It’s road trip o’clock, my friends. Time to hop in the land cruisers, take some motion sickness meds, and soak in the scenery before we leave for Turkey and say goodbye to Africa!
We packed up our tents in the morning (a process that involved a lot of shaking sand out of and off of various camping equipment), said goodbye to Rabies, Manuel, and the Olduvai team, and loaded up into the vehicles! It was very bittersweet to leave Olduvai. It is certainly one of the most amazing and beautiful places in the world, and I could have stayed forever if I had the opportunity. That said, the combination of dry air and lack of showers had made my eczema spread up both arms and down both legs and also onto my face, so I was not not looking forward to our hotel stays on the way home.
Our way back to Nairobi had us tracing our steps through Africa, allowing us to bid farewell to all the places we had known and loved. We drove back around the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater, back to Karatu and through Arusha, back across the border crossing and through Kenya, all the way to Nairobi.
Our journey was not without excitement, though. There was some mechanical distress in one of our vehicles, meaning we had to stop every ten minutes along the crater until we could get a repair in Karatu – luckily, we made it though, and were not all stranded in Tanzania! That said, it could have been a good time to cross-country trek across the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. We might have missed our flight, though. The technical issues meant we were late to get our lunch in Karatu (I will certainly miss Tanzanian lunch boxes) and to transfer to a bus in Arusha. Once in Arusha, we bid our drivers, Crispin and Mohammed, farewell! They deserve recognition for their skills, single handedly delivering us across Tanzania, through wildlife, flat tires, a car breakdown in the Serengeti, and so many trips across the literal Olduvai gorge all without any map app and largely without paved roads, all the while granting us insight into Tanzanian wildlife and music.
The bus got us to the border, where we waited in lines to collect more passport stamps and avoid aggressive jewelry vendors to get into Kenya once more, and set a course for our hotel!
I will be totally honest and note that my “less drowsy” Dramamine effectively knocked me out for a good bit of that fourteen hour drive from Olduvai to Nairobi, but I nonetheless enjoyed myself peering out the window at the savanna passing by, eating my lunch box and trail mix and drifting in and out of sleep.
The next leg of our journey begins at 3 am, when we brave the Nairobi airport and Turkish Airlines to get to Istanbul, then Houston, and then (for me), Boston!
Sincerely,
Caroline (Today I got my hair caught in an Acacia so bad Dr. Solomon had to untangle me)
Last group photo at Olduvai!
