So began our day of driving and looking for animals, doing the African safari as all westerners know it. At first, the driving around seemed really random, but trust me there is a process to it! It helped to have a native Tanzanian driver who had driven the crater many times and knew general areas to look for certain areas, but it's really about adhering to your own animal instinct: being part of the herd....because whenever there was more than one car stopped, you knew there was something to see. Once there were 28 trucks parked bumper to bumper along the road just to take pictures of two lions sleeping in the long grass. Our driver joked and said the lions had probably eaten a lot last week an were now too tired to "put on a show," whatever that means!
Throughout the day, we saw zebras, wildebeests, lions, servals, vervet monkeys, olive baboons, African buffalo, warthogs (these guys are SO ugly!!), secretary birds, hippos (at least 30 or 40 in the lake at one time), gazelles, hyenas (which are much bigger than I imagined), ostriches, flamingos, everything! At one point, we were totally surrounded by literally thousands of zebras an wildebeests.
After lunch, we FINALLY saw elephants from a distance. At first, I was bummed we weren't closer, but then I was ok with it because later when we stopped at one of the crater's lodges along the rim, we saw three elephants roaming around the lodge grounds. A few of us went on a photo hunt and were like 10 yards from one! And this is probably not something I should be writing home about, but no worries; we were safely hidden in the bushes but decided to leave when the elephant turned to start eating them. Wait, do elephants even eat bushes?? Well, regardless, he was moving our way so we were outta there!
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