Kakamega Serengeti

We spent a last, full day at the community centre last Monday, after which we took a car ride to Kakamega to start the next phase of the great African Adventure. We were sad to leave our new friends behind and departed the family compound with a sense of melancholy. We’ll miss the ambition and optimism of the centre and the hot, dusty days of village life.

There was one more stop in Kenya before we crossed into Tanzania. Michelle taught not far outside of Kakamega when she lived in Kenya 15 years ago, and she wanted to return to the school to say hi to the current staff and students and to see how the school looked all this time later.

The response was pretty overwhelming.

The next day we left Kakamega early for the Tanzanian border. Sometimes the story of a journey is best told with a picture.

The trip took most of the day involved a car, a matatu (oversold as an “express shuttle”), and a final jaunt in a station wagon. We thought we’d reached the ultimate level of absurdity when 13 people were (at times literally) crammed into the station wagon, including children stacked on top of our luggage in the back. Michelle was sitting on my lap in the back seat. The driver pulled away, but was flagged down by another potential passenger. Unable to turn down a fare, he drew the car up to the man and got out, motioning for him to sit down in the driver’s seat. The man got in and the driver got in after him, driving the rest of the 20km run to the border sitting on the man’s lap.

But we made it to the border safely and in reasonably good spirits where we said goodbye to Kenya for now; goodbye to its stunning scenery and mesmerizing wildlife, and goodbye to the lovely people of Kenya, with their ready smiles, warm welcomes, and their lilting, almost-musical accents. It’s a place that is not easy to let go, and when we left it seemed most likely that we weren’t seeing it for the last time.

We’re now in Zanzibar. We flew in this afternoon, on a plane that was typically 3 hours late. We had a sort of epiphany on the shuttle ride to the airport about how far we’d come on this trip psychologically.

It goes like this.

I was checking my e-mail this morning for the first time in a week (we were out of Internet range for the last week, hence the break in posting) and it turned out our flight had been changed to leave from Arusha airport (the one we’d deliberately stayed near) to Kilimanjaro airport about 50km away. Thankfully, the airline had arranged for a shuttle to pick us up at a nearby hotel. (Not actually at the hotel, as we later found out, but kind of near the hotel. That took a while to sort out on its own.) The flight was supposed to leave at 1:50pm, but the shuttle didn’t start moving until after 1. There were only two other people in the shuttle with us, a Spanish couple who had just wrapped up a safari. They looked wide-eyed and panicky.

“Are you flying to Zanzibar??”

“Yes”

“But the plane is supposed to leave soon!! Aren’t you worried??”

Michelle and I looked at each other. Not only were we not worried, it hadn’t even occurred to us to be worried. Something that would have agitated me to the point of fury two months ago barely registered.

“Hm, no, I guess not! I think we’ve been in Africa too long to be worried…”

Our trip from the border to Zanzibar included four days on safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater. Both were incredible. The huge herds of wildebeest and zebras haven’t yet left the Serengeti for the Masai Mara, so the southern expanse of the park was filled with animals. The Ngorongoro crater is the leftovers of a huge volcano that collapsed millions of years ago and is now filled with vegetation and animals of all descriptions. Because the park is so small (covering only 265 square km), the animals have all seen and become accustomed to the tour vans, allowing for close-up viewing that’s not possible in the bigger parks.

We camped in both parks. The campsites are inside the parks themselves and there are no fences to separate campers from the animals. We heard things. The last night as we were camping on the crater rim, I heard something big, a buffalo I think, snorting and grazing a few feet from our tent.

At least it wasn’t a lion.

Now for some pictures! First up: Serengeti. Look for the fascinating sequence where an elephant clears a pride of lions hiding in the grass…

And then, Ngorongoro crater, in which we saw a pair of cheetahs kill a baby gazelle (but too far away for pictures) and the extremely rare black rhino: