Africa

Jambo (hello in Massai, we think)
We are flying from Kilimanjaro to Luxor and then on to Jordon. Internet service in Tanzania was not good. We were fortunate to get out an e-mail to our blog master, Jilayne, explaining that we would not be able to post a blog until this weekend. We have no idea when you will get this blog but you will be getting two for the price of one. What a bargain!

Yesterday in Tanzania is probably in the top three experiences of this trip for both of us. We left our lodge at 8:00 in the morning and headed into the crater. Ngorongoro Crater is a volcanic crater that is 2.3 million years old. Our lodge was on the rim of the crater at 7800 feet altitude. The floor of the crater is 2000 feet below the rim and encompasses 125 square miles. It took us over 20 minutes to get to the crater floor. Tim, impatient as always, bugged the driver of our jeep that we had been on the road for 20 minutes and had not seen an animal. Within a couple of minutes we encountered a bunch of Zebra’s. For the next 4 hours we did not go 15 minutes without seeing new animals. Our first sightings were Zebra’s followed by Cape Buffalo, Thompson and Grant gazelles, Wildebeest and warthogs. Soon after we saw a hyena right next to the road eating it’s kill. Actually, it was probably some other animal’s kill. Nearby were two different kinds of Jackals hoping for leftovers! Next we drove through a troop of Baboons. These are actually quite dangerous members of the ape family and have been known to kill Leopards. Soon after we came up to several other jeeps parked on the road. There were two Lions in the brush next to a small river. We watched for 5 minutes or so as they pretty much just lay there, occasionally looking in our direction. All of the other jeeps moved on but we stayed put watching. Our patience was rewarded as both Lions got up and walked out onto the plain. We watched them for another 10 minutes until they finally disappeared back down in the brush. Before lunch we had three more encounter s with lions. One of them was exciting because a lioness and a cape buffalo were staring each other down. The cape buffalo is about the only animal in the crater that the lions will not tangle with. Another high point of the morning was going to a small spring fed pond where there must have been at least 50 hippopotamus. There were also 5 male elephants at the edge of the pond. In the crater the young male elephants and the females and baby elephants live on the edge of the crater where there is plenty of food. Only the old males live in the crater itself. These “retired” elephants, as our guide put it, were about 50 years old, had large tusks and were much larger than the Indian elephants we had ridden in Asia. We had a box lunch picnic in a wooded area in the crater where we had to constantly shoo away monkeys that were trying to steal our food. After lunch we had the two most impressive sightings of the day. First we came across two lionesses nursing five cubs. This was occurring no more than 20 feet from our jeep. We could literally reach out and touch them. The lions were oblivious to our presence. We must have spent 30 minutes watching. The next big sighting was a black rhinoceros with a baby rhino. The term baby rhino is used loosely. Unlike the baby panda and lion cubs, there was nothing cuddly about the baby rhino.

After an incredible seven hours on the floor of the crater we drove up to the rim and visited a Massai village. It was on one hand extremely interesting to see but on another level a bit disturbing. We felt that some of what we saw was staged and not really how the tribe lived. We actually had a chance to go into one of the huts. It was tiny, dark, no lights, and very cramped. We also visited their school for 3 & 4 year-olds. They recited our alphabet and numbers for us. Their teacher was a 15 year-old Massai girl. We would have loved to spend another day in Tanzania. There were other places we could go to see different animals than we saw in the crater.
Our next posting will have details about Egypt.
Tim and Lynda