January 25th, 2024
Unfortunately, my illness stuck around for 2-3 more days so I laid low in Nungwi. It’s possible that it was my second round of Covid. It wasn’t until the third day that I finally ventured out and saw the beach, which was only about 400 meters away. It was a nice beach for sure, I just wasn’t in the mood for it.
I took a dala dala (local bus) back to Stone Town for one
night and then flew to Arusha, a small city which is the hub for most safaris that
go to Tarangire, Lake Manyara, the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater parks. Thanks to my new German friend Thomas, whom I
had met at Kizimkazi on the south end of Zanzibar Island, I had booked a four-day
safari with Mountain Warriors for $700 USD, which I thought was a good
rate. I had inquired with some other
companies and they wanted over $2000. The
one I picked was a “budget” safari, meaning we would be sleeping in tents some
nights, which was fine by me as that feels more like you are on a safari!
Some local school kids on Zanzibar Island:
Flying over Stone Town. Quite a weird apartment complex making a big plus sign when viewed from above.
My first view of Kilimanjaro, the tallest free standing mountain in the world at 5895 meters.
The day before the safari, Rosemary, an employee of Mountain
Warriors, came to my hotel to go over last-minute details. I paid her the outstanding balance (I had
previously sent a deposit) of $559 in cash.
I had a $100 US bill but the rest was in Tanzanian shillings. The East African countries tend to not have
large denomination notes with the Tanzanian biggest one being 10,000
shillings…the equivalent of $4 USD. So
do the math…oh, I’ll do it for you, that’s 115 x 10,000 notes!
Makes you feel rich!
The original plan was that I would be picked up between 6-7
am and that Rosemary would give me a more accurate time that evening. Later, she left me a voice message and the
plans had changed for some reason and my pickup wouldn’t be until 9-9:30
am. That seemed a bit odd.
In the morning I found out why. There was supposed to be a Polish couple
joining, along with 3 others who had booked with another company but
unfortunately the couple got food poisoning and had to delay for a few
days. I guess this put Rosemary into
overdrive as she tried to figure out what to do with me. There are hundreds of tour companies and it
makes sense that they work together at times, so she found a tour that fit me
in.
Rosemary and a driver picked me up and took me to a
“Cultural Experience”, really it was a super big gift shop. This seemed to be a bit of the cart before
the horse, isn’t the gift shop at the end of your visit? We met a guide named Max with his Toyota Land
Cruiser from a company called Suricata Safaris.
Suricata means “meer-cat” in Swahili.
While waiting for some other tourists to arrive to create a group to go
on the safari, Rosemary and I wandered into the gift shop. Man, there was a lot of stuff on the three
levels inside, from statues of animals, to earrings, to purses, to coffee
tables and more.
The entrance:
The thing I found most interesting, to my surprise, were
precious stones. A couple were at a
glass counter, like you’d find at a jewellery store, and they were looking at a
bunch of blue gems. It is known as
Tanzanite and is only found in this area of Tanzania. The larger the stone, the darker blue it
is. You could buy a stone for as little
as $50 and splurge to over $30,000!
Precious stones are definitely not my thing, but these were beautiful,
and it was interesting that this is supposedly the only place in the world to
find them.
Tanzanite, small, big and the rare multi-colored:
The other tourists showed up and it was time to get on the
road. Max had each of us tell everyone
our name and where we were from. Beside
me in the van was a 38-year-old Turkish woman named Selin, and she works as a
stewardess on fancy motor yachts. Her
last gig was on a 30+ meter boat, privately owned by an Israeli. In the middle row were Melanie and Jenny, two
nurses in their late 20s, from Lille in France.
And rounding out the group I the back row, were Marissa and Luke from
Kansas. Marissa is just finishing her
medical studies and wants to practice general surgery while Luke is a young
aeronautical engineer.
Bottom left Selin, behind her Jenny, at the back Marissa and Ryan, and Melanie behind me.
My first impression was that this was going to be a fun
group to spend the next 4 days with on safari.
We chatted and got to know one another as Max drove the Land Cruiser
about and hour and a half to the gate for the Tarangire National Park.
A big baobab tree by the entrance:
We waited at the gate while Max paid for our permit but then
we were thrown a bit of a curve ball. We
were unaware that there was another group of tourist, eight Portuguese people
in their 50s joining us. They had
suffered a delayed flight and instead of arriving the night before, they were
just making it to Tanzania. Most Land
Cruisers going on safaris here can seat 8 people, the guide and 7 guests. This meant that two of the Portuguese were
going to have to join our vehicle, and either me or Selin (one of the two solo
people) was going to have to join the rest of the Portuguese group. Max did not explain the whole situation to us
at first and we didn’t understand why our newly formed group had to split up,
and we were resistant to it. Once we
knew the details, it seemed like the only option was for me to go to the other
vehicle. It felt as if I was on a
“Safari Survival” reality show, and I’d just been the first one to get kicked
out of the vehicle!
I tried to think positively about it. At first, I thought they were Polish since
there were so many Polish tourists on Zanzibar, but I just hadn’t listened to
them talking long enough. I got in the
front seat, introduced myself, and we just went through the gate and
immediately pulled over to an eating area to have our picnic lunch. Since each Land Cruiser carried their
respective food, even though the lunches were identical, I had to sit at the
table with 6 of the 8 Portuguese tourists so that the portions were the same. They were nice people but only a few of them
spoke a bit of English so unfortunately it did mean that over the next 4 days I
sat in a vehicle where only Portuguese was spoken, therefore it was a bit
boring for me (compared to what it would have been like in the other vehicle). The group consisted of four couples: Phillip
and Bella, Pedro and Paola, Armando and Natasia. The pair that went to my
original vehicle were Jose and Carla.
Jose was definitely the joker of the group. Okay well, sometimes you just have to roll
with the punches.
After lunch, we began a mid-afternoon game drive, which
isn’t usually the best time to spot animals as it usually hot and most animals
are sleeping or resting. The first
animals we saw were baboons followed by some elephants. I can never get sick of seeing these giants. Next were some warthogs and then something I
hadn’t seen while in Uganda…a couple of cheetahs! They were just chilling in the grass, but
still cool to see.
We stopped for a toilet break at a viewpoint overlooking a
river with some monkeys running about. There
was a nice viewpoint of a river below with an elephant wandering around in the distance.
On our way out of the park, another new sighting for me was
a couple of ostriches. They weren’t
terribly close to the road, but my guide Lewis had a pair of binoculars which
helped. There were some giraffes in the
distance, which Team Portugal were excited to see (I’m a bit jaded since I saw
many up close in Uganda and fed some in Kenya).
A vehicle whipped by us, and unfortunately took out this lovely Lilac-Breasted Roller:
Back on the highway, we headed about 10 kilometres back
towards Arusha before turning north for about an hour to a small town called
Mtumbu. It turns out that the Portuguese
signed up for a fancier safari than the rest of us, so we dropped them off at a
lodge that was built a few years ago by the Suricata Safari company. It was a bit of an odd looking building as it
was quite square and completely made of red brick. It did have a nice view of Lake Manyara
though, where there is another national park.
Lake Manyara:
The rest of us were taken to a campground in town. It was almost like a compound, with a gate
manned by a guard, and buildings running around the perimeter with our tents in
the middle on the coarse grass. It was a
nice place though. There was a small
grocery store just outside the entrance, bathrooms with hot showers, a covered
dining area, open air but covered kitchen prep areas for the guides, some rooms
and finally a bar and restaurant with a small pool outside.
We had a nice dinner and found that out that our chef Salim likes to cook a lot of food…way too much food.
Our dinner group:
Afterwards I ventured over to the outside portion of the bar and watched the second half of an African Cup of Nations football match before calling it a night. Tomorrow, we head off to the Serengeti!
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