Emily's climbing things...again (safari part 2)

So the 3rd day we travelled through the Serengeti and back to Ngorongoro. This day was mostly more of the same thing we've been seeing (but it was still kind of novel so we cared). By far the most interesting was the leopard we saw eating a dead gazelle up a tree. Kind of gory, but we were far enough away it didn't really look all that bad:

he's totally staring us down.
probably cuz we interrupted his nom fest...whoops

The funniest moment this day was probably the hippos we saw. We had seen them earlier, but they were either mostly in the water or just not good photo opportunities. We pull up to the water and my first though is "oh hey look hippos! oh cool and there's an island in the middle of the pond too!" Well, I did a double take, and this is the island:

Yup. That island turned out to be more hippos. These things are massive as well. I guess everything looks bigger in person than on the TV screen watching the Discovery Channel. I was waiting for such a long time for one of them to yawn that my battery almost died (but thankfully it didn't).

We stayed that night at a campsite along the edge of Ngorongoro Crater where we went the next morning. The campsite was FREEZING the entire time. Even though not having a hot shower didn't help, we had every piece of clothing on at night and we were still cold. I unfortunately had forgotten my sneakers so i was stuck freezing my toes off. I finally caved in the morning and put socks on with my flip flops so I was definitely the coolest person at camp rocking this look:

oh yeah. hot stuff right here.

Supposedly there was an elephant at our campsite late at night hanging out around the water tank but I too busy being cold inside my tent. It's pretty believable though since the campsite was covered with what I assume was elephant poop. It was definitely from some very very large animal, or someone with really bad stomach problems.

The final day we spent roaming around the crater which is pretty cool. We woke up early to get a head start since we still needed to drive home and wanted time to see things. There also happened to be a gigantic tree at the campsite that I decided to climb. It was number 3 of the fun things Emily has climbed on the safari. The first was a rickety ladder in Lake Manyara:

I was trying to climb on top of the bathrooms
to get a better view =)

The second was a tree at the gate to Ngorongoro (which I don't currently have a picture for...it's coming soon). But this tree was gigantic and I truly couldn't resist.

I'm the little, indistinguishable green and
grey blog halfway up the tree

The sunrise from here was pretty spectacular too since it rose right over the crater. You couldn't really see the crater in the pictures with the sun, but it's still pretty nonetheless:

The day was pretty slow and this was the point where we were sleeping as zebras are trotting by our jeep. Partially because we were so exhausted (who knew driving in a car all day could make you so tired?) and because we had seen thousands already and had photos. The only thing we really stopped for were lions. We had seen a few in Serengeti and Ngorongoro but they weren't in good positions for taking photos. We must have waited at least 30 or 40 minutes for these lazy-ass cats to move. They literally sleep and lay about all the time (I mean, they are cats). Finally, just as all of our cameras were about to die, one of the male lions (which is all anyone wants pictures of) stood up for about 3 minutes to stretch and yawn and then go back to sleep.

 

After that we had lunch and tried to take a jumping photo in front of the hippo pond in the crater (none of them have everyone in the air lolz).

After that we headed home! We truly slept most of the time except for when one of the cars broke down and we had to stop and people came to talk to us (more often than not to sell us stuff) through the jeep windows. 

So if the pictures themselves aren't reason enough, I STRONGLY SUGGEST that people put it on their bucket list to go on a safari at some point in their life. Whether you're a cheap college student like moi and choose to stay in tents the whole time or if you're rolling in the dough and can afford to stay in lodges, it's completely worth a trip to Africa.