Serengeti National Park

Serengeti National Park is Tanzania’s largest (14,763 sq.km.) and most famous national park. It is named after the Maasai word “siringet”, which means “land of endless space”, and that is exactly what it is, though that endless space contains grasslands, woodlands, swamps, rivers, hills and so much more.The southern part of the park contains numerous kopjes (also called "simba rocks").
We spent three days in Serengeti, driving throughout the park and witnessing the varied landscape and animal life.
The animals that we saw in Serengeti were truly amazing.
The following two pictures may be difficult to identify, but in the first, there is a cheetah perched atop the rock in the middle of the frame, and in the second, there is a lion lying under the tree, just to the right of the trunk.On our second day in the park, we stopped at the visitor's center for lunch. While eating, we made two new friends - the hyrax and the mongoose. Although I'm sure the hyrax is basically an African squirrel and the mongoose is a pest as he begs for food, I couldn't help but take pictures of both.
At the welcome center, there is also a small nature trail and display area that provide information about the park's ecosystem, wildlife and management. Although this picture may be too small to make out the details, it's a handpainted mural that describes what it takes to manage a huge national park like Serengeti. The scenes in it are priceless.
For the two nights that we were in Serengeti, we stayed at the Ikoma campsite, which may as well have been within the gates of the park. We even woke up one morning to find two enormous elephants less than 200 meters from our tents! On our last day in the park, we witnessed the famous migration of wildebeest and zebras that takes place each year. There are over a million wildebeest and over 200,000 zebras who migrate around the park depending on the season. This time of year, they are in the south, and I truly believe we saw the vast majority of the herd. They literally stretched to the horizon.
On this day, I was also "lucky" enough to find a dung beetle that made its way into our vehicle as we were leaving the park. Everyone else in the car - Hudson, our driver and our cook - seemed to think it was hilarious to make me hold the huge, powerful beetle, but I'm not so sure I agreed.

Oldupai Gorge

We then proceeded to Oldupai Gorge, a canyon northwest of Ngorongoro Crater that is approximately 50 kilometers wide and 90 meters deep.
Because of a unique geological history that placed distinct layers of volcanic deposits in the area over a period of almost two million years, the gorge has provided tremendous insight into ancient life. The fossils excavated from Oldupai Gorge provide some of the oldest evidence of human existence. A set of 3.6 million-year-old footprints were found near the gorge that were made by three early hominids. The most famous fossil from the gorge is a 1.8 million-year-old skull known as Australopithecus boisei, which is on display in a small museum.
The gorge also provides one of the best views of Oldoinyo Lengai, Tanzania’s only remaining active volcano. In the left of the picture below, you can see smoke rising from the volcano.

Lake Manyara

We began our safari at Lake Manyara, which Hemingway once described as “the loveliest [lake]…in Africa.” Lake Manyara is a relatively small park, but what it lacks in size, it certainly compensates for in natural beauty, plants and wildlife.

As we entered the park, we passed unfamiliar, yet amazing, beauty. We passed the incredible baobab tree, a tree which can grow up to 100 feet tall with a trunk diameter of 23 feet and which can store up to 32,000 gallons of water in its trunk to survive drought conditions.We also saw the sausage tree, with its enormous berries hanging down from vine-like stems.

As we continued along dirt roads that winded through every corner of the park, the sights were truly spectacular. Although it was only the first stop on our safari, we saw a huge number of animals - baboons, impalas, hippos, giraffes, cape buffalo, crocodiles, wildebeest, elephants and so much more.When we finally left and began our drive towards the Serengeti, we were allowed one last, amazing view of the lake and the surrounding valley.

Safari

“Few areas of the continent captivate the imagination as does Tanzania. Snowcapped Mt. Kilimanjaro towers majestically over the horizon, flamingos stand sentinel in the salt pans of Ngorongoro Crater, and the hoof beats of thousands of wildebeest echo over the Serengeti Plains. In many ways, this is the Africa of legend, where hot, dusty afternoons end abruptly in glorious blazes of sunset and velvet-black star-studded skies enfold the hills.” (Lonely Planet East Africa)

This is the Africa to which I arrived this morning. Hudson and I boarded a small propeller plane at the Kigali airport, and just over two hours later, we arrived at the Kilimanjaro airport. However, with the hot, dry air and flat, grassy land, it felt much, much farther away from the cool rolling hills of Rwanda than such a short plane ride. And so our adventure began…

Beaches and earthquakes

This weekend, several friends and I headed west to the town of Kibuye for a relaxing weekend on the lake. Saturday was just the relaxation for which we were looking; we spent the day laying in the sun, reading, dining by the water's edge, taking in the beauty of the landscape and enjoying one another's company.
Sunday was not so relaxing. Around 9:30 in the morning, I was putting on sunscreen, when suddenly I heard a rumbling sound and felt the building begin to shake. For a split second, I honestly thought there was a group of children running around upstairs; quickly enough, though, I realized that was not the case, so we quickly grabbed our things and fled the building. As it turns out, there had been a 6.0-magnitude earthquake just southwest of Kibuye, across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For the rest of the morning, we felt aftershocks, and then, as we were eating lunch, around 1:00, we experienced three more quakes. These three ranged in magnitude from 4.5 to 5.0 and were centered south of us in Rwanda. All four are shown on the map below as yellow squares. Thankfully there was not much damage where we were in Kibuye, and no one was injured. However, at least 34 people were killed and hundreds were injured in the areas that were directly hit by the quakes. Please keep those persons and their families, as well as all of those who were affected, in your prayers.