Quest for Beer - Africa (Tanzania)

Ok, I’m back. Sorry about the delay in the blog updates (just been taking care of some housekeeping).

I think we got to sleep in a bit this morning. Breakfast was in no rush. Breakfasts usually consisted of toast, peanut butter, jam, honey, porridge, breakfast sausage (hotdogs), and eggs. David, pictured holding the big pot, was our cook for the entire trip! Cooking for 28 people, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 2 weeks is no easy task - he was awesome! The dinners with goat and/or beef were always a huge hit, and it was amazing at how many soups he came up with.

This was a little gem, it seemed everyone thought it was a shower (there was another shower close by and the tarps looked the same - and there were other, not so clean, toilets with a different style tarp - thus the confusion). That’s too much information, I know, but here’s some more. I got to be the first to use it!

Ok, on to the drive. Another long, hot, dusty day in the landrover. We are heading back to Ngorongoro Crater, which meant driving back across the Serengeti. This elephant was out for a morning stroll.

We got very lucky and our driver spotted this leopard up in a tree. You can barely see its paw hanging down.

There were many Masai villages close to Ngorongoro, but it was hard to take photos of them from the landrover, and if you stop to take photos, they run up to you and ask for money. I snuck this photo in, though, although he did come over and tried to sell Mark his spear.

We got to camp around 4pm or so. For some reason we had to set up our own tents tonight - that was a challenge. We played some frisbee for a while and then got interrupted by this guy. He walked about 10 feet from our dinner tables and then proceeded to hang out near the bathroom stalls.

This photo is courtesy of Cindy (check ‘em out, she has some great photos!)

This was the last campsite - one more night of tenting it. Firewood was scarce and after seeing the elephant, we didn’t venture too far away to look for it. Sean H. and I walked about 10 feet past the toilets and he shined his headlamp into 3 sets of glowing eyes that belonged to these huge water buffalos - we made a quick exit and went back to the fire with no wood. Needless to say we partied again that night - it took a while for the fire to get going, but we managed a nice one with what little fuel there was.

(photo from Cindy)

The plan was to get up a 5am so we could be heading down into the crater at 6am (then out by noon - they only allow so many groups for a certain period of time in the crater). I lost a bet to Madhu about the fire being hot enough to melt glass - it actually did melt it, but did not disappear completely.

Jonathan, Adie, Brad, Jen, and Teresa hanging out at the dinner tables after the elephant went by.

Tags: Leopard, Ngorongoro, Serengeti, The Safari, Travel, Water Buffalo

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 4:20 pm and is filed under The Safari, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.