I realized looking at my last blog post that I might not have provided enough context regarding the camping aspect of our trip, and should have included this photo so that anyone who reads this will have a point of reference for our campsite setup. Better late than never, so here's a photo of our truck that we traveled in and what our mealtime setup was like.
Mealtime setup at the campsite in Nairobi
Our big white truck was named "Songwe" and the same truck took us all the way from Nairobi to Cape Town, except for a brief breakdown situation in Zambia, but I'll touch on that when we get there. We stored our belongings in lockers at the back of the truck because the undercarriage areas were filled with stuff for cooking, cleaning, camping, and other travel necessities. We had pink buckets set up for hand washing and gray buckets for dish washing and sanitizing so that we didn't waste a ton of precious African water, and we also rotated chores each day, which included helping with cooking, washing dishes, or tidying the truck. Then our tents were set up near one another within the campsite (in the photo above, they're sprawling out to the right, and you can even see the tan edge of a tent in the photo). They were two-person tents, so everyone shared with someone. I was lucky enough to share with Katarina, a female solo traveler from Sweden who was also going all the way to Cape Town. There we many smaller legs of the trip where we would be dropping people or adding new people, including Nairobi to Zanzibar, Nairobi to Victoria Falls, Zanzibar to Namibia, etc, so we figured it made sense to stick together for the duration, and I think we both lucked out in finding someone like-minded to share a tent with. In the beginning of the trip especially, there were a great many super long travel days, so between all the time in the truck and the time we spent just hanging at campgrounds or doing chores together, I got to know many of my fellow travelers very well, for which I'm very grateful since most of them were a delight. But now that you have context for what our camping setup was like, let's move on to Tanzania.
On January 22, we left Nairobi and crossed the border into Tanzania. Our first stop was Arusha, "the safari capital of Tanzania." We made a pit stop at the Cultural Heritage Center in Arusha, which is described as "a place where the past and present of the Tanzania's 120-plus tribes can be viewed in a single compound." The Center had incredible artifacts, including carvings, paintings, traditional clothing, and more. The Center also had a section of curio shops where they sold Tanzanite, a blue or violet gemstone only found in Tanzania, making it more rare than diamonds. I had a very hard time abstaining but I managed not to buy any Tanzanite, beautiful as it was.
The Cultural Heritage Center in Arusha, Tanzania
We then headed to our campsite, which was a combination campground and snake park called the Meserani Snake Park. Separate from the camping area, there was a setup with many different kinds of snakes in glass enclosures, most of them terrifying and venomous. I enjoyed doing a lap through the exhibit though, knowing that they couldn't strike from behind the glass. The snake park also included some birds of prey and a crocodile, which tried to take a snap at me and my tent-sharing buddy Katarina when we passed by. Thank God there was a fence around its enclosure, or Katarina, who was quite petite, probably would have been swallowed whole.
The best thing about the snake park campground was the onsite bar. The proprietor just goes by the name "Ma" and she has a crazy list of shots behind the bar, one of my favorite names being "Ma's Revenge" (which I wasn't brave enough to try and was glad I didn't when I discovered it had hot sauce in it). The bar was also decorated with artifacts from years and years of African overland tours passing through, so she had everything from t-shirts to magnets to tiny flags of different countries plastered all over the walls and every available surface.
Ma at the Snake Park bar
In the morning, we headed out for the Serengeti National Park and Ngorogoro Crater. When I was booking a trip to Africa, my first instinct was to go to South Africa so that I could see Cape Town and also Kruger National Park to get an amazing safari in. However, a friend of mine went to Kruger as part of her honeymoon trip and said she was surprised by the landscape, because Kruger was really lush and had lots of trees, and she was expecting more open plains like something you'd see in The Lion King. As ridiculous as it sounds, that kind of changed my perspective a bit, and I started doing more research about other places to do safaris in Africa. I decided the combination of the Serengeti being the inspiration for the setting of The Lion King and the ability to visit literal paradise by traveling to Zanzibar was too tempting to pass up, which led to Tanzania being a big part of my trip to Africa. So long story short, to say I was looking forward to visiting the Serengeti would be a huge understatement.
A really unique thing that I wish I thought to take photos of was that, because the Maasai people that I talked about in my last post are allowed to live within the conservation area around the Serengeti, there were goats and sheep grazing next to zebras and giraffes.
We saw so many giraffes, close by, on our way to the Serengeti
Beautiful landscape on our way in (and those are the rooftops of Maasai homes)
There were also zebras everywhere
On the edge of the Ngorogoro Crater
At the park entrance. "Serengeti" means "land of endless plains" in Maasai
On the way in to the park, our guide told us we might be fortunate enough to see some of the Great Migration, which is when thousands zebras and wildebeest travel to Tanzania from Kenya in their search for water. Soon we were upon a great plain absolutely brimming with animals, especially wildebeest, which were everywhere. At one point, I realized that what I thought was a tree line in the distance was actually just thousands more wildebeest. It's one of those things that photos doesn't do justice so I didn't even try, but it was more incredible than I can put in to words.
Very quickly upon entering the park, we entered the pride lands (I'm not just saying that because they say it in The Lion King; our guide actually called it that) and saw a number of lions as well as several hyenas in addition to the wildebeest that had already been so plentiful, so my Lion King dreams really came true. I don't have any decent photos of the hyenas but the lions were so close to the side of the road (or even in the road, in one case)!
Pride Rock (again, according to my guide, not just me being Lion King obsessed)
Inspiration for Rafiki's tree? (Okay, fine, that one is me being Lion King obsessed)
Unsurprisingly, there weren't nearly as many zebras around when we crossed into the pride lands. The other highlight of the day is that we crossed another of the big five off the list. One of the guides for our group managed to spot a leopard lounging in a tree probably a football field away. We all marveled at how he saw it at such a great distance and he said they look for tails or paws hanging down from branches (which, if you ask me, still look like a branch from far enough away, but what do I know).
Leopard photo by Lisa Hammer
I only had my iPhone so thank God Lisa was kind enough to let me use her photo. I had to look through someone else's binoculars to even make it out but it counts, so we were thrilled to check off another. The only member left of the big five for us was a rhino, and we had only been in Africa for less than a week.
That evening, we camped in the middle of the Serengeti (at a real campground, not just pitching tents in the pride lands), and our guides reminded us repeatedly to keep everything in our tents because hyenas had been known to visit the campground (which had no fencing or anything to keep out wildlife). They were particularly adamant about not leaving our shoes outside, so much so that it was obvious it had been a problem in the past. Due to being in the middle of the Serengeti, our campground had only solar power for the lights and the kitchen--none for hot water, and I was physically truly filthy because of all the dust kicked up by the 4x4s on the dirt roads, so that night I had my first of likely many more baby wipe baths. That night, I was woken up by a strange noise and realized it was lions roaring in the distance. I found out in the morning that a lion had actually passed through our campsite on his way across the plain. Talk about wild!
The next day, our game drive got off to a slow start because we didn't see anything literally all morning except a dik dik, which is a tiny antelope, and a bat-eared fox, which someone pointed out looks more like a Pokemon than a real animal. But our guide did tell us while we were driving around looking for animals that the Ngorogoro Crater was a volcano 3 million years ago, and the ash covering the surrounding area didn't allow any trees to grow, which is why the Serengeti is still largely devoid of trees to this day. So that was a really cool tidbit, and the bat-eared fox was pretty adorable, so I certainly don't consider the morning to be a wash.
Dik dik
Bat-eared fox
The two days in the Serengeti run together for me a little, so I'm not sure if it was this day or the day before, but we stopped to have lunch at a picnic area and our guide warned us to beware of the birds of prey that lived in the trees surrounding the picnic area. I heard his warning but was still not prepared to have birds dive-bombing our group while we tried to shield our chicken and hard-boiled eggs (and our heads). One of them actually managed to snatch a chicken leg from one of my fellow travelers, and my friends Jason and Katarina were so terrified that they ended up eating their lunches in the 4x4 rather than risk the birds. It was one of the most memorable and hilarious memories I have from the trip. But anyway, after lunch, the wildlife viewing picked up significantly and we saw more giraffes, hippos, zebras, and a big pride of lions again.
Hippos
Hippo photo by my friend Kate Wilson, a fab photographer with a great camera
Wildebeest and zebras as far as the eye can see
Lions sleeping in the grass
Somebody's awake!
Those lion photos are both mine, taken with an iPhone, so we really were that close. Even now I can't believe my luck.
We left the Serengeti late in the afternoon and camped at the edge of the Ngorogoro Crater, which we would be descending into in the morning. That campsite only had one full-sized toilet on the other side of the camp, so this might be TMI for some readers but I conquered my fear of using a squatty potty there, which is memorable to say the least.
When we set out in the morning, the Crater was covered in low-lying fog, which made for great photos on our way in but not the best once we got down there.
Katarina, my tent buddy, and I on our way down into the Crater
Descending into the crater, almost 2,000 feet down
Wildebeest in the fog
Zebra family
Flamingos in the fog
But thankfully, the fog lifted after too long and we saw some amazing animals--including three rhinos, the last of the big five we needed! We were overjoyed. Less than a week in Africa and we saw all five of the big five: elephant, rhino, cape buffalo, lion, and leopard (I forgot to mention, we also saw the "ugly five": hyena, wildebeest, stork, vulture, and warthog). The big five are so named, for the record, because they are the five hardest to hunt, not because they are literally the biggest or the most popular for tourists. The Crater was so abundant with life that at one point, we saw wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, a rhino and her baby, flamingos, and a hunting lion all at once. It was truly one of the most incredible days of the entire trip.
I took this rhino photo through binoculars so please forgive me; it was the best I could do
Photo stop at a lake with hippos
Wildebeest and cape buffalo everywhere
A stork photo by Kate Wilson
A hyena photo by Kate Wilson
Safari vehicles photo by Kate Wilson
Wildebeest photo by Kate Wilson
Cape buffalo photo by Kate Wilson
We finished our amazing day by driving back to Arusha to the same campground, and we celebrated our good fortune at Ma's bar. In the morning, we traveled on to Bagamoyo, which was quite a long drive (about 13 hours in the truck all in all). But the campground had a pool, and we were like kids in a candy store because the humidity went through the roof as we approached the coast, and now our campsite was only steps from the beach (Although our wonderful tour leader Eva told us visiting the beach might not be a great idea, since we weren't in a super safe neighborhood). We had also crossed over into the part of Tanzania that's primarily Islamic, so we heard the call to prayer at sunset and sunrise the next day.
Our evening enjoying the pool in Bagamoyo was brief and then we were back in the truck again the next day, this time to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania and our gateway to the beautiful Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar. However, the traffic leaving Bagamoyo was so bad that we were stuck at a standstill for several hours. A group of people decided to leave the truck, against Eva's advice, to use the bathroom, and after literally hours of not moving an inch, traffic picked up all of a sudden and we went a kilometer down the road before we were able to pull over so they could get back on. I was so grateful that I didn't get off the truck because God knows they would have been waiting an extra 10 minutes just for me to huff and puff my way over there. We had to alter our plans because of the traffic delays so we stopped at a fancy shopping mall for lunch, which had air conditioning, and I personally almost cried tears of joy. We'd had days and days of being sweaty and sticky and covered in dirt, so it was so lovely to get a reprieve for a couple hours.
Our campsite in Dar es Salaam was literally on the beach, and it turned out that upgrading to a beach hut with a bed and mosquito net was only $8 for the night, so Katarina and I jumped on it.
Katarina took this from inside the beach hut. The sand was just beyond the iron fence.
I took my first dip in the Indian Ocean that evening and we got to sleep in beds instead of on the ground, so I consider it an A+ kind of day.
Leaving the campsite in the morning, we took a caravan of tuk tuks to a short ferry, which would take us across the estuary that separates Dar es Salaam into north and south, and then walk to the swankier ferry that would take us to Zanzibar. It was just as much of a scramble as it sounds, but somehow our tour leader Eva didn't get overwhelmed.
Tuk tuk caravan to the first ferry
On the ferry to the other side of Dar es Salaam
I don't have photos from the ferry to Zanzibar but that, too, was air conditioned, so what a treat. In fact, both hotels that we stayed in on Zanzibar were air conditioned, so I think I got a little spoiled.
Two hours later, the ferry pulled into the Zanzibar port, and we had to wait in line to get our passports stamped (even though it's still part of Tanzania). We then walked to our hotel, because our first night we spent in Stone Town, the old part of Zanzibar City. After we dropped our bags, we took a tour of a spice plantation, where we tasted and smelled spices fresh off the vine, and sampled different teas and coffee.
Our guide showing us nutmeg
Fresh cinnamon
They made us crowns at the plantation
We then walked around Stone Town a little when we got back, which included a photo stop at the Freddie Mercury house and museum (he was born in Zanzibar before his family moved to the UK) and then we had dinner and drinks on a rooftop, watching the sunset.
Still wearing my crown at the Freddie Mercury house (and looking overheated, woof)
With Kate, photographer extraordinaire, at the rooftop bar
The next day, we did some souvenir shopping in Stone Town in the morning before we headed north to the beaches and got to relax for the next couple days. We did a booze cruise that first night and some people did snorkeling or scuba diving, but for the most part, we lay on the beach, swam in the sparkling Indian Ocean, and ate amazing seafood. Paradise was not overstated, truly.
My and Katarina's air conditioned hotel room
On the booze cruise with Katarina and Jason (and already sporting raging sunburn)
Drinking a piña colada on the beach
After two relaxing days at the beach, we had to travel back to Stone Town to get the ferry back to Dar es Salaam. The bus bringing us back got a flat tire, which delayed us getting back and meant we only had 40 minutes to get lunch takeout before we had to meet at the hotel to catch the ferry. Stone Town is delightfully old and windy, so a group of us got lost trying to get back to the bags after lunch had already taken too long, but we managed to make the ferry with few minutes to spare, and no one got left behind, thank God (although staying in Zanzibar wouldn't be a hardship). Our luck continued and we got off the ferry back to Dar es Salaam in absolute pouring rain. Eva bundled us onto a bus to get to the next ferry to the other side of the city, but we still got soaked through, despite her best efforts. And I had flip flops on, naturally, so I ended up getting on and off the next ferry barefoot so that I didn't fall out of my shoes in the deluge, so I spent the quick ferry trip trying not to think about what I might be stepping in, and got in the tuk tuks again absolutely dripping wet. Ah, adventure. Always keeps me on my toes (pun intended).
We took the tuk tuks back to our same campsite and the rest of the evening was blessedly uneventful. We dropped and picked up a number of passengers in between Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, as we were starting a new leg of the trip to our next big destination, Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, so we met the new arrivals briefly that night and the following morning.
The next couple of days as we traveled to the border of Malawi were pretty uneventful, which on this trip, was usually a good thing. The day after we left Dar es Salaam, we camped in Mikumi National Park. We had a late lunch at the campsite and spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool. The following day, we were supposed to camp in Iringa, Tanzania, but Katarina and I upgraded to a farmhouse sort of setup with beautiful soft beds and even an ensuite bathroom, which was a real treat at that point. We were so sad that we had to get up at 3:30 the following morning to get dressed, eat breakfast, pack sack lunches, and be on the road by 5am (or earlier if Eva had any say in the matter). We were crossing the border into Malawi that day, and border crossings regularly added significant travel time to our day. But I was looking forward to visiting a country known as "the warm heart of Africa."
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