Hello everyone! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!! We apologize for not writing for such a long time but we have been busy doing a ton of stuff so this will most likely be a longer post to tell you all about it!
We left Liberia and felt quite ready to go. We had a great time on Robertsport, which is a wonderful beach in Liberia, over Christmas. We lay on the golden sand beach and swam in the beautiful warm water all day and in the evenings we hung out with our friend Liz as well as some Lebanese friends we met there. We spent Christmas evening eating delicious grilled goat meat, drinking beers and Black Label Whisky for Kevy and having sheesha all courtesy of these Lebanese guys while they sang Lebanese songs with a guitar and danced a little bit. It was not how we envisioned spending Christmas but it was a lot of fun.
So on December 28 we arrived into Nairobi, Kenya at 5:30am and strangely I ran into a friend, Sarah, from my program at SFU in the airport and she had been on the same flight since we stopped in Accra where she was connecting through...small world! We stayed one night in Nairobi, with our one day there focused on finding a shuttle to take us to Arusha, Tanzania, which we eventually found after walking around the whole city centre! We woke up early the next day for the 5 hour bus ride to Tanzania which Kevy thought was one of the most beautiful areas he had seen during the drive. It was cool to see the Masai villages and the wonderful landscape.
We arrived into Arusha and went to the hostel we had booked, Masai Camp, but they were quite rude and did not have the room we had reserved so we stayed one night there and then moved to a better backpacker’s hostel in Arusha, which has been much nicer and where we are currently staying. On our first day in Arusha we met a couple from New York who are on their one year-long honeymoon, traveling from London to Cape Town on their motorbike. They are really nice and we have been hanging out with them ever since. They were looking for people to go on a safari with so we decided to go along and left on December 31st for a 4 day safari!
I had been to the same parks before but this safari was more successful in the animals we saw and being with these friends was a blast. The first day was in Lake Manyara where we were slightly charged by a large male elephant, saw a bunch more elephants, baboons, giraffes, hippos, zebra, and many others. That night was New Years and we stayed up and drank 4 bottles of red wine and some port between the 4 of us while playing cards and charades. We had a really good time and being on safari was a great way to bring in the New Year!
The next day we drove to the Serengeti where we did an afternoon game drive and saw a pride of lions on a big rock lounging about, more lions with 4 lion cubs which was super cute, and a bunch of other things. We camped the whole time although the food was not very good. The night in the Serengeti was pretty funny because the four of us were going over to the bathrooms and we had a headlamp since it was dark and we saw these green glowing eyes staring right at us from not far away and it turned out to be a hyena!! We all ran away scared at first but then burst out laughing. The next day we did an early morning drive in the Serengeti which was awesome. We saw a leopard in a tree which is very hard to find, a herd of over 100 elephants all around us with little baby elephants, tons more zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, hippos, baboons etc. It was a great day and Kev loved the massive plains of the Serengeti.
We drove back that afternoon to the Ngorongoro Crater and camped that night at the ridge of the Crater. That night Kev and I woke up having to go to the bathroom and heard something outside and after an hour of listening and feeling the hot breath of some animal right outside our tent and feeling it pulling the grass out from under where we were laying, we realized it was a herd of zebra literally right outside our tent! It was crazy!
The next day we descended into the crater, which is about 260 square km so it isn’t very big and therefore animals are very easy to see there. Also, most of the crater is open plains without many trees so there aren’t many places for animals to hide and get shade. When we first got into the crater we rushed to where a bunch of vehicles were and saw a cheetah stalking some gazelles with hyenas hanging around waiting for the kill. It was so cool to see, especially since the cheetah was really close to us and it is very rare to ever see cheetah at all, let alone that close and stalking prey. We stayed with the cheetah for about an hour but eventually we left since it did not look like he was going to actually go after the gazelles. We also saw 3 black rhinos that day, which are also very rare to see and are only found in the crater now. One of the craziest things that happened was a 5 year old male lion walked right up to our vehicle and sat down right outside my window and literally stared me right in the face at eye-level! It was so insane! If the window wasn’t up, I could have reached out and touched him. It was a little creepy looking straight in the eyes of a huge male lion 30 cm away from my face! After that we came upon 3 more lions (2 males and 1 female) and they also came right up to our vehicles and lay in the shade the jeeps provided. It was super cool to have them lounging about right at our tires! Needless to say we got some really great pictures and video and our new camera has exceeded expectations. The day was really great and we saw a ton of animals.
We got back into Arusha and today (Jan. 5) Elizabeth and Jason left to go up to Kenya so we had a nice Indian dinner last night together. We really enjoyed having a week traveling with other people as Kevy and I have been by ourselves for most of the last 4 months. Now we have one more night in Arusha before we head down to Dar es Salaam for two nights and then we will go to Zanzibar for about a month! We are really excited to get to the beautiful white sand beaches of Zanzibar and to get to swim and snorkel etc. We will update again once we get to Zanzibar, though our internet use may be less frequent than it was before.
We hope everyone had a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We would love to hear how the holidays were for everyone so send us updates and we will keep you all posted on what we are doing.
We have also posted some safari pictures up on my (Tiffany) facebook account for your viewing pleasure!
Lots of love,
No comments:
Post a Comment