Little Tidbits.

As we were leaving Arusha with our driver, we passed by some rather large coffee plantations. They grow Arabica coffee here, and it is really tasty stuff. Nicole asked our driver to stop so she could get a picture and he happily pulled over. That's the great thing about spending a bit more and having our own driver and vehicle, we can stop whenever we please and we always have a window seat! If he sees us taking a picture out the window, or hears us mention something that we see, he pulls right over and explains thing to us or waits until we take the picture. A very agreeable fellow.

We also passed banana plantations, sugar cane fields, and oddly enough, rice fields (rice paddies?)

The land outside Arusha is very badly eroded, there are areas that look almost like a desert they are so dry and dusty.

We also saw some camels in a field, which was sort of unusual. It was unusual to me at any rate.

School here is very expensive. Hamisi could not believe it when we told him that school is basically free for our children and that it is law for kids under 16 to go to school. Most kids here cannot afford primary school and University is far beyond most peoples grasp. When an average family makes MAYBE $300 a year and high school can run as much as $1500 a year...well, you can see why it's almost impossible for so many young people to get an education.

Dinner at the Lake Manyara lodge was the most excellent buffet. Beef, chicken, lasagna, fish, all sorts of veggies prepared in different ways, rice, some curries, salads and a huge table of desserts. We were very impressed!

When we returned to our room we found our beds turned down, mosquito nets in place and little candies on our pillows.

After dinner there was a group of young folks who performed some traditional songs and dances while wearing traditional clothes and face-paint. I'm sure it was partially packaged for us tourists, especially noticable as we watched one young guy dancing with wild abandon, but we kept getting glimpses of his red Nike shorts beneath his robe.

The wind was getting quite strong, although it was a very warm wind and quite refreshing. The bathrooms all have spaces at the top of the walls where the wall meets the ceiling and this space is just filled with a screen. It's about 8 inches high and is meant for ventilation and breezes I guess. The wind was whipping through this space so hard that the shower curtain looked like it was possessed and it sounded like it too as the wind howled and screamed through the bathroom. A very strange feeling to walk into your bathroom and have to control the shower curtain before you can sit on the toilet.

We slept very well and we are loving our mosquito nets, it's like being in a little cocoon. I am considering getting one for my bed at home!

Jan 23.

This morning we went to the morning buffet which was really nice. They even had an omelet bar, plus hash browns, bacon, sausage etc as well as all sorts of fruits and cereals. We have become addicted to the slices of pineapple served at every meal, so fresh and juicy. We sat and looked at the vista of Lake Manyara as we ate. All the different shades of blues and greens--a little hazy in the morning mist, it looked very ethereal. I still cannot believe we are here.

We watched 2 men cut the grass with scythes. They were very diligent and it looked as smooth and as even as if a power mower had been used.. We were ready by 8:30 and Hamisi appeared just as we were gathering up our box lunches, so off we went.

(the box lunches are all set out "buffet style" and you can pick what you would like and pack your own little lunch. They supply a sandwich, fried chicken, carrot and cuke sticks, bananas, apples, cake, a small chocolate bar, a juice box and a bottle of water. Sometimes there were hardboiled eggs and cheese as well, so it was quite a healthy and filling lunch.)

It was the start of a pretty long day. We left Lake Manyara and headed towards the Serengeti- driving on a major highway where we saw all sorts of interesting things. Locals plowing fields using cows and/or donkeys hitched to an old fashioned wooden yoke, and some people who were plowing and didn't even have that luxury; they were simply using a hoe. The land looked very fertile, lots of green maize seedlings, but if the rains don't come, they'll die. The landscape had a lot of rolling hills, and quite a few trees as well. The trees looked like our poplar trees until you got close to them and you can see that the leaves look like small ferns. They are called "silk oak." People walking everywhere.

We passed through the small town of Karatu, which looked very nice, it seemed clean and had a lot of little restaurants, curio shops, souviner stands and tiny little guest houses. It gets a lot of tourist trade, people who are not on an organized safari but instead are travelling between Lake Manyaro, the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater on their own. It seemed like sort of pleasant place. Hamisi said there it is mostly populated by Ethiopian and Iraqui people.

To get to the Serengeti, you pass through the Ngorongoro area. You drive up, up, up a series of steep and twisty roads and then you stop at the top and look down, down, down the other side into the crater. We didn't descend that day, that's the day after tomorrows adventure, instead we circled around the crater and go down the other side to the Serengeti. It's like a jungle up here, very thick and green.

It's a $60 transit fee to go through the Ngorongoro, but that is all fed back into the upkeep and maintenance of the park. I will say that the Tanzanian government takes extremely good care of their national parks.

As we came down the other side, the land became very flat and dry and looked like you imagine the Serengeti to look. We started to see gazelles everywhere, both the Thompson Gazelles and the Ranch Gazelles, as well as zebras grazing all over, and wildebeests? I had no idea we would see them in the millions, and I do not exaggerate, we were fortunate enough to catch the migration and they were stretched out as far as the eye could see, it was amazing. They, and the zebras wander around beside the road and you think you are going to get a marvelous picture but as soon as you get close the zebras turn their back on you and the wildebeest kick up their heels and fling their heads about and do that silly wildebeest dance--tails flicking back and forth, it makes you smile to watch them, silly beasts.

We stopped at a designated place to eat our lunch and we were approached by all these little iridescent blue birds- black heads, shiny little eyes and a yellow stripe on their throats, but their feathers glow like blue gemstones. They hopped around our feet looking for crumbs and I was so interested in watching them that I never noticed the sneaky little grey bird who swooped down and tried to steal the sandwich right oiut of my hand.

This lunch area is where the drivers pay the entrance fee to get into the Serengeti area even though we had entered the actual part area a few miles earlier. Another $50 each. Good thing all tis is covered in the cost of our safari fee.

We headed off into the arid, dusty, wheat coloured area and almost instantly Hamisi spotted a cheetah stalking a gazelle. It was a ways away and we had to use binoculars to see her clearly, but it was still pretty exciting to watch!

Turning a corner we almost ran over a Topi, which is a large reddish animal, similar to a deer, but much stronger looking. Their front end stands higher than their back end so they almost look like they are stretching their necks out. It just stood there, still as stone, looking as if it were trying to ignore us and that if it didn't see us, then we wouldn't see it. We saw a lot of them standing like this, just staring intently off into the distance...all alone, just standing on the horizon. Hamisi said that the Topi's are sort of a sentinal, because they are large, they look for enemies and the gazelles and other smaller animals can graze in peace as the Topi will spot something coming and give the warning. I have a few good pictures of these fellows, which I'll post soon.

We saw so many birds, and our driver knows them all-- blacksmith plovers, grey herons, secretary birds, ostriches, crowned cranes, white egrets, stilt jacks and 2 huge nubian vultures leering at us with their wings outstretched, they must have a wingspan of 6 feet. They were a little scary looking.

We also saw reedbucks, redbucks, waterbucks and springboks, haartbeestes and wildebeests and of course gazelles, zebras and the ornery, cranky and dangerous Cape Buffalo, not to mention warthogs busily trotting off as if they had somewhere important to be.

The haartbeest, when his horns are full grown, looks like he has a heart on the top of his head, his horns grow outwards and then curve in, heart shaped.

We drove until about 3 PM and then headed to the hotel. The land is very flat, but suddenly the hotel appeared out of nowhere. It's built around these giant rock formations that are scattered through the Serengeti, every few miles you will come across these giant boulders some are 3 or 4 stories high. These are the places where the lions will go during the rainy season, they have little hidey holes in between the rocks. Some places have rocks stacked on top of each other and they look like a strong wind would blow them over, but I guess they have stood here for millenia now.

So we checked into the room, which had 3 small beds so we happily used the middle bed for our stuff and as we were happily unpacking we heard a "knock-knock" on the door and a hotle staff memebr apologetically told us that we had been put in the wrong room and we'd have to move. What is it with us and room changes? So we were moved upstairs to a room that overlooked the Serengeti. The patio door opens, but ther is no actual deck there, just a railing so that you don't tumble down and a ledge that is maybe 8 inches wide.

We can watch the gazelles in "our" backyard, not 15-20 feet away and also in the evening we watch families of warthogs running past, screeching little piggy sounds and making everything else scatter. I saw some cape Buffalo wander by one night and a few zebra as well. What a backyard!

The rest of the hotel area is filled with Red Hyrax, whuich is a really cute little thing, sort of like a giant guinea pig, about the size of a large cat. They scamper all over the place and play in the little pond.

We were told by the staff to not only keep the door to our room locjked at all times, but when we leave the room to also put our stuff in the closet and lock it too. Apparently the monkeys and baboons are very sneaky and will get in and demolish your things given the slightest chance!

As we look out our window we saw all sorts of monkeys running by and then we saw a procession of baboons, about 5 or 6 of them coming out of the grass towards the hotel. They stopped beneath our balcony and then wandered to the front of the hotel. We ran to our front door and the last we saw of them was their red backsides as they wandered nonchalantly up the path to the restaurant. I half expected to see them at a table, holding a menu upsidedown when we went for dinner.

We were still trying to unpack when I glanced out the window and saw, sitting on our ledge, a mama monkey nursing her baby who could not have been more than 2 or 3 weeks old. I whispered to Nicole to come and see and we took a few pictures through the glass and mama didn't seem the least concerned so we slowly opened the window and she was fine with letting us take as many pictures as we wanted. Then the baby decided to clamber around a bit and as it tried to be adventurous mama held on to the end of it's tail so that it wouldn't fall or get too far away. Then another mama came over with her little one, who was a bit older and the 2 little ones played and hugged while the 2 moms groomed each other, one mom would lie with her arms outstretched as the other one would pick and clean her. We were just enthralled. We finally forced oursleves to go for dinner, although we had to find fresh towels as in the front desks haste to move us they gave us a room with someone else's towels in it. I swear, we have the worst room luck, but if we hadn't had this room we never would have seen the monkeys so close, so that was worth it all.