Migration Camp Serengeti National Park

... the bus and make sure everything is locked up, dave however has taken it upon himself to double check everything
i do! his job is backlocker so he has to take the backpacks on and off the truck at each campsite, i think he's hoping to have
arms of steel for the beach in Oz:)


Ok so back to serengeti, we all separated into groups of 6 and got into our jeeps, our driver was a tanzanian called chris who
finished every sentence with a chuckle ...

... difficult to find. We had heard there were a couple of leopards there so we had fingers crossed. We maybe shouldn’t have crossed our fingers so hard…

In the Serengeti we camped in the bush. We had a few visitors in the night - hyena. Fortunately they don’t like the light from torches so you just have to just pray that your batteries don’t die during a bush pee! The first day out we saw 16 lions, 2 cheetahs, hippos, crocs ...

... was a little disappointing but I was too busy lining kids up along yellow road markings and learning how to count to then and the months of the year in Swahili. Got a high 5 from a cool girl on the back of a bike. :) I felt like I was in the "popular crew" and I'm putting my snoopy pj top as the culprit for that.

That said, how my attire that morning produced 3 marriage proposals, including one from Maurice who specifically requested a photo and a date ...

... br>
Emmanuel, one of our four driver/guides, is getting married at the end of this trip operation. So Rachel arranged for a wedding shower; as a group we gave him a coffee table book on the Serengeti, so his new wife can learn more about what he does all day. Beverages and snacks were served.

We met a mongoose and a hyrax when at the center, two of the smaller animals on our checklist.

We headed out for more gaming. We ran ...

... had been dating 5 months. Luckily Kim was trilingual (being born of Italian and French parents in Quebec Canada) and was fluent in Spanish so assisted in translating the more complex issues to them as their English was good but some conversations were too fast for them to pick up. We drove west to the Serengeti but this took about 5 hours before we actually entered the park gates travelling on the usual dirt roads that were bumpy and dusty. The terrain became very ...

... the most natural feel about it with the animals being able to roam the landscape without fences or any interference in place.

And there were lots of animals. For anyone doing our trip in the other direction and who therefore start at the Serengeti, it will be a bit of a disappointment as they get to the parks further south. We literally lost count of the lions we saw, and it was here that we finally saw cheetahs and even one ...

This morning we got up at 5:30am to start into the Crater. It was a fourty minute drive from the campsite into the Crater and on the way into the Crater our van got a flat tire. It was really cold and really early in the morning so we all had to pile out of the van and wait as Robin and the driver changed the tire. In total it took about fifteen minutes but one of the reasons we had started out so early in the morning was so that we could view the ...

... As we got further and further out of the city, the pavement disappeared and shantytowns sprung up along the road. But even these eventually disappeared as we drove into the heart of Africa.




Along the way I was introduced to a herdsman of the Masaai, a native tribe of the region whose nomadic way of life continues to this day. At the border crossing we had to get out to get our passports stamped, and walked a short distance through a ...

... observation I have made in Tanzania is that it often feels like the whole city is outside walking on the roadside and it can get pretty crowded out there. This surprised particularly surprising since it was the early morning of Good Friday, a national holiday. I suppose people get started a lot earlier here. After 2 hours and driving approximately 145km Northeast, we arrived at Ndabaka Gate, the Western ...

... and in the distance huge smears of pink on a salt pan lake which we were told were Flamingos. A very African sight was laid out in front of us as far as the eye could see, it was a shear delight. We stopped for a pack lunch shortly after this and watched in horror as Pete lost half of his chicken that he was about to bite into to a swooping Yellow Billed Kite. It was so close that it left mud on his shoulder as it struck out to grab the tasty ...