I can’t believe I was really there. We were a group of 6, 4 of us form the US and 2 from Australia. We met 2 years ago on river cruise in Europe so this was a reunion trip for us, 18 months in the making!

Within minutes of leaving the airport we saw impala; within a half hour we saw zebra and giraffes with babies! We woke up the first morning to a giraffe at sunrise, you now those pictures you see in magazines. What an experience see the great migration and the river crossing. We were told there are 1.7 million wildebeest; we think we saw a million of them!

We did a night game drive and couldn’t get enough of the bush babies jumping from tree to tree! We arrived first or maybe second as a vehicle passed us, to the Ngorongoro Crater. There were a lot of animals playing around. We saw 4 of the “Big 5”, only the buffalo was missing. We had the privilege of following 2 black rhinos (we had been lucky to see 2 others in the Serengeti).

Seeing all of the elephants, giraffes and zebras in Tarangire Park was amazing. I read you could see 100-400 elephants a day here. I think we did. At one point one of the people in our group counted 56 of them standing together.

Here we also experienced the love of a mother for her child. We came upon a mother elephant and her baby, separated by the road. The baby was obviously ill and could hardly move. She was trying to get it to cross the road by her. When she saw that we might come between them (we were stopped several meters away) she started to charge us. Wilfred quickly maneuvered the vehicle so we off t he side. She continued in a sideways movement across the road towards her baby not leaving her eyes off of us. We watched as the baby slowly moved across the road and the plain trying to follow the mother to the herd.

Although we never saw a kill we did see the aftermath…the cheetah in a tree eating, and lions eating their take down. We were on safari during the dry season, we were fortunate to have very few other vehicles around; often we were the only one. The camps were wonderful, especially the talking bush showers after a dusty hot day out. Two of the nights we were the only ones at the camps so it was like having experienced 3 private camps instead of one.

Sandy Jacobson
Wallace, North Carolina
Safari Dates: October 15, 2012 to October 25, 2012