One of the more surprising things about safari is how tiring
it is just sitting and staring day after day. You move slowly, on very bumpy
roads (this despite the fact that the TZ government is raking in millions of
dollars/week – who knows where this money goes), and have to stay in the car
the whole time. Apparently animals don’t differentiate the human forms inside
the truck as long as you don’t get out of the vehicle. If you stay at the
resorts as we did (as oppose to camping), you get ridiculously stuffed with
food everyday too. Fat people would love this vacation. I honestly ate better
than I do back in the States. Breakfast would feature dozens of options with 8
jams, fancy pastries, olives (something you can’t find here), fresh tropical
fruit, sausages/bacon, pancakes, custom made omelets, everything really. The only downside is you
just have to occasionally compete with the animals -a monkey stole my cheese
sandwich on day 1. The jerk! They are so quick!
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| this blue monkey looks so sad |
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| Huge baobabs that the elephants love to strip the bark from |
Tanzania lives up to its reputation: when people think of
Africa and all of the crazy animals, this is the place where it’s actually true
(after having gone to Cameroon I remember becoming very annoyed when the 50th
person back home asked me how many elephants and lions I saw – I didn’t see any).
Literally, it’s hard to not step on (or rather drive over) the animals in the
Tanzania parks. You barely drive more than 10 minutes without seeing some
animals. The numbers for many of them are pretty outstanding – I think there
are about 3 million wildebeest in the Serengeti alone.
Not unexpectedly,
there are diminishing returns to the animal sightings – after Day 2 the
elephant is no longer that interesting, unless maybe you get really close. And
often times you do get really really close, check out these lions here (they
like the shade that the vehicles provide).
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| The lions love the shade of the cars but cars are supposed to move when the lions get close like this |
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| An elephant goes for a drink |
At Tarangire National
Park we watched elephants waltz around as we enjoyed our breakfast. As a side
note, apparently elephants only sleep about 2 hours a day – they are always
eating otherwise.
Other animals really move more at night (hippos for example)
so most of the animals aren’t really doing much when you see them (unless you
are willing to pay extra for night safari). It’s funny to work so hard to see a
lion, and then you find one, and after about 10-15 min. you get bored and want
to move on. I think it’s super rare to see them having sex, giving birth,
hunting, or fighting. Most animals just sleep a lot. The numbers are also
disproportionate: You will also see a million of the same animals but very few
of the less common ones. Looking out the window you almost always see zebra,
gazelles, and some type of bird and in Sarangeti, the most famous of the 4 parks
we went to, the sky literally goes on forever.
I expected my parents to do something insulting or
culturally insensitive at every corner during this trip but it was ok for the
most part. One time when we were at Ol Duvai Gorge where the first foot prints
of humans are recorded Herb did embarrass me by trying to rush us through
saying “these are just ancient things” because he just wanted to get to the
animals. He also insisted he washed his
hands every time he touched the paper currency (Tanzanian Shillings).
I also found it strange staying in 5 star resort hotels in
the middle of nowhere national park where super wealthy 100% white people were
treated to “authentic” cultural activities like a traditional Masai dance nightly.
On the other hand, things that I sometimes don’t think about, like how much
people just stand around in Africa doing nothing (and the number of people
outside), were observations that my parents as outsiders reminded me of.
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| The Masai |
Being on safari in Africa though is not like being in Africa
so only when you drive through the small village towns do you get a glimpse of
life here. It really was better coming already from Uganda/Rwanda and not being
a total tourist – this I think is the best way to travel.
Another thing was that I got pretty sick of safari envy when
you run into other tourists: “We saw a (
fill
in the blank intended to make you jealous). What did you see?” It’s all
about getting lucky and I felt like we were for the most part. A lot of people
got up at 5 or 6 AM every morning, which seemed pretty stupid to me. Your odds
of seeing more activity are increased but only slightly (from say 8 or 9, not
the middle of the day), you still won’t see a cheetah chasing down some
gazelles.
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| A rare cheetah sighting |
We saw all of the big 5 except the rhino (damn, so
elusive!), jackals chasing some huge birds, the crazy and amazing beginning of
the migration of the wildebeest (my parents favorite), 6-7 lions, a few
leopards, a cheetah (my favorite), crazy baboons running around Lake Manyara
park, and 100 other types of animals. Some common stuff like the zebra and
wildebeest working together and gazelles running is fun to watch. It’s amazing
with all of the people safari-ing you usually don’t see other cars around, the
parks are just so huge so with a private group as we had you can really do
whatever you want.
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| King of all animals! |
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| Filthy disgusting and awesome hippos |
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| The great Wildebeest migration at the beginning |
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| Mother and child |
Not sure I’ll do it again, at least in Tanzania, but overall
it was an awesome trip and I’d recommend it to friends.
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