Monkeying Around: Safari - in two senses of the word

23^rd – Up at 4am, on bus by 5:15am, departed kigoma by 6:00am, break down at 8:00am. Moving again by 12:00pm, drive till 12:00am, stop in random village and told abruptly that we’ll move again at 4:00am. Get off bus, find ‘guest house’, sleep 2.5 hrs, back on bus by 3:45am, moving by 4:00am. Arrive Half way city, Singida at 6:00am. Taxi to bus station, find our next bus, buy tickets (the last 4), depart again 8:00am, drive till 2pm, get off bus at place called Makayuni. This is our turn off for Karatu (our destination). We find a Dalladalla (a minibus taxi of sorts) or rather it finds us being that we stuck out like 4 sore white thumbs. Quickly bustled in with our bags strapped onto the top and back. We felt good, we’d done the worst part and the minibus was fairly spacious. Oh how we were wrong. With in 10 minutes they’d managed to fit at least another 10 ppl in with us. At one point I had a Massai woman sat on top of me. Sadly she was not attractive. Although staring through the holes in her ears passed the time a little. 4pm and we’ve arrived in Karatu. From here our Safari operator has ensured us it is but a short distance to our hotel. We find a Taxi but he’s never heard of the hotel. I ring Safari operator, he talks to Taxi driver, taxi driver knows where it is now. We leave, 10 minutes later were at the hotel – it’s the wrong hotel. The wrong hotel tells us where our hotel is. 20 minutes later, Taxi breaks down, me and Julian get out and push. 5 minutes later we arrive! Roughly 5pm, bring on Christmas!

If its one thing new skill I can take away from this experience is the upmost competence at peeing into a bottle whilst hurtling along on a severely bumpy road. Speaking of which, where did I put that bottle?

25^th – Did bugger all

26^th – Started our 3 day Safari. We spent 1 day in the Ngorogoro conservation area, 1 day in the Serengeti and 1 day in the Crater of the Ngorogoro crater. We saw lots of awesome animals – Jonty was amused for most of it although he was disappointed by the lack of Tigers and Dragons. Here are the photos.