Yesterday was a quick day. We woke up and hit the road. The guests who had been my accompaniment were finishing their trip off, and flew back to Arusha from Serengeti early in the morning. We had to drive them to the airport before we could head out—it was around 9:00 a.m. before we could start booking it out of the park.
I was very tired, I think all of the previous days had finally caught up to me. While in the park I don’t think I slept more than 6 hours a night. I didn’t want to miss a single moment, so I sacrificed a bit of sleep, and it seemed to work out perfectly.
I drove back with Ally—he gave a bit of a game drive, but we had a long journey on our hands especially because it was raining and the roads required slow, cautious traffic.
Seeing an ostrich up close was something new. I hadn’t gotten and good pictures of them because they tended to be far off, so I feel lucky to have got this on the way out. These wildebeest were very impressive too. This picture doesn’t capture the scope it deserves. As far as the eye could see, there were black dots littering the plains. Ally said during the migration period there are around 1.5 million of these guys in Serengeti. When you were able to see far enough off, the colors of grass and anima started to blur and it looked like a carpet of black had covered the lush ground. We also saw a bunch of hyenas, but I wasn’t fortunate to get pictures of them (it’s difficult to get a good picture from a car going 50 mph).
We stopped by the Olduvai canyon entrance. We didn’t go explore the museum or anything, I got this picture and we left. I had never heard about this excavation site, it would be interesting to come back here someday to learn a little bit about human’s history.
We pretty much booked it after olduvai. We stopped for a short lunch in a town called Mto wa mbu which translated to this off-putting name: river of mosquitoes. After lunch we had to make a delivery to another one of Lucas’ schools. This one is settled deep in Maasai land and it was very new seeing the way of life of there.
We got home around 7:00 p.m., making for a good 10 hours of travel. I was super excited to get back home, I hadn’t realized how much I missed the family. I crashed pretty hard after dinner. Today there’s supposed to be some church service at our house, but I think I may have slept through it.