The travels of Tim and Megan: Africa Safari: Tanzania

Day 16: Nairobi to Arusha, Tanzania

Sunday 23 October 2011 was a very exciting day - it was the day we entered another new country (Tanzania), it was the day we picked up some new tour members, it was Rugby World Cup final day, but most importantly of all, it was Megan and Tim's first wedding anniversary! We woke at 6.15am, our bellies still full from all you can eat meat at Carnivore the night before. We showered, packed up our things and tried to eat some breakfast in the camp restaurant. If only we had not been so full - it was a superb breakfast of toast, bacon, eggs, sausage and baked beans. Sadly we did not do it justice.

We left the camping ground and drove across Nairobi to the Boulevard Hotel, where we picked up 16 new tour members, bringing the total number of our tour to 30 - a full truck! It was a tight squeeze and the 14 of us who had already been together for three weeks were not too happy about it. But such is life. We visited a Nairobi shopping centre to stock up on supplies and get rid of our remaining Kenyan shillings, then we departed Nairobi and headed south towards Tanzania. Our tour leader, Mwangi, was sad to be leaving his home country, the "best country in the world" as he often referred to it.

The Rugby World Cup final kicked off at 11am local time - we were stuck in a truck, bumping along the road towards Tanzania, so we could not watch the game, but we (and the other few Kiwis on the truck) followed every nail-biting second of the match on our blackberries/mobile phones, etc. New Zealand started well and scored an early try, but missed a few kicks at goal, so could not establish a decent lead. In the second half, a Stephen Donald penalty extended the lead to 8-0, but France came roaring back (as they always do) and scored a try to close the gap to 8-7. France were all over us in the second half and it looked like a late dropped goal or penalty would break our hearts again, but somehow we held on and eeked out the narrowest of wins. It was a huge relief for us, rather than jubilation. We were gracious winners on the truck, but we did take every opportunity over the coming weeks to remind the Aussies on the tour that we are now the holders of both the rugby and rugby league world cups...

The rugby helped to distract us for a couple of hours on what was a big driving day. We stopped for lunch just before the border and then after crossing into Tanzania (country number 54 for Tim and 58 for Megan) we carried on down to a town called Arusha, where we would camp for the night. It was amazing how different the landscape was in Tanzania, compared with Kenya and Uganda - there was no greenery at all - just dry, dusty dirt everywhere. We got a decent view of Mt Kilimanjaro on the way - pretty rare, as the top of it is almost always covered in cloud. It was stunning.

We arrived at the camp in Arusha at around 5pm. We set up our tents and had a few beers in the bar, as we got to know some of the new members of the tour. The day kept getting better for us, as Arsenal beat Stoke 3-1, but even more enjoyable than that, Manchester United got thrashed 6-1 in their own backyard by Manchester City. Ahhhh.

The new people were mainly very nice, although there were a couple of "interesting" characters thrown in. At our meeting in the evening, there were a few stupid questions from the newbies...when Mwangi was telling us about an optional activity of swimming with dolphins in Zanzibar, a guy asked if the dolphins would be in cages! Another guy queried whether the ferry to Zanzibar would be a return trip...now let's think for a minute...as opposed to a one-way ferry to Zanzibar, where we will all stay until we die???

Sadly the bar had no champagne for us to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we had a couple of drinks anyway and it was a fun night to cap off a brilliant day.

Day 17: Arusha

We were allowed a little sleep-in on Monday, except that two old German dudes who had joined our tour were up at 5.30am yapping away to each other outside our tents. Seriously! Still, we should be grateful that that was our only encounter with the Germans that morning. One poor girl opened her tent up to the view of an old German man completely starkers in the tent opposite hers...not a pleasant view to start the day! This sparked many jokes about seeing snakes in the camping ground etc etc. Much hilarity.

We had breakfast at 7.30am and packed up our tents in readiness for the three-day Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti excursion. At 8.45am, we went into Arusha town to get some supplies and mainly to get some Tanzanian currency. We needed to withdraw 1.2 million Tanzanian shillings - not as much as it sounds, but still a fair whack of cash really, and this caused us plenty of problems at the banks. Back at camp, we had showers and lunch and got all sorted for the crater trip. At about 3pm, we were picked up by smaller 4x4 jeeps (8 people per vehicle) and we drove west for about three hours from Arusha to a place called Karatu, not far from the crater's edge. It was a very hot and sweaty drive and we would not have access to showers for the next two days!

We arrived at our camp in Karatu at about 6pm and, after pitching our tents, we had a drink in the beautiful bar (next to the beautiful swimming pool). Dinner was pretty average - we did not have our regular chef, Mwai, for the three-day optional crater trip, and the difference in quality was obvious. We pretty much crashed straight after dinner. We were in our tent by 8.35pm and asleep before 9.30pm - but we had a 4.30am wake-up call coming!

Day 18: Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti

We got up super early and left the camp at 5.45am. We drove for 20-30 minutes to the entrance of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where we got clearance before driving up the hill to the crater rim. We stopped at a lookout spot at the crater rim and had some photos looking down to the magnificent crater below. The view was spectacular.

The Ngorongoro Crater is a large volcanic caldera, measuring about 25km x 17km with steep hills on all sides. The crater is 610m deep. The crater acts as a natural enclosure for a wide variety of wildlife in a relatively small area. A population of 25,000 large animals lives in the crater, including the rare black rhinoceros, the hippopotamus (not very common in this part of Tanzania, as it is so usually so dry), wildebeest, zebra, eland and both Grant's and Thomson's gazelles. The crater has the densest known population of lions and, on the crater rim, are leopards, elephants and buffalo.

It did not take us long to spot some of the wildlife. About one minute down the road from the lookout, where we had our photo stop, a large male lion ran across the road in front of our jeep, snarling at us as he ran off into the bushes on the side of the road. Eek! Just along the road was a decent sized herd of buffaloes, munching on some grass. We drove over the rim and down hill into the crater itself and it was packed with animals. Almost immediately, we saw two male and two female lions - they thought about having a crack at some wart hogs who were roaming about nearby...but they decided against it. Lions are very lazy!

We saw ostriches, hyenas, flamingos, elephants, hippos, lots of different birds, a cheetah, wart hogs, a few giraffes and a very distant rhino (apparently) - and all before lunch time! It was a magical place. It was very different terrain from the Masai Mara game park - here there was dry yellow grass and dirt, very flat plains and few trees - not a lot of cover for animals to hide in or to sneak up on prey. Everything is out in the open.

We had lunch in the crater and a few of our group got attacked by hawks and monkeys! They appeared to be working together, the hawks swooping down from the sky trying to grab food from our hands and the monkeys pouncing on anything that fell as we ducked for cover.

After lunch, we drove out of the crater and continued west / north-west towards the Serengeti National Park. The Serengeti National Park is a large nature reserve in north-west Tanzania. It is actually a continuation of the Masai Mara National Park, but on the Tanzanian side of the border. It is most famous for its annual migration of more than 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 zebra, who migrate to the Masai Mara in search of water and grass when the Serengeti gets too dry. It is widely regarded as the best wildlife reserve in Africa due to its density of predators and prey. The park covers 14,763 sq km of grassland plains and savanna.

Amazingly, as we entered the Serengeti National Park, the landscape became even more arid, dry, dusty and flat. We saw several dust storms, that whipped up out of nothing, forming a huge twister that swirled around for a minute or so and then died away - photo below. We spent a few hours on a game drive through the Serengeti and we saw ostriches, the usual grazers (zebra, wildebeest, gazelles and the like) and a few very hot and lazy looking lions, resting in the long yellow grass. But the undoubted highlight of the day, and one of the overall highlights of the whole tour was seeing a beautiful leopard resting on a log out in the open.

It was getting close to the end of the day and there were thick black stormy clouds rolling in. We were just about to head to our camp, when we saw a few jeeps parked up alongside a log. We joined them and soon heard rumours of a leopard hiding behind the log. We waited patiently, but started to think that we would not see the leopard, if it was even there at all! But just when we were contemplating leaving, the magnificent big cat strolled out from behind the log, leaped up on top of it and sat enjoying the last few moments of sunshine of the day.

Everyone in the jeep started snapping away on their cameras like crazy. It is so rare to see a leopard at all, but to see one so close and to get such an unobstructed view as this was quite magical. It must have sat there for more than 10 minutes, almost posing for our photos! And it got even better, as a small dark coloured cub jumped up and ran along the log to join its mother! When mother and cub eventually disappeared again, we too made tracks for our camp, as it was starting to rain.

We were camping at a very basic campsite in the middle of the Serengeti. There were no fences around the camp, so we were warned to be very careful moving about the camp at night - any wild animals could find their in! We had to pitch our tents on wet ground, dinner was really bad and the camp was pretty crap, but none of that could dampen our spirits - everyone was buzzing from the amazing leopard sighting!

After dinner, we were sitting around the camp fire, and we had heard that a hyena had been spotted lurking on the edge of the campsite. Mike, our South African friend, announced that there was no way in the world that a hyena would come into the camping ground when there were lots of people around. Five seconds later, a large hyena ran through the middle of the campsite, just metres from where we were all sitting, as if to say to Mike, "na na na na na". It was very funny.

Day 19: Serengeti

Wednesday started with a very poor breakfast. We had to fight just to get hold of some toast, and even then there was no butter and no clean knives left. Not cool. Eventually, we got some omelets, which made us happier. We had a morning game drive in the Serengeti, although it started out a little disappointing. We didn't see many animals at all - we had possibly left the camp too late in the morning and missed the early activity. We saw a few lions dozing amongst some bushes, and some ugly storks drinking in a pond, but then not much at all for an hour or so.

Things did get better though. We returned to the log and saw our leopard again and this time she had not one, but two little cubs with her! Leopards are rather territorial and especially since this leopard had two young cubs, she would probably hang around that same area for a number of weeks. We sat and watched the leopard for a while, as she licked her cubs clean and then kept a close eye on them as they ran along the log playing with each other. They were very cute.

Later we saw a large pride of 11 or 12 lions - three of the females were stalking a big herd of wildebeest, while the rest of the pride watched on eagerly and kept well covered in the long grass. The three lionesses very slowly closed in towards the wildebeest and we all got rather excited about the possibility of witnessing a lion kill! But they couldn't quite get within striking distance before the wildebeest ran off. It was a shame, but it was still fascinating to watch the strategy and precision with which the lions stalked their prey.

We returned to our Serengeti camp at about 11am and packed everything up. We had a good lunch of pasta, rice and potatoes (carbo loading!) before the massive drive back through the Serengeti, past the Ngorongoro Crater and on to Arusha. We arrived back at out Arusha camp at about 5pm and it was pretty full. We were all very dirty and dusty, so there was a queue for the showers, but we all got through eventually. As a special treat for all concerned, Tim shaved a handlebars moustache - lovely.

Day 20: Arusha to Dar Es Salaam

As was becoming fairly common, today was a massive driving day. We were up at 4.30am and left the camp in Arusha at 5.45am. Things took longer in the mornings with 30 people on the truck - breakfast, packed lunches, dishes, loading the truck all took more time. We smashed our tour record with today's effort - 14 hours to get to the new campsite in Dar Es Salaam!

We had a couple of quick stops, including a drinks break at a place that had loads of oranges for sale. Mwangi bought us a big bag of oranges and a bag of tangerines to share on the truck. We drove past plenty of sisal plantations, which are common in Tanzania. They are fields full of plants that look like massive pineapples. They use the plants to make rope.

We actually arrived in Tanzania's capital city, Dar Es Salaam, at about 4pm, but very heavy traffic slowed our progress and then we had to wait for more than two hours to board a ferry for a five minute ride across the river. The wait was made worse as we were parked up outside the fish market for most of it, and the fish did not smell pleasant. Not cool.

Dar Es Salaam is the largest city in Tanzania and has a population of around 3 million people. It is situated on the eastern coastline, on the Indian Ocean, and it is a very hot and humid place.

We made it to our camp at about 8.00pm and pitched our tents in the dark. Our task was made harder, as the two old German guys had taken our tent, so we had to go looking for it and get it back off them. Seriously! After a late dinner, we crashed. It was an intensely hot and humid night. We were sweating profusely all night - disgusting. But tomorrow we would be going to Zanzibar!