Serengeti National Park

Breakfast and checkout from the Acacia Farm Lodge (where they sang us a farewell song), then Penuel drove us to the Lake Manyara airport. Sure wish he was our guide for the rest of the trip! Our plane was a 38-passenger Dash 8, bigger than we had expected. It was a short hop over to the Serengeti, where we landed at Kogatengo airstrip (no building, everyone waits outside) in a light rain. Raja, our guide for the next three days, met us with his canvas-topped Land Cruiser. His first words of advice: “When you need to pee just say, Raja I need to check the tires.“ He took us on a game drive on the way to our next home, the Nimali Mara, a “luxury tented lodge” built into some immense boulders. We listened to an orientation and signed a waiver about all the dangers here — the lodge and its surroundings, the game drives and the vehicles! No walking outside in the dark by yourself, you must have a staff member with you for safety — which means going to breakfast and coming back after dinner. Our place is definitely “bush luxury” — the bathroom area has a double shower and beautiful copper bathtub (I think it’s the honeymoon suite)!

Raja took us on a second game drive after a late (gourmet) lunch. We held on to our seats for dear life as he sped over the washboard roads and bumpy single tracks until animals came into view and he would stop. On today’s game drives: fields full of wildebeest and zebras; impala, topi (antelope), warthogs, giraffes, dik-dik, baboons, elephants, eland, both male and female lions, vultures, geese, ostrich, maribou storks, and other birds that we couldn’t identify. Oh, and huge crocodiles in the Mara River! We also passed by the partial remains of a wildebeest being finished off by the maribous and vultures, and a zebra that had been recently killed by a nearby lion.

At dinner Jack got the royal birthday treatment again — all the staff marching around the tables while singing and clapping, until they stopped and presented him with a cake. It seems our safari trip planner must have told every lodge that he was celebrating his birthday!En savoir plus