Day 19

We leave Dubai early today. I'm not sorry to leave, but I'm not sure it got a fair shake. Maybe it just didn't fit with the rest of the tour, but it definitely wasn't a highlight. There's not really any traditional culture left there, just a frantic race to build as much as humanly possible. The drive out to the airport took a lot longer than it seems like it should have because of traffic. They're working on a metro system, but I can't believe that anyone but the workers would give up their cars to ride public transportation. Besides, they're only building three stations, I think. It doesn't seem terribly helpful. They think it will help with the traffic problems, though, so I hope they're right. We went fairly close to the Burj Dubai. Someone asked how tall it is. The answer is one hundred sixty stories. So far. They won't disclose how tall they ultimately expect it to be. It looks more like a missile than a building already. Once in the airport, we had to recover our passports. The lady tried to give me Margaret's. She probably doesn't even know that Margaret is a woman's name. She certainly didn't look at the photo. I finally got the right one, after convincing her I'm not Margaret. The guy at passport control asked me something that sounded like was I going to Kenya. I replied no, Tanzania, and that seemed to confuse him. It took several minutes longer for him to process me than other people going through the line, so what I said must have been the wrong thing. They had Pepsi in the duty-free shop, so I got one. It was only twenty-eight cents, but since I didn't have any Dubai money, I had to give them a dollar, and they don't give change in American money, so I kept one coin and put the rest in a charity box.

The plane ride to Tanzania was four and a half or five hours. Again, the time went very quickly as always. The airport at Arusha was small, but modern and nice. They had quite a few shops with souvenirs, most of which were pretty interesting. We didn't have too much time there, but Jan managed to find several items and Sam found a mask he liked. The group heading to Ngorongoro crater left first, then we started out to our planes. One was a "big" plane, a Dash-7. It's a four-engine, turbo-prop plane that holds about twenty-five or so people. There were also two Cessna 208 planes. Single engine high-wing planes that hold ten. Only seven got in ours. Barb Kelley, John Slajyak, Lonnie, Cathy, Jan, Sam and I. The ride to the Seronera Air Strip was fairly smooth and uneventful. We heard when we got on the ground that the people in the Dash-7 were uncomfortably hot and they were going to try to get on the small plane for the return trip. When everyone arrived, we all got into jeeps and started heading toward the lodge. We almost immediately came to a pool with hippos. They weren't interested in photo ops, though, and all we saw were their backs. Then we came to a leopard up in a tree. The carcass of his kill was in the adjacent tree in a fork in the trunk. Apparently leopards are very elusive and hard to spot, so were were very fortunate to see one right after arriving in the Serengeti. Then there were several lion cubs in the grass playing together. There was quite a traffic jam of jeeps all trying to get a view of them. They were a little hard to see and get pictures of, but I got a couple of short video clips that turned out OK. Then we came up on a group of giraffes. The guide called a group of giraffes like this a "johnny". There were adults and babies all eating off the acacia trees. They were fairly close to the jeep, too. Giraffes are very impressive looking animals. It's also impressive that they eat the acacia, which are covered with long sharp thorns. They have prehensile lips that can get the leaves from the acacia, eating around the thorns. Very handy adaptation, that. We also saw a jackal, an ostrich and a sable cat, but couldn't get a picture of that. It ran off into the woods before I could get the camera ready.

The lodge, while not luxurious, was nicer than the one in Papua New Guinea and at least you couldn't see cracks through the walls. They had a gift shop, and Jan almost immediately headed there to make sure someone else didn't get all the good stuff before her. I got the room key and took our things there and came back to find Jan haggling away with the shop guy. She desperately wanted some tanzanite jewelry while we were there, but the guy wanted a ton of money for what he had. Everything in that shop was expensive, so it was no surprise that the tanzanite would be at a premium. She got my brother-in-law Larry (a geologist) to look at the stones, and he declared them good stones, but couldn't or wouldn't pass judgment on their actual monetary value. The shop keeper came down, but not enough, and negotiations broke down for the evening. The dinner menu was interesting, but only a few at our table wanted the soup. After they finished, the bowls were collected and we didn't hear from the waiters again. We were about to give up and go to our rooms when Admah intervened on our behalf and got them to bring our dinner. It wasn't worth the wait. I ate a token amount and Jan and I went to the room. They had been in to turn down the room. Not just the bed, the room. They close the sliding glass door, close the drapes, pull the mosquito net around the beds, and turn off all the lights. This last part is important because if you leave your lights on, you attract all manner of bugs into your room. We never really saw any mosquitoes, but the flies could be quite bad and there were moths, beetles, and other bugs that weren't good to have in bed with you. The bed, by the way, was hard. No box springs. After a hard day of traveling and game viewing, though, it was soft enough.