camping

I've never been much for camping.  My first memory of camping is in my grandparents' pop-up trailer parked in their driveway.  I was about eight years old and it was also the first (and probably last) time I ever had Mellow Yellow.  I made it until about 2 am when I called my mom and begged her to come get me.

Then came summer camp.  I cried my eyes out the first three days.  Looking back, I'm pretty sure it was because I missed my nice clean bathroom and longer-than-3-minute-showers.  (Just kidding, Mom.)

Even in college, camping consisted of hanging out at the campsite until late in the night and then driving home to pee in a real toilet and sleep in a bed above the ground.

So when I was planning this safari and the travel agent told me the only place available in our budget in the area where I wanted to stay (to catch the Great Migration.  Of course I would sign up to go camping and then it wouldn't rain all year and the animals would go somewhere else) was actually a tented camp, I was skeptical.  But I figured since the website said it had toilets and hot showers, it was only one night (I hadn't taken into account how bad the place in Moshi would be) and it'd be an adventure.  

How much of an adventure I didn't realize until we read the rules.

The giant tarp which held our beds was partitioned into four parts: a bedroom, a sink/dressing room enclave, a toilet and a shower.  The toilet, flanked by wooden boards, flushed twice - total - and in order to get hot water, two men stood outside the tarp and poured a fire-heated bucket into the shower nozzle.  It was more slime than water and which left me wishing for a shower after my shower.  I tried to tell myself it probably had really good anti-aging qualities.

Then there were the lions.

Joey caught a cold, and the poor guy had been sniffling and sneezing all day.  Normally this translates to a lot of snoring at night.  After we were escorted back to our tent for bed by the African tribesman, Joey heard a noise.  With big eyes he looked at me and asked, "Did you hear that?"  I shrugged it off and fell into a light sleep.  At one point what I thought was Joey's snores roused me, and I told him, apparently loudly enough for Angela and Steve in the next tent to hear, to roll over.

It wasn't Joey snoring.  It was a lion.  Which is why Angela and Steve were awake to hear me hollering. 

We had an early drive the next morning to see the nocturnal predators returning from the hunt, and at 5:30 am we sat in the dark with our coffee while we waited for our driver.  Joey, Angela and Steve said a lion had kept them up all night, but I didn't believe them.  Then the lion roared again, closer this time, and I apologized to Joey for complaining about his snoring.

Click here for all of my pictures from day two of our safari.

      

safari day 2

Tuesday morning we began the second day of our safari with a drive through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.  None of Tanzania's reserves are gated; however, an entrance fee is required and you do have to check in and check out of each reserve.  Unfortunately, when we arrived at the gate of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, we did so with many other safari-goers, and it took almost an hour before we were cleared for entry.  Fortunately, Ibrahim was in charge of this check-in process, so all we had to do was try to stay out of the strong sun and away from the nasty tsetse flies.

The peak of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area sits at 7,500 feet, so with each turn the car wound higher and higher up the rim of the caldera.  We stopped to photograph the crater below before winding all the way down the other side to the "endless plains" of the Serengeti, the breathtaking scenery only aggrandized by the occasional presence of a giraffe, elephant or zebra.  Then we passed under the gate of the Serengeti National Park where thousands of impala and gazelle and zebra and wildebeest just seemed to materialize from the grassy savannah like the baseball players from the corn in the Field of Dreams.

With the hatch of our Landcruiser popped and the hot sun streaming in, we bumped along the dirt road toward Lake Masek, where we discovered a wildebeest graveyard. The tires crunched on the bones of the fallen prey as we made our way deeper into the bush and encountered a large family of elephants.  We got so close we could count the wrinkles of their crackled gray skin, and laughed at the posturing of the baby elephant.  He stomped his foot, flared his ears and snorted his trunk, only to be gently led away by his mother who didn't find our vehicle as threatening as he.

We passed flocks of pelicans and pink flamingos, pausing to photograph a herd of hippos taking a mud bath in Lake Ndutu.  They smelled almost as bad as the blunt and bloody limb toted by the very hungry and very pregnant hyena we saw next.  Dark clouds rolled in with the dusk, but we drove deeper into the bush before arriving at camp.  Though a waiter met us at the car with delightfully cold towels and deliciously fresh passion fruit juice, our experience that night would be far more rustic than any other night on our trip.

staycation day 3

On the agenda today:

1. Finish beet juice.  There is an apple, five carrots and a 1/4 cup of mint in this concoction, but all I taste is beets.  Ew.

2. Paint toenails.

3. Paint fingernails.  Then I can't dig ravenously into the pantry calling my name.

4. Procrastinate on vacation blogs.

5. Yoga by the pool with Joey's iPod since I broke mine on Monday.  Did you know when you put an ipod in the back of your sports bra and it's 95 degrees outside the moisture will kill the screen?  Oops.  Good thing there's an Apple store in Abuja.  Ha.

6. Chew raw sweet potato, apple, and celery salad for lunch.  And chew.  And chew.  And chew.  At least when it takes a really long time to eat something you think you're full...

7. Procrastinate further on vacation blog.  Maybe watch TV and try not to think about food.

8. Wait for Joey to get home.  Pounce on him as soon as he walks in the door with twenty questions.  "Hi!How wasyourday?Whatdidyoudo?Didyoumissme?CanyoutellI'vehadnohumaninteractiontoday???????"

an even better article

http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/news-update/40357-panic-in-rivers-as-beggar-%E2%80%98steals%E2%80%99-four-men%E2%80%99s-genitals.html

Yes.  The article is about missing genitals.  Please read the whole thing.  Thank you this is my life.

yesterday's fun

I'm borrowing this link from my friend's blog.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/03/gunmen-attack-american-embassy-in-abuja/

Joey's version of events is a little different...

cleanse

My employment contract expired on Friday.  My new contract was supposed to begin yesterday, but it's all tied up in red tape, which means I am taking an indefinite staycation.

This staycation perfectly coincided with the arrival of my new juicer and impending vacation to Eastern Europe (where all those bitches have legs a mile long and an inch thick), so I finally started a cleanse.  I've been trying to plan this cleanse since my January edition of Whole Living magazine arrived in February, but organizing all of the components isn't easy when you live in Nigeria.

I believe the editors of Whole Living intended for the cleanse to jump-start the new year.  My edition arrived significantly later, not by any fault of the people at Martha Stewart publications.  Then I had to order a juicer.  Then I had to wait three weeks for said juicer to arrive.  Then I could start compiling the foods needed for this cleanse, because obviously those things need to be consumed fresh.  One would think that living in a tropical climate would afford accessibility to a large variety of fruits and vegetables, but I think I would have had an easier time finding all of the ingredients in Iowa in January.  Maybe that was the point...I guess there aren't a lot of Whole Living subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa...

Anyway, the vegetable delivery man came on Saturday and Joey bought all the items he could find on my list.  Then yesterday we went to the market to buy more vegetables and today M. is going to the supermarket to hopefully find the rest.  I think the only thing we may not find is kale, but there is another vegetable delivery man coming on Friday and he said he might have Swiss Chard.

Did I mention I'm starving?

Anyway, by last night we had amassed enough ingredients, and so this morning I began my cleanse.  Nothing but fruits and vegetables for 1 week.  Three hours in and I'm already starving.  My breakfast of grapefruit, carrot and ginger juice kept me full for about one whole hour and I've been sucking down water and tea to try to get me through the next two.  In fifteen minutes I get to eat four dates stuffed with pistachios.  Oh yay.

So we'll see how this thing goes.  My other option is to sit at home and eat all day long, so I figure the cleanse route is worth a try.

Only 9 more minutes until my dates...

safari day 1

Monday morning a representative from our safari company rescued us from our hotel and whisked us away from Moshi in his white minivan.  The clouds impeding our view of Mt. Kilimanjaro the day before had dissolved, rewarding us with majestic views of the tallest mountain in Africa for much of our drive to Arusha.

Joey's cousin, Angela, and her husband, Steve, flew over 30 hours and almost 10,000 miles from Seattle to meet us in Arusha.  We couldn't decide whether we were more excited to see Angela and Steve or to begin our long-awaited safari.  Luckily we didn't have to, because no sooner were we reunited than we were loaded into the Toyota Landcruiser in which the four of us would have many, many hours over the next week to reconnect.

About two hours through the Tanzanian countryside and a snack of red bananas later, we reached our first safari destination: Lake Manyara National Park, where we were greeted by a blue monkey before even passing the gate.  Once inside, our driver and guide, Ibrahim, popped the vehicle's roof hatch so we were able to stand while he drove through the park.

Standing in the back of the car.  See the giraffes in the background?

As we made our way through the forest, we saw baboons, more blue monkeys, black-faced velvet monkeys and impalas before lunch.  We stopped in a clearing with several picnic tables and Ibrahim doled out our lunch boxes.  Lunch was fairly meager, but fortunately for always-hungry Joey we still had some of the bananas purchased along the way from the women on the side of the road.

After lunch we headed into the bush and over the next several hours spotted wildebeest (which Ibrahim pronounced as "wild beast"), giraffes, elephants, teeny tiny little impalas called Kirk's Dik-Dik, an Egyptian lizard, warthogs, zebras, hippos, and numerous species of birds!  With the aid of Ibrahim and my journal, we counted 23 different animals and we still had four more days to go!

Pink flamingos, giraffes and wildebeest

This giant turkey vulture looking thing is called a Southern Ground Hornbill

We left the park and about an hour later arrived at the Bougainvillea Safari Lodge, a welcome respite from our accommodations the previous night.  We had our own cottage, with a four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting, a fireplace and large walk-in shower, which I employed immediately.


Feeling much fresher, Joey and I met Angela and Steve for dinner in the lodge.  Many glasses of really bad boxed wine (actually, the first glass was the only really bad one; Angela said she saw them tipping the box to get all the wine out) and many good laughs later, we finally retired to our romantic little cottage.

Click here for the rest of my pictures from our first day of safari