The "Way Too Much Has Happened for One Post" Post

Lord, I'm never going to fit this all in before I have to go get on my plane. Yes, that's right, I'm leaving Africa today. I'm variously glad to be going home (hot showers! potable water on demand! no one who even knows what "mzungu" means!), and also very disappointed to be leaving. I know I haven't seen any more than just the beginning of what this part of the world has to offer. Such diversity, such color, such vibrance. Such a short amount of time in which to try to understand it all.

Ok, so we drove to the Serengeti on the first day of the safari. My travelmates were three American kids traveling together (two of whom were--get this--UCSD students, and all of whom were in Tanzania through UCSD's Arusha Project), and one Canadian guy traveling alone like me. We started out in the gloom of Arusha and went up, up, up, past Lake Manyara, across the misty, rainy rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, and down to the (finally sunny, almost) grassland of the Serengeti. It wasn't quite the endless plain of my imagining; there were definitely trees here and there (including some magnificent, and very "African" looking, flat-topped thorn acacias, as well as many others not quite so much like you'd picture) and blue mountains off in the distance marking a definite endpoint of the lowlands, as well as the mounds of flaky rock, cropping up out of nowhere, called kopjes. We saw some great animals and scenery--perhaps, even, the best of our whole trip--one the loooong drive through the park to our campsite (a cleared-out area right there in the park where everyone who is sleeping in a tent must camp together; safety in numbers, right? Though on that night we spent there, we definitely heard the snuffling of an animal--zebra, perhaps?--grazing right outside our tent and even nudging our heads out of the way to get the grass underneath. We also heard the lions roaring just before dawn as we sat down to breakfast.) On that first drive in, we saw hippos, cheetahs (a mother and two adolescents!), zebras, giraffes, elephants; more gazelles, impala, and antelopes than I can count; dik-diks, an African Wild Cat (looks almost exactly like a housecat), baboons, two rock hyraxes (East Africa's answer to the rabbit), cape buffalo, the morally poisonous puff adder (one bite kills a human in ten minutes), and countless birds (eagles, vultures, cranes, secretary birds, etc.) Perhaps best of all, we saw a male lion in his fully-maned glory, lounging by the side of the road (right by the side of the road) before he sashayed lazily across it directly in front of our car. We marveled at an astounding sunset (reds, golds, feathered clouds, a burning ball that sank below the grass leaving the chill of darkness behind), and then hit the hay early for our 5:30 am rise.

The next day was chilly and unreasonably rainy (lamest dry season ever), which kept us inside the pop-top and many animals at bay, though we did see a pretty good showing even so. Nothing that we hadn't seen on the way in, but hey, who can complain about giraffes loping through the bush twenty feet away? After lunch on that second day, we drove back up into the mountains to the lush rim of the Ngorongoro Crater (an ancient, collapsed volcano that calls itself, with perhaps some degree of accuracy, the world's eighth wonder), where we FROZE.

Ok, computer time is up and I have to go check in from my flight. May have to finish this stateside. Onwards and upwards--next adventure, grad school!!

Love to all. See you soon.