Kilimanjaro - My Journey to the Roof of Africa

Safari (Day 3):

Serengeti National Park

Monday, January 21, 2013

My darling Randy is 42 years old today. Happy birthday to my love!

I literally slept with the lions last night. I heard them roaring quite a few times and it sounded very close. Even closer were the elephants. One of them was tearing the bark off from a tree just a few steps from my tent. Despite all this, I slept pretty well. The only difference was that I didn't want to step outside the tent at night when I had to pee so I peed in the small area between the inside tent and the outside cover.

Breakfast was scheduled for 6:30am and we headed out for our morning game drive at 7:20 or so. We drove around for 5.5 hours. At first, I was excited because we saw some jakals and a hyena. The jakals are the cutest things in the park. They are like tiny dogs and they are very friendly. After that, however, we didn't see anything exciting for the next four hours. We were driving in an area where there was only one other safari vehicle and no animals whatsoever. Even the scenery was boring: just grass as far as the eye can see. I was getting very bored and miserable. Sitting in the uncomfortable vehicle on the dusty and bumpy roads and not even seeing anything interesting was very boring and tiring. At the end, we finally ventured into the territory where all the other vehicles were and, naturally, all the animals. We got to see some hippos in the water, lots of elephants, one lion in the grass and three on a tree, and even a few giraffes on the way back to the campground.

We got back at 12:45pm and soon after we had lunch. Then we had a couple of hours to rest. I laid down outside on the small concrete bench that I covered with my mattress. I rested for an hour before I started writing in my journal. In about 15 minutes, we'll go out on our afternoon game drive. Luckily, this will be much shorter. Hopefully, we'll also see more animals than in the morning. The big group left and a few new people have just arrived. I'm glad we'll have some company tonight as well.

Our afternoon game drive was a lot of fun. The weather was cooler and we saw lots of wildlife: more than ten dik diks, giraffes, at least ten lions laying in the grass in the distance, baboons (one of them was eating a rabbit), and hippos. The hippo pond was the most interesting. There is a nice picnic area next to it with flush toilets. Tons of hippos in the pond were making weird noises. We even saw a crocodile basking on the sun on the rocks in the distance. I really enjoyed this afternoon game drive.

I ate a lot for dinner and went to bed with a pretty full stomach at 8:30. Unfortunately, I couldn't really sleep until eleven because some rude people set up camp in front of our tents to talk loudly until 11pm.