Day 17: My First Safari

          To day I went on my first safari!!  Complete with wild animal, unicorns, and velociraptor attacks!  Okay, so there were no velociraptors attacking us, but if there had been, it would have been awesome!  (I think so, anyways.  I mean, how many people get so say they were chased by prehistoric animals?  Besides Jeff Goldblum...)  If you go to my albums on picasaweb.google.com/Tate-in-Tanzania, you can even see the pictures from it!
          It was awesome!  I got to see giraffes and zebras and water buffalo and a whole lot more!!!  We woke up early in the morning, ate breakfast, and drove for about an hour and a half to the turn off from the GNR to the road leading up to Arusha National Park, or Ngongare Park, located at the foot of Mount Meru.  There we met our tour guide, a relative of ours named Willam Siyalo Urio (he's my father's Mjomba, but he was adopted by my Babu, so they are also brothers.  My family can be really confusing!).  He was waiting for us with our totally awesome safari jeep!  Mjomba Terevaeli had insisted that we ride in style for the safari, and had forked over the cash for the safari jeep.  It had seven seats, and the roof raised up in two places so you could stand up and take pictures.  Needless to say, I was standing practically the whole time, and took tons of photos of everything.
          Besides being my first safari, this trip was special for another reason.  For Ngongare Park is where my father was born and grew up (till he reached school age).  It wasn't a national park back then, it was my Babu's lands.  This was all the way back in the 1940's.  Would Baba's old house still be there?  Read on to find out!
          Once we got in the safari jeep, we drove up to the park entrance, where we got out and I took pictures of all the signs and info boards (Note: if you look at the pictures, you will noticed that they spelled the name of the park wrong, adding an extra "gon").  Then we went into Ngongare park.  Our first stop was a field where lots of animals liked to rest and graze.  There were giraffes, zebras, and water buffalo.  From there we backtracked to Ngongare Crater.  Along the way we saw colobus monkeys and baboons.  We drove along the rim of the crater up to a lookout where we got a nice view of the inside of the crater.  There was a very small (in more ways than one) herd of water buffalo at the bottom.  My father pointed off down the outside of the crater southwest of where we were.  In that direction lay the town of King'ori where my bibi lives and where I have a plot of land.
          From there we went back down the crater and drove a long ways to Small and Big Momella lakes.  The plants and terrain changed a lot along the way, going from jungle to forest to plains.  We passed Lokie swamp along the way, and saw another herd of Giraffes, zebra, water buffalo, and even a couple warthogs (the blurry blotches).  At Small Momella Lake I saw a really big black and white bird (sorry, no picture) as well as a heron and some other birds.  From Small Momella lake we went to Big Momella.  While driving we came across a family of giraffes right next to the road!  I got some really nice pictures of them.  While we were watching them, another group of tourists showed up in a white jeep.  As per the new rules, our jeep is a natural color, a nice sandy tan color.  This is to not disturb the animals.  The proof of necessity of this law could bee seen in the giraffes reaction to the white safari jeep.  Before it got anywhere as close as we were, the giraffes moved away.  Fortunately they were on the other side of the herd from us, and thus drove the giraffes closer to us, who didn't mind our tan safari jeep at all.
          At Big Momella lake we saw a large flock of greater flamingos.  They weren't the pretty pink of the lesser flamingos, but they still were neat to watch.  The water at Big Momella lake is very dangerous.  Touch it, and you turn into a zombie Minotaur.  Fortunately, the effect wears off fairly quickly.  From Big Momella lake we drove up to the top of a hill that overlooked both lakes and Mount Meru.  After that we drove past Momella Village.  This whole village didn't exist when my father lived there before the park was built. Near the village is a large grey rock.  Believe it or not, about or so years ago that rock was a small mountain.  Baba and Mjomba Mike used to climb it as kids.  Unfortunately, wind erosion over the past few decades has worn it down to a large boulder.  My baba now began to look for where he was born.  Finally he saw it.  Or rather the hill it was behind.  We decided to drive around to it, stopping at a gate with a park ranger.  Baba recognized her, as he had known her father.  We drove on from the gate, till we reached a turn off to a park ranger rest house.
          This was it.  The house where my father was born and lived as a toddler!  The house and road were off the approved park trails, but we went anyways.  This was something I just had to see.  (And it was worth it, I got my best shots of some warthogs and grebe along the way to the house.)  The house was still there, just as my father remembered it.  There was also now another house further off.  We told the park rangers why we had come, and they let us walk through the house.  That was definitely the best part of the whole trip.  Back in those days the kitchen was always kept separate from the house.  Sometimes quite a ways away.  The kitchen had been located about twenty meters down the hill from the house (that's why there are those photos of brush and thicket).  The kitchen was powered by a water wheel in a near by creek (now a small trickle) further down the hill.  The water turned the wheel, which turned belts with powered equipment in the kitchen for making things like butter.
          After visiting Baba's old home, we continued with our tour, driving through the foot hills of Mount Meru back towards the park entrance.  Baba and Mjomba Terevaeli could remember driving along this road before the park was formed.  Sometimes elephants would be crossing the road.  All one could do is stop and wait, sometimes for hours, for the elephants to pass.  Unfortunately we didn't have to wait for any elephants to pass as we rode along, as there are hardly any elephants (or many other animals) left in Ngongare park, due to heavy poaching.  We did, however, see an old path that led from Ksomiri (some 129 km/80 miles away) to the northwest to Engare na Nyuki (which means "Honey Water", and is about 64 km/40 miles away) in the southeast.  My baba used to used to walk this entire distance on foot!
          After we toured the entire park we visited Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge.  This is a rather famous hotel.  Anytime there are any big meeting of state between the various presidents of East Africa in Tanzania, they stay at Ngurdoto.  Mjomba Terevaeli knows the chief at Ngurdoto, and he got us a tour of the place.  We got to see the (truely) presidential suites, entire small houses located right in the middle of a coffee field (there were workers tending the coffee while we were there)!  We also got a tour of all the other levels of accommodation provided.  The cheapest room at Ngurdoto costs $139 US dollars a night.  From Ngurdoto, we went back to the restaurant where we had left Mjomba's car and had lunch.  Then we toured several more hotels, including Rivertrees Country Inn, and the Impala hotel as we made our way to Mjomba Ndelekwa's house.
          At Mjomba Ndelekwa's we left our bags and went to Karibu home for dinner.  Zara, the owner of Karibu home, knew my baba and had invited him to dinner.  Zara's place is very nice, and we ate a fancy three course meal.  After diner, Zara insisted that we come back and stay for a few days some time soon.  We made plans to return on Sunday evening.  After Zara's we returned home and went to sleep.  It was very late and had been a long day, so this was probably my second favorite part.


E’ya! - Tate


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