Lions!

LIONS

Male lions at nap time (which is basically all the time).

A ranger told us the story of this lion and her baby. Only female lions hunt, and the men usually watch the cubs to protect them from attacks. But this lion's mate was out being unfaithful and left the five cubs unprotected. A hyena killed cubs of them the day before I took these photos. We watched as she lavished attention on the remaining cub.

Pride Rock -- right behind our camp sight. The Serengeti was filled with lions: the lions mating in our camp site, the lions sunbathing on the other side of our site, the lions chasing a hyena across our front porch.

ZEBRAS

Their stripes get darker as they get older. Some of them are albino and have on partial stripes.






BABOONS



Ridiculous.

WILDEBEEST

Everywhere. So many!! So ugly. So stupid. We saw the Great Migration across the Mara River. Wildebeest are so stupid that, if one starts moving, they all do. So if one crosses the river, the others just follow. Even though there is great grass on both sides. And even though there are crocodiles in the river just waiting.




Stay tuned for CATS!!!

ANIMALS

HIPPOs

Hippos are boring. They're also deadly. They usually lie in water looking completely lazy--but if they get riled, they can run and chomp and kill like no other.

As we drove through Tarangire National Park, we got to the hippo pool, got out, and stood looking at the boring old hippos. And then a high-pitched shriek came from the hippo pool. We stared, trying to figure out what was going on, and then finally focused in on the action. A mother hippo had given birth just that morning--after being pregnant for 15 months. And now a male wanted to mate with her, but since a female can't/won't mate while she's nursing, the male went after the baby. He chomped down on it (the initial scream), chomped again (another scream), and kept at it for about 10 minutes until the baby was good and dead. The mother, still with the blood of labor on her, watched the whole thing. My friend Jenn said that she looked sad. I couldn't tell--for being so deadly, they really just continued to look pretty darn boring.



ELEPHANTS

I love elephants. I love them for being the one matriarchal animal--the women actually have a say. I love them for protecting each other, for their whipping tails and their snagged ears (the ears get caught on trees as they go through forests, so they get torn from thorns just as if they'd had earrings torn out of them). Mostly I love that they move so slowly that even a beginner photographer can take great pictures of them!






GIRAFFES

I'vealways said that giraffes are my favorite animals. This started when I was 3 years old at the zoo. We stopped at the giraffes, and a baby giraffe came close to me. I offered him/her my tommy tippy cup, and he leaned over to drink. I don't know if that endeared the giraffe to me, or if it was my mom telling the incident to my relatives and making me sound super cute that did it, but I've always these animals.




Stay tuned -- I promise to be quicker about this!

INTRODUCTION TO SAFARI

Hi, guys! I’ve never had a blog before. But this trip was the culmination of 10 years of saying, “Someday I’m going to go to Africa and hike Mt. Kilimanjaro.” I never actually thought that “someday” would come. But since it did, and since there’s no way to explain any of it without sharing the images, here we go. I’ll tell about the trip in segments over the next little while.

SAFARI. What does it really mean to go on safari? My very vague idea before our own safari was based largely off of The Wild Thornberries (a cartoon a few years ago about a red-haired girl who traveled around Africa with her naturalist parents, had adventures, and could talk to her pet monkey). Well, I found out . . .

Going on safari means riding around in a Landcruiser with a Tanzanian guide who says, “That’s a cheetah way over there” when all you can see is the same old grassy plain – and who then drives you up to within feet of that cheetah.

And it means getting tired of being in the Landcruiser, climbing on top, and bumping along for miles with the wind in your hair and a head completely empty of thought and filled only with pure living of the moment.

It means spending your nights eating 5-course meals made in Dutch ovens and bathing, going to the bathroom, and sleeping in luxury accommodations that are still a part of nature.

It means having a Maasai with a spear walk you to and from your tent every night. And it means having a park ranger with an AK-47 guarding your camp.

It means passing Maasai villages, giving out water bottle after water bottle to thirsty Maasai boys out herding the family’s cattle, and loving the beauty of tribal clothing against the deadness of the winter grass. For us, it even meant being a bit of a freak show in a village in quiet corner of Tanzania just outside the Serengeti where we were the very first westerners to visit. (Unfortunately, no pictures of us as every last person in the town stared at us—with the focus entirely on us, I felt too conspicuous to take photos.)

But mostly it means animals. Miles and miles of bumpy road and the thrill of the hunt. The catch-an-exotic-animal-doing-something-that-is-very-strange-to-see-or-that-humanizes-the-animal hunt. And the capture-it-by-camera hunt.

We saw everything: giraffe, zebra, lion, wildebeest, elephant, hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, several species of gazelle, vulture, lion, stork, jackal, hyena, leopard, cheetah, lion, lion, and even rhino. Yes, lots and lots of lion. I took about 4,000 pictures. So thank me for being selective in what I put up. I'll be posting animal pictures and stories very soon--in the meantime, here's a comical teaser: