Keith's travelogue

Well folks, after the last blog multiplied itself this one will be "merci"-fully short as I am in Mauritus only for a few days (they speak French as well as English here so it is a bad pun).

The last week in Africa was spent in the famous game parks of the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. These are the places that most of the wildlife documentaries on East Africa are filmed as this is where the wildebeest still roam free over the plains. We drove from Dar to Arusha and were very lucky that both Kilimanjaro and Mt Meru peeked out from behind their usual cloud cover and allowed us to see them. Mt Kili is the highest in Africa at 5895m, so it is about the same as Mt Cook and Mt Kusciuszco combined. Some of the group will try climbing it later, but not me, six weeks on the truck is too long to be inactive, and only about 20% of people making the attempt get to the top. It'll have to be another trip.

The next morning we changed from our truck to 4WD for our trip. This is so that we can get closer to the animals and it turned out that we got very close indeed! We headed off to the Serengeti first, driving up to the rim of the Ngorongoro crater which happens to be the largest on earth, at over 20 kilometres across. The rim is 2200m above sea level and the floor is about 1600m above sea level. It is part of a volcanic zone that produced about 9 volcanoes, only one still active.

It is around here at Olduvai Gorge that many ancient humanoid fossils have been found, including the first hominid footprint, preserved in volcanic ash and dated at 3.6m years. This forms part of the evidence for the theory that homo sapiens began first in Africa and spread to the rest of the world. The Leakeys did their excavations here and found the nearly complete female hominid skeleton called "Lucy". I know this because I remember reading about them in the sunroom at Lyttleton St (around the mid-70s) as Dad had a subscription to the National Geographic Magazine. Unfortunately we couldn't get to visit the gorge as the game drive works on a time basis and it was too late in the day when we passed by the turn-off.

When we arrived at the camp on the first night, we were greeted by the sight of a massive bull elephant calmly walking in to drink that the water tank. It was SO close, only about 5m away from us and it came up so quickly that most of the people were surprised and a number of the women hid behind me (no idea why that would be useful). After it had its drink it calmly wandered away and allowed us to eat dinner. That night the animals were all around and a number of people said they heard a lion roaring in the night. But I was blissfully asleep so missed it all.

The next day was taken up with a game drive and on our 4WD we reckoned we saw an awful lot. The volcanic soil is so hard it doesn't allow trees to send down their roots, so the Serengeti is a grass plain (savannah) which means there are lots of antelope, zebra and other grazing animals, plus the predators that live on them (lions, hyena, jackals and a few leopard). We were lucky enough to see three lions (two male and a female) up really close - about 1-2 meters from the 4WD vehicle. Photos to come.

After the full day we set off to the Crater, and spent the night camped on the rim, before going down into it for another game drive. Here we saw two black rhino (away in the distance mind you) lots of elephants, warthog and thousands of wildebeest. And the best was almost last when we saw a pride of lions with 10 adults and four baby cubs calmly sauntering across the plains. Our drive ended about 3pm and over the whole trip I reckon I saw most animals except a leopard. So the game parks were a great way to end the trip and vindicated my decision to go South to North.

The last days in Africa were a drive from Arusha to Nairobi where I took leave of the rest of the tour group (down to six on the last night) and sad thanks to Garth our driver, and Renate our tour leader and caught my flight to Mauritius for some R&R. Tomorrow it is back to cold-ish Melbourne and time to get ready to face the might of the Rocky Mountains.

Keith