Tanzania

I've just returned from an amazing adventure to Tanzania. This trip was actually a year in the planning with a cancellation and postponement, but we finaly got there and it was worth the wait. We got lucky and were treated to a private safari, just my husband and I and our driver Frank. In a week we travelled to Lake Manyara, the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater, Olduvai Gorge and Tarangire. We saw an amazing number of animals and birds. I was able to add a little more that 100 birds to my life list.

This was our drive vehicle.  The roof hatch rose up so I could stand and look around in all directions.

Views from the roof hatch put me right in the scene.

Many of the animals we saw were right in the road ahead of us...

or lying in the road so that we had to drive around them.

Lions are what I wanted to see the most, and we saw a lot of them. We saw them from a distance...

and we saw them from very close, just alongside or in the road:

we even watched these two mate.

There were giraffes and

elephants and

Cape Buffalo and

Hippos and

Zebras.

I expected to see all these and was not disappointed. The sheer numbers of animals was unexpected. The wildebeest were gathering and waiting for the right weather signals to begin the Great Migration from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara, so we saw hundreds of thousands of them.

There is no way that I can sum up this whole trip in one post. I am going to come back later and tell you about each place and my experiences there one at a time. So, please accept this little token for now and come back later for the Ngorongoro Crater.