avelog

I just got back from my Serengeti, Ngorogoro Crater, and Lake Manyara safari, successfulling completing my goal of seeing leopards and cheetahs in Africa. The group I joined up with for the safari was comprised of 12 medical students doing electives at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre. They were very warm and welcoming, even though 8 were German and didn’t speak English very frequently.

We stopped at Lake Manyara first, and vast lake on the edge of the Rift Valley, with lush forest bordering it, and making up 60% of a National Park filled with zebras, giraffes, hippos, elephants, etc. After camping for the night, we made the long drive to the Serengeti, passing along the rim of the Ngorogoro Crater, the largest caldera (volcanic crater) in the world. In the Serengeti, we saw massive herds of wildebeest and zebras, paused in their annual migration to care for newborns and for the new mothers to recover their strength. We camped in the middle of the Serengeti, at a small wooded campsite, lions roaring in the night.

After sleeping, we went on a dawn game drive without much luck, although we did stop at a massive hippo pool in a stream, where at least a hundred hippos were submerged and crocodiles were sunning themselves on the rocks in the background. On the way out of the Serengeti, our drivers (in three jeeps) got a call about a leopard spotting, and we took a detour to check out the gorgeous creature resting in a tree, looking absolutely relaxed, its front legs dangling down from the branch and swaying in time to its breathing.

We spent the night camping on the rim of the crater, and three of us were up having late night beers and chatting under the stars when a buffalo wandered up through the darkness, munching away and staring at us. Considering that the buffalo is the second most aggressive animal apart from the hippo, we decided to back away slowly and observe it at a dashable distance from the concrete eating enclosure. The following morning we descended steeply into the crater and drove around for several hours observing the amazing volume of life in the crater: cheetahs, lions, rhinos, hippos, elephants, plenty of gazelles, wildebeest, buffalos, etc. Having met my twin goals of seeing a leopard and a cheetah in the wild, we drove back to Moshi, which lies in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Tomorrow I will join two Dutch people to climb Kili in six days, hoping that I don’t get altitude sickness. I’ve heard widely varying accounts about the proportion of people that successfully summit the mountain. Some say as little as 40% of climbers make it to the top. I’ll let you know in six days’ time!