tea and ginger cookies. I thought life can’t get any better. Then as he was leaving he said you might end up seeing a leopard from your tent. There is one around here. Oy vay. 

A New Day in a New Place

A few days age  we went on a longer morning drive which turned into a full day drive. We peed in the middle of the savanna twice and had lunch out there. I don’t love peeing in the open. We saw many animals today, but the coolest thing we saw was wildebeest crossing the River. It can be very dangerous because of the crocodiles hippos on the river at places. We saw a huge herd well over 1000 probably several thousand Wildebeest  cross the river. Some of the wildebeest leaped into the river and it was Truly amazing. Fortunately all the wildebeests crossed safely. Josh was hoping to see a a crocodile or hippo attack. But I think that’s pretty rare. I timed the video we took at 13 minutes but I started it the timer a few minutes after it had begun the entire thing probably lasted 15 to 20 minutes. The entire time the river was packed with wildebeests and later on zebra. We also saw another pride of lions today. This time one of the Lions came up and laid down about 5 feet from our jeep she was using the jeep for shade. Apparently this is totally normal and we didn’t need to be scared. FYI, Joshua was scared! Yesterday one of the lions we saw was laying on its back with its paws up which means that no animals should approach because there are lions there.

Today we moved to on new camp. It is the most rustic camp of all. They are literally just tents. The floor is dirt with rugs over them. The shower is outside with a bucket for water. We saw much poop all different kinds which tells us the animals wander through camp. This is really cool. We’re not allowed to go out at night without an escort. We’re going on our first game drive here in about a half an hour. I’m sure we will see some really neat stuff. On the way from the airport to the camp we saw more than 20 hippos in the water including baby hippos. That’s all for now.

Breakfast in the Bush (With spots)

 

and off to the side were the spots  (take a few moments to let your eyes adjust):

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!

            Sent from my iPhone 

 

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??