Freshly scrubbed, and dinner of macaroni and cheese, we were crawling into our tent a bit early for a welcomed sleep. I decided on one last trek to the toilet and donned my headlamp with faded batteries. Intent on the task at hand, I passed through some people standing near the vehicles, and nonchalantly headed toward the toilet, when I realized that the sudden movement towards my direction was the tusk of an elephant who thought I’d come much to close. Judging the distance of only some feet, I completely agreed.
He continued to enter the camp, drinking from the water tank and checking out the meal a group was sitting outside eating on a picnic table. His friend soon came along for a drink of water as well. With all the tourists gawking, taking photos, shining flashlights in their faces and staying far too close to the elephants it seemed a recipe for disaster, but finally they moved on, I think with some persuasion from the rangers.
Early the next morning we were jostling down into the bottom of the crater. Because animals don’t migrate from the crater, we were looking forward to seeing some animals that had migrated from the Tanzanian side of the crater.
I took a photo as we were jostling along, and I was just playing around with the camera. I thought I was doing adjustments on that photo, so thought “format” was pertaining to that photo only. It soon became clear that with no warning, no “format disc” message, I had managed to clear the entire disc of all my photos of that past four months including Victoria Falls with my aunts, events with the kids, Zanzibar, Masai warriors, my leopard, the lion and reacting gazelle’s, EVERYTHING. I couldn’t believe it, since I had bought a large camera specifically so I would have a good zoom when I went on safari. It was so devastating, and put a damper on the rest of the day which seemed to be a bit jinxed anyway. We were on the wrong side of the river causing us to miss seeing a leopard that had moved on by the time we drove around, and didn’t see too much of anything else either. I tried to eat my lunch at an idyllic spot next to a lake only to have two large black kite birds literally snatch the food out of my mouth, gauging my mouth with their talons, and leaving me with small cuts and feeling very stunned. It then started pouring, and we had to continue the rest of the trip sitting inside the vehicle with the top closed…boring…aside from the fact that we didn’t really see any more animals of interest. One thing that was nice about the crater is seeing a variety of animals – wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, topi…. All just kind of hanging out together. We also saw hyena…rather mangy creatures, and a Cheetah, who we hoped was going to decide it was lunch time and go for one of the gazelle, but she didn’t seem to be in a particular hurry.
We got back to Arusha pretty late – around 6:00- and finally found a place to stay at the Catholic Hostel, which worked out pretty well. It had a stunning view of Mount Mehru on the outside porch, and was near to where our friend was staying so we were all able to go for a nice meal after enjoying long, HOT showers.
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