Camping Safari

This week we went on a 3 day/2 night camping safari.  Mark and I and our friend Doug left with the driver/guide and cook in a big 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser with a pop-up roof.   

Let me say that I have never especially liked camping.  It has always seemed like a lot of work and inconvenience in order to spend time outdoors.  However, in a camping safari, the tour operator does all the work and suffers most of the inconvenience.  Our trip was highly enjoyable.

The first day out, we drove to the Engaruka ruins.  This is a settlement in the Rift Valley that was occupied between about 1500 and 1700 C.E.  We saw gravesites, the thick rock walls of sizable dwellings, and an irrigation system that resembles modern permagardening systems.  Although that settlement was abandoned, Maasai villages are in the area now, and the tribespeople are protective of the site.

Proceeding on, we stopped for the night at a posh campsite in Karatu, Kudu Camp.  By posh, I mean that it had an internet cafe, swimming pool, pub, gift shop, and more.  Our driver set up the tents and our cook prepared a wonderful meal.

The next morning we drove into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.  We saw baboons along the road, including a family group with a tiny baby clutching its mother.  Our cook was dropped off at Simba A Camp, where he set things up and starting preparing another feast.  We then went to the Oldupai Gorge, where Mary Leakey's team made 60 different finds of ancient hominid remains, including a skull of Australopithecus boisei, who lived 1.8 million years ago and remains of Homo Hablis and Homo Erectus.  Her team also found 3.75 million year old footprints of Australopithecus afarensis nearby.  This is the same species as the individual whose bones were found in Ethiopia and named "Lucy".  These remains were preserved at Oldupai due to repeated volcanic activity that sandwiched them between layers of lava flows.  Rifting and erosion enabled them to be found in the 20th century.  Fascinating stuff.

We returned to the camp, which is situated on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater.  The view was breathtaking.  By that point in the early evening, quite a few other campers had arrived.  Most were brought there by tour companies, but a few had their own cars.  I was grateful for our guide and cook, not only because of the afore-mentioned work and inconvenience of a do-it-yourself camping experience, but also because they were very good at their jobs.  We settled in for the night, under the visible Milky Way.  It was about 2:30 am when we were awakened by cries of "Help! Help!" from nearby.  A cape buffalo had wandered through the camp and had repeatedly bumped a tent.  Our guide told us that he was the one who scooped up a handful of rocks and threw them at the animal, who then strolled out of the campsite.    

The next morning, the Land Cruiser was loaded up and we drove down into the crater.  This was the highlight of the safari.  The crater is about 20 km wide and holds thousands of animals.  Most of them can and do migrate in and out, but the crater has food and water and is a comfortable place for them to live.  Our guide was expert at spotting animals that we wouldn't have noticed on our own.  He and the other guides also share information on where exciting things might be seen.  Like the lions sleeping in a clump of tall grass right next to the road.  Or the cheetah surveying the landscape from a small rise on the plain.  We saw elephants (one about 30 feet away), warthogs, hippos, ostriches, gazelles, cape buffalo, zebras, wildebeest, and much more.  We took lots of pictures.  We are grateful to Doug for sharing the photos from his camera, which has a longer zoom than ours.

After lunch we proceeded home, tired from this amazing experience and from bumping along dirt roads, but extremely happy that we had this opportunity.