Ngorongoro, Tanzania
Monday, November 19, 2007
We left our lodge in Tarangire to drive to the Ngorongoro crater. The night before, Doug's door wouldn't lock and he was SO mad - we haven't seen him mad yet. He even used exclamation points in his journal, yikes!!! When he called reception to come and fix the lock, a little pit crew came, removed his entire door and replaced it with a brand new one, so funny! On the way out of the gate, one of the hawkers had a t-shirt that said "I have a black belt in crazy" - he was selling knives. We saw a lion and an ostrich with about 20 babies - so cute! We took a crazy, windy road up to the Ngorongoro crater rim and went on our afternoon game drive. When we got to the gate to enter the park, Danielle said "I kind of have to pee" even though she had gone 10 minutes earlier. She knew it would be a long 3 hours before that dream could come true. We saw a family of pumbaas with babies and a big papa elephant with huge, white tusks. Only male elephants live in the crater - they have to walk all the way up and out of the crater if they want to get any action
. We saw an ostrich who's legs and neck weren't quite red enough to indicate that he was 100% ready for mating but we think that he had a halfie. We came upon a herd of cape buffalo and Waldo the Rhino amongst them with binoculars and took photographic evidence so that you can play Where's Waldo Rhino edition for yourselves. We saw the cutest baby zebra ever - he was so little that he could barely walk. We saw more flamingos and went to the hippo pool. The hippos were splashing eachother with their tales, rolling around in the mud and lying on their backs with only their stubby little feet sticking up in the air. Hippos = very cute from a distance. There was a tour guide recently, who was out on a boat and was hitting the water with his oar to get the hippos to come up and one came up and bit him in half in front of his whole tour group - how embarassing. On the way back from the game drive, Danielle REALLY had to pee and she said, "I have to pee! It's emergent!!!" Hilarious. That of course made her laugh, which didn't help the situation, but she made it and still has all 3 pairs of pants to continue on. We tried to have a shower when we got back. The water came out brown and trickled down the wall so we scratched out that plan. At dinner, Serra told us about her eccentric father who drilled a hole in the top of his car and put a snorkel pipe in it for "fresh air" - such funny stories!
xoxo
D (or P, haha) & A
