Nathalie's Traveling Adventures: Safari time!

For our safari, we visited 3 parks: Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National Park. All three parks are quite different from one another! Tarangire is wooded, huge beautiful baobabs (they can be 3000 years old!!), a variety of plants and trees and many animals. The Ngorongoro Crater is a smaller area, animals are there year round, lake in the middle, wooded on the rim but grassy in the crater. The Serengeti is pure grasslands with a few acacia trees here and there. In this park, the animals migrate, following the rain and the green grass. Because of this, depending the time of year, you could see less animals. We saw lots of animals in this park, but most of the big numbers were now in Kenya.

All three parks offer great views of wildlife. We were treated to magnificent views of large and small animals. We saw the big 5 (lion, hippo, rhino, water buffalo and elephant) and many other species as well.

Baobab

So what do you do on a safari? Well, you sit in a jeep - in this case Toyota Land Cruisers, and ride all day looking for animals. You get your bones rattled as the roads are quite bumpy! When you see something interesting, you tell the driver to stop, if you want, you stand up and look at whatever it is you saw. Each person has their own window so it's easy for everyone to see. When the driver spots something or hears of something interesting on the radio, he drives you there.

It's clear the animals here are wild and you don't want to be walking around... you could very easily end up being dinner for something. What is sad is that the animals are so used to seeing a large amount of vehicles it's like they don't even see them anymore. The lions would walk right by not even looking at the vehicles. The antelopes looked at your while you drove by, not moving.

I'm surprised to see the appearance of lack of rules and regulations. There are hundreds of jeeps filled with people "fighting" for the best view, following the animals around. At some point, the government will have to come up with some sort of system to control the amount of vehicles. We know it all has to do with money... money always speaks louder than anything else...Our driver was saying there are about 3000 companies running jeeps - each pays taxes - which amounts to a ton of money for the gov. So... I guess things won't be changing anytime soon.

Our group slept in tents 3 out of the 4 nights. These tents were fabulous! They were spacious, had their own toilet, sink and gravity shower. The bed was comfortable as well. The other night was spent in a "hotel" room. It was freezing cold in this room as we were at higher altitude.

Once it was dark, we were not allowed to leave our tents without a guide as animals walk around the camp as they wish. One night, we had water buffalos in around the room all night! Another camp, we had wildebeests walking around! The third camp we had various antelopes including the dik dik (the smallest of all antelopes).

I will always cherish this very special experience! It was another dream come true! To see a momma cheetah sharing an antelope with her offsprings, hyenas munching on a catch, watching a lioness hunt, a leopard up in a tree with its dinner, seeing a baby elephant feeding on his mom, the list goes on and on. Truly a spectacular experience!