So after our fab few days in Kenya, we were dreading our journey, 4 hours from Lake Nakuru to Nairobi and straight onto the shuttle bus for 5 1/2 hours to Arusha, Tanzania, but time passed quickly and we were excited about the next leg of the trip. Ken from Kenya had been great at organising and Fred dropped us off at the shuttle, Grace phoned to make sure we were ok, Tom had our tickets, Saidi picked us up in a cab to take us to the hotel, Abraham met us in the morning to explain the schedule and Omar is our guide for the next 5 days. How fantastic is that! We were not expecting such personal service and everyone is so lovely.

After the first night in Arusha (a usual base before the Kilimanjaro climb) we set off to our first destination, lake maynara. The drive was amazing, it gave us a small insight into daily life for so many people, from the town people of Arusha, to villagers and tribes tending their cattle. Life is so, so hard for many people, there is still great poverty here and yet everyone still smiles and they are so resourceful. It really makes you consider your own life and how wasteful we can be and take so much for granted. Being close to nature and seeing people living so closely to nature makes you consider the meaning of life I suppose. I resolve to rethink what's important in my life over the next week and when I get home, to not take things for granted, be less materialistic and to think about ways to help.

As we arrive at Lake Maynara I am pulled quickly from my philosophical state as we are introduced to our travelling companion for the next few days Jeh Jeh from Taiwan. Jeh Jeh says it how it is and is hilarious and was to give us much joy laughing with her and sometimes at her (sorry Jeh Jeh, affectionately I promise) with her funny little ways.
She hated the sun and wore a cap with the biggest rim you have seen in your life. Under the cap she had the hood of her UV100 cardigan up and if the sun came in through the window she put her umbrella up, in the van, I kid you not!

Lake Maynara was nice, lots of monkeys, (including ones with bright eon blue balls,as seen on attached picture) but it was hard to spot the wildlife. It was so different to the open plains of the Masai Mara and the Serengeti to come. We drove through lots of plush forest and we could hear the wildlife, just not see a lot of it. Our lodge was great, looking out over the rift valley and we could see down to the tree tops of where we had been driving and to the lake and for miles and miles beyond. But we were excited to leave the next day for the Serengeti.

The road was bumpy to The serengeti and the cars, ours a land cruiser, get so much hammer. I don't think I mentioned that in the Masai Mara our spare wheel fell off. Toni looked out of the back window and shouted that the wheel was bouncing down the track. We looked back to some Maasai running after it and they wheeled it back to us. In the Serengeti the bit you stand on to get in to the van fell off and Omar strapped it on with bits of old tyre tied together to make a bungee rope. Resourceful! But the bumpiness and dustiness of the open plains meant it was once again easy to spot the abundant wildlife! 'Omar, drive quick to the lion' Jeh Jeh would shout! 'Omar, we need big 5, big 5! Drive quickly! Drive closer to elephant!'
The big 5 are the most dangerous animals to hunt on foot, elephant, lion, rhino, buffalo and Leopard. We had seen all but leopard in the Masai Mara so we were excited and hopeful to find them. Jeh Jeh was still chattering on to Omar about 'I only see big 2 Omar' as she had only started her safari tour when we joined her in Lake Maynara when suddenly Omar pulled to a halt under a tree and turned round to us 'shhhhhh, look up in the tree, three leopard' and sure enough there they were, hanging on branches without a care in the world, 3 beautiful leopard, a mother and 2 cubs! They were fantastic and so close and Toni and I did a high five to ticking off the last one of the big 5! Wahoo!
After two nights in the Serengeti it was off again to our final safari destination, the Ngorongoro Crater. It is a large, unbroken, un-flooded caldera, formed when a giant volcano exploded and collapsed some three million years ago. The Ngorongoro crater sinks to a depth of 610 metres, with a base area covering 260 square kilometres. When it was a full volcano it would have been almost as big as Kilimanjaro! The crater is absolutely teaming with wildlife and our lodge was perched on the rim of the crater and through huge viewing binoculars on the terrace we could see rhinoceros and herds of elephant below.

Before we set off on our descent into the crater Jeh Jeh shouts 'Omar! I have present for you!' and she produced some balloon models she had made in her room of some of the big 5. She had made an elephant and lion and a lion cub, all made out of balloons. She gave Toni and I some traditional Chinese handcrafts she had made at home. We had really got to know Jeh Jehovah our safari, we knew she ate a bite of cake, then a bite of meat, then a bite of melon at dinnertime, bit weird. We knew bits about her life in Taiwan, that she teaches people to make traditional chinese handrafts. We knew she hates the sun and is direct and bossy, but a lovely, kind funny, slightly mad chinese woman. We now also knew she could make model balloons of the big 5 and Omar confirmed that this was the first time he had been given any kind of balloon gift on safari, let alonen ballon elephant and lion! Jeh Jeh has invited us to Taiwan to visit her, which we hope to do one day but she says she doesn't want to come to England because 'no want to come, no like weather,very expensive and me no like the food!' well like I said, she says it how it is, although she did seem a bit embarrassed when I told her we run a restaurant!

The crater was absolutely the best end to our safari. Once inside you have a 360 degree view of vast crater walls and as we drove through there was wildlife at every turn. We saw elephant, hippo, great eland, giraffe, jackal, hyena, gazelle, impala, buffalo, wildebeest the list went on and on. The best bit for us was watching a lion stalk some zebra and wildebeest. We had to pinch ourselves to make sure we really there watching it for real.

So the end to the safari was here! We drove back to Arusha happy but sad. The low to the trip was the necessary evil of hours and hours of bumpy driving just to get to the national parks, followed by hours of driving within them, but the high was the amazing experience of being so close to the animals and meeting so many fantastic people in Kenya and Tanzania.

So now we are off to Zanzibar, spice island! Speak soon

Photos attached