The sleep deprivation is real. We went to sleep at 12am and woke up at 5:30 am. I am a monster when I get less than 8 hours of sleep but we will prevail.
And I did prevail, we went to Ngorongoro crater, which is a national park here in Tanzania and also the largest caldera in the world which is pretty neat. We drove over and to the base of the crater and saw so many incredible animals. We saw ostriches, warthogs, wildebeests, cape buffalo, Thomson gazelles. The cape buffalo were mostly in bachelor herds and they had the egrets on top of them that were waiting for the bugs to be stirred up for them by the buffalo. Some new animals we saw were hippos (my favorite), lions, and flamingos. It was amazing to see the hippos as I now have a special appreciation for them since they are my taxa. We were able to hold some hippo teeth and they are extremely dense and heavy. We had lunch at a place where hippos hang out which was cool as I was able to get some up close pictures of them interacting and snorting. For the lions we saw a lone male lion as well as a pride of lions. For the pride of lions there was a nearby Thomson gazelle herd, and there was this very diligent gazelle who was staring down the pride for any indication of trouble. After the caldera we drove to Olduvai and on the way we saw an insane amount of giraffes. There were two herds that we saw that were right up next to the road, and it was easy to see how tall they are.
(Ngorongoro Crater)
Here at Olduvai we set up our tents for the night, it was a little stone age as we had to use random rocks to hammer our stakes in, but a lot of our tents were over hard rock so we ended up tying our tents down with rocks. I hope I don’t fly away as it is really windy at night.
(My tent during sunset)
We ended the day with a few presentations about large felids and warthogs/rhinos/mongooses which was cool to learn about. Overall super happy I was able to see hippos and interested to see how camping for 7 nights will turn out.
Isabella-2024-Bovini
