Asante Sana, Squish Banana

So now for my crazy African Safari blog. After leaving the Maasai village on Friday we headed back to our campsite which was just your typical fenced in camping area. It was no different than any campsite in the US and I was secretly relieved. I slept really well for it being my first night in a tent since I was 16 years old. We woke up before the sun and hastily ate breakfast so we could make it to Lake Manyara as early as possible. The first animals we saw were tons and tons of monkeys and baboons. I couldn’t stop saying “Asante Sana, Squish Banana” like Rafiki in “The Lion King”. The monkeys are actually pretty annoying and one actually jumped into the front seat of our truck at one point later in the trip. I was pretty much over them after the first hour. Luckily, we soon saw tons of giraffes, elephants, zebra, buffalo, impalas, flamingos, hippos… basically everything aside from large cats since there aren’t too many of them near the lake. The best thing we saw that day was a Mama elephant with her baby. They crossed the path right in front of our car and the baby was really curious so it stopped and poked the car with its trunk while its mom patiently waited on the other side of the road. At one point she poked it with her trunk to hustle it along and it got all playful and started to jump around. I’ve never seen anything so cute! I got it on video and I’m so glad I did. After lunch we drove up to Ngorogoro crater which is a caldera pretty high up in the mountains. It was a really clear day so we could see all the way across the crater to the other side and it was beautiful. We set up camp on the rim of the crater and this time it was no fenced in campsite. As soon as I saw the piles of animal crap two feet from my tent, I knew it was going to be an interesting night. It was so interesting, in fact, that it deserves its own blog entry and so I will just skip to Sunday morning. We set out early again and since we were up at the top of a mountain walking through clouds, it was pretty cold and wet. We drove down into the crater and immediately saw Wildebeests, Zebra, and Buffalo. A few cars ahead of us said they saw a couple of cheetahs but they were camouflaged and lying down in a ditch so we couldn’t make them out. We drove around and finally saw what we were looking for – two female lion’s right on the edge of the road with two baby cubs. I couldn’t believe how close they were! Soon after that we saw a whole den of female lions hanging out on a hill and within minutes came across a fully grown male lion with a few females lounging around a recently killed buffalo. There were hyenas and jackals all circling around the kill, trying to get in on the action but the female lions kept running them off. We watched them for a long time; it was like watching animal planet live. We headed back up to pack up our car and as we were waiting to leave, two huge elephants wandered right into our campsite and started drinking from the well. It was a very groovy weekend and I even though I’m not much for the camping; I would do it again in a heartbeat!