We spent 5 days on safari and we were lucky enough to see all of the ‘Big 5’- or the 5 most coveted animals to see in the wild:
Simba/Lion
Chui/Leopard
Tembo/Elephant
Nyati/Buffalo
And the most coveted, Faru/Rhinoceros! We didn’t get any photos of the 1 rhino we saw (but it still counts!) In Ngorongoro Crater, we drove up on a few safari vehicles looking into the brush and they told us that they could see the rear end of a rhino in the distance. We waited around for about 15 minutes and didn’t see anything until all of the other vehicles left. Then a large elephant came crashing through some trees and scared the rhino from where it was laying down. So we ended up seeing the rhino take off to get away from the elephant about 200 feet away from us. Pretty cool!
We spent the first morning of our 5 days getting from Moshi out to Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area. Once we dropped our cook off at the campsite on the rim of the crater, we took our boxed lunches and went on an afternoon game drive. I had been to the Crater the last time in Tanzania, but since now we were there in the off-season, there weren’t many other safari vehicles, so we had the whole crater practically to ourselves!
After seeing the rhino, we came up out of the Crater around 6pm in time to shower and eat dinner at the campsite. Our guides had warned us that animals liked to hang around the campsite. And we’re not talking about small rodents….
A little hard to see, but that is an elephant that comes every night to drink out of the cistern at the camp. We kept a reasonable distance...
Yup- there are resident elephants at this campsite that come up and drink out of the water tank ever evening at dusk. Later that night, I saw zebra hanging out near the bathrooms. We were tent camping, and no matter how bad I had to pee in the middle of the night, I was NOT leaving the tent. With my luck, I would have walked right into a buffalo or something.
The next day we headed the 2-3 hours beyond Ngorongoro Crater to Serengeti National Park. I hadn’t been to this park before, and if you ever go on safari, your itinerary NEEDS to include this park! It was by far our favorite. We had 2 nights here, and you need that long to do it justice. During our 2 days there we really only covered half of the park. We also tent camped here:
Serengeti is home to all of the cats!
We ended up seeing so many lions (and lots of cubs!) that we became pretty desensitized to them. You think you are in a zoo and almost forget that they are wild….until you see one try to take down a zebra…
After our 2 days in the Serengeti, we headed back out through Ngorongoro Conservation Area and stayed our 4th and final night in a nice lodge. On Day 5, we visited Terengire National Park. It was a little anticlimactic compared to everything we saw in the Serengeti, but this park is known for its Baobob trees and elephants.
-Cara