Serengeti National Park

The next four days were incredible. Every morning we would board the safari vehicles just after sunrise for our daily game drive. It took the first three days just to get my mind around the fact that we weren't at the zoo, that this was... for real. We were driving and camping IN the home of literally millions of wild animals! In two days we had elephants, hyenas, and water buffalos surround our camp. There's nothing like waking up to a jackal sniffing your tent. Walking the dark expanse from the campfire to the outhouse was not unlike walking the plank, the unsettling, yet somehow thrilling feeling of your very possible impending death, looming ahead of you in the pitch blackness.... Sound dramatic? You try going to the bathroom surrounded by growls and shrieks rising up from 26 sets of glowing eyes. Exactly. Particularly when the only instructions given for defense were to "Stare the hunger-crazed lion in the eyes and back away slowly". Awesome.

We saw elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, dik-diks (my personal favourite) water buffalos... some other kind of buffalo, bush bucks, bush beast, wildebeests, heart beasts, and many, many other beast...many other beasts. The only thing we didn't see was a rhino, but really, could we even complain? By then, I'm ashamed to admit, we were almost animaled out.

DAY 1: "Look at that! A SNAIL!!!"

DAY 4: "Yawn!!! ....Oh, what? ....Another cheetah?...keep driving."

This was definitely a result of the never-ending animal-spotting skills of Ole Sammy-hawk eye, our driver. Sammy never missed a beat. He could spot a field mouse 14 km away, be able to tell it was 1 1/2 pounds, 3 years old, a female, pregnant with 7 babies, liked long walks on the beach, and had an aunt named Ruth. I swear these guys have an internal radar. Either that or they know we'd believe anything they'd tell us anyway.

Spending more than a couple days in the Serengeti could be bad in so many ways. It can turn the most mild-mannered person into a cold-hearted, savage. Take Andrea for instance - Yoga instructor indeed! Witnessing a near take-down, with a lion on one side of us, a poor little warthog on the other side, and Andrea in the middle, with fire in her eyes, fervently whispering, "Get 'im, Get'im", is a shocking and frankly, disturbing experience. I had to share a tent with this woman! While we never did witness a kill, the plains were littered with animal remains, one gazelle carcass hanging from a tree from a recent leopard kill. On T.V. I would find these things horrifying, but in real life, absolutely amazing. What an unforgettable experience.