We took the ferry from Rwanda into Tanzania crossing lake victoria. We spent one night in Mwanza before making our way onto the Grumeti Game Reserve where we were due to spend a night under Masai Mara Poison Tipped arrow guard before entering the Serengeti National Park the next day.
We then headed into the Serengeti. We saw many things from Leopards hunting to a large family of Tigers with a kill which a hyena turned up and took. We also saw many more wildebeest, a huge rat like creature and stopped at a local Masai Mara village where we witnessed traditional dance, local school life and their mud houses. The locals also had tattoos apparently they got a mark added every time they had killed a lion.
We then headed to the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater. The temperature dropped from the 40 celsius we had been used to to just below 0 celsius. We were totally un-prepared for this and only had a rain coat and fleece to deal with the cold. While 0 degrees celsius isn't exactly unusually cold for us the extreme 40 celsius drop between the day and night really made it difficult to adapt. We did however find a herd of Zebra's playing in the campsite which was and eye opener. We also had elephants turning up during the night to drink from the water tanks on top of the shower blocks. We managed to persuade one of our drivers for the next day to drive down into the local town and collect us a crate of beer so that we could all enjoy a couple of ice cold beverages round the campfire while overlooking the crater. The next day we then headed down into the crater. The crater is a strange place formed over 3 million years ago when a volcano exploded and collapsed on itself. To enter the crater we had to descend over two thousand feet, it was brutally cold in the 7 seater land cruiser we had as we departed into the crater at 5am. The crater itself covers an area of 260 square kilometres and is one of the only places that the Black Rhinoceros still exist. We were lucky enough to be able to witness one of them since it is reckoned that only a handful of them still exist. After this we then left the crater and proceed onto the capital on Tanzania Dar el Salem. Leaving the crater proved to be more of a challenge than we expected when our driver stalled our Land Cruiser on a 20% incline. He attempted to jump start it in reverse, a feat I'm sure no one has ever managed. As expected this failed and we had to place rocks under the wheels to stop the Land Cruiser rolling down the incline. It didn't take much time before we had created a traffic jam on the exit slope. The issue was that the path was only wide enough for one vehicle and was specifically an exit only ramp. This meant no one could get close enough to jump start our vehicle. Luckily for us after about 15 minutes someone in the queue turned up and informed us that they had two batteries in their vehicle. We stole their 2nd battery and without the need for jump leads simply inverted the battery onto the battery in our vehicle. Possibly the crudest jump start I've ever seen, but it worked and we were soon on our way again.
When we arrived in Dar el Salam we were taken across to a nice little beach resort where we were all desperate for a swim after sweltering in Dar's traffic in 40 celsius heat. Unfortunately after this we were all greeted with salt showers. We proceed to have a few drinks in the evening at the beach bar. The next morning we got a tuk tuk to the ferry port and then a ferry to Zanzibar Island. The ferry took 2 and a half hours and was overloaded meaning that we had to sit on the floor by the AC unit which was expelling hot from the 1st class cabin onto us. Upon arriving in Zanzibar we spent a night eating at the local food market and having a few drinks in Zanzibar's old town which was essentially us starting to celebrate the end of a month of travelling. The next day we headed onto the beach resort stopping at a spice museum on the way were we sampled lots of locally grown spices. Once we reached the beach resort we simply relaxed for 5 days before heading back to Dar and leaving the rest of the group and eventually flying home. This was the end of our African Safari.
