Lions and zebras and 'phants, oh my!

So it's been four days since my last confession... And what an eventful four days! I've had so much fun, I can't type fast enough to tell it all!

Sunday we just explored the city in the morning, wandered around to get our bearings and found a nice place for lunch. At Stiggy's we'd seen a flier for the cinema and noted eagerly that Tanzania is so delightfully behind the times that The Dark Knight was still playing! So our first full day in the city and we went to an American movie. Still, it was an excellent film. Then back to Stiggy's for dinner, where I think we're headed tonight as well. Their menu is too good, we have to try as much as possible!

Actually, Sunday afternoon sonething even more exciting happened! We found a place that does laundry!!! For only 14000 shillings we all got our dirtiest most horrible clothing cleaned. It was a magical magical day. Picked up Monday afternoon and I almost proposed to the nice lady when my cream trousers were back to their original colour! Yeah... showers get more exciting after camping too. It's good, small thrills.

The place we're staying is cheap, which is pretty much it's only redeeming factor. Clean too I suppose, but so noisy! The mosque starts at 5, people start talking and thumping at about 5.20... It's lucky we're going to bed early or we'd be dead by now :P Hopefully Lushoto (my next stop) will be quieter :)

Monday we headed to the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal, you hand in your passport and camera to a nice man with a gun and then wait outside a door that says "closed session" for an hour before going for lunch and planning to return. Actually the others went back, and got in for abot twenty minutes, but I had to go fix the safari that I so skillfully messed up! When I emailed Sunny Safaris (awesomest company ever) I said Tuesday the 17th and Wednesday the 18th. The cleverer amongst you will realise that Tuesday was in fact the 16th. So I went in and asked very nicely if we could change it and they said sure absolutely. Easy as pie.

So we did in fact go on safari on Tuesday and it was AMAZING! We saw pretty much everything you can hope for! Tuesday we headed for Lake Manyara, leaving around 9, got to the town about 11:30 and had lunch (Safari company provides a cook, a really good cook!) before heading to the park at abot 12.30. Basically a safari you drive around the paths in a forest or plain looking for animals. I figured the animals would be quite far away and we'd all wish we had more zoom on our cameras - not so! The first animals we found were baboons just hanging out right beside the road! Baboons are cool, the males are big and they show off their teeth a lot, they all groom each other too, really pedantically going row by row.

If I described in detail all the encounters you'd be reading for days so I'll give you a few highlights and a list of all the animals we saw (if I can remember them all).

Day one: Giraffes up close, they were my favourites. They all look so gangly and awkward, like a 13 year old who's all limb, but they move so gracefully! And they look funny when they sit!
We were heading back to camp later in the day when Jen said "Oh, stop!" and right next to the path there were two elephants! They were so close, and so chilled out just wandering along the road, we got some amazing pictures!

Day two: Wednesday we headed to Ngorongoro crater, which our guide informed us is mis-named, it's really a caldera, which is basically a collapsed volcano full of animals! We saw heaps of zebras - the punks of the animal world with their mohawk and crazy make up. Lots of pregnant females too! We saw two cheetah, but very far away so once again made use of my excellent binoculars. But the absolute highlight? Driving along we came across a lion and a lioness just lying in the sun beside the road, so we parked and started taking pictures, got some really great ones too. Suddenly the female gets up and starts walking, to have a nap in the shade of our jeep, and the male joins her a few minutes later! We have some great pictures of course, but our guide scared us a little when he started saying, quietly bt urgently, "Close the windows please. Please close the windows." At the time there was a lion tale through one of them but we obliged as quickly as possible. Apparently lions won't hunt people, but females are especially curious and they're known to put their paws up on the window and look in to see what's going on!

We saw, in no particular order: baboons, black faced monkeys, samango (?) monkeys, zebras, wildebeests, hartebeests, elephants, lions, cheetahs, a serval cat, jackals, gazelle, dik-diks, impala, hippos (boring mostly cos they don't move much), buffalo, ostriches and heaps of other birds that I can't remember all the names of.

I hope you all start planning your safari, with Sunny Safaris, because it was so completely amazing! Our guide Dearson (the only son with five older sisters, much wanted by his parents I wold guess) was so knowledgeable, and he's starting his own company soon which I think will be a huge success! I'm going to have to sit down and write out all the stuff we saw and learned so I can bore you all later. Those were the highlights but there were no low points, seeing those animals in the wild is the best experience I've had yet.

I'm going to try to post photos now, but if it fails then blame the computer or the connection!