Calling a Vacation Audible

Greetings from Tanzania! Nothing about travelling/life in Africa is ever simple, so in retrospect we should have expected something like this to happen. Kezza Besigye, the opposition leader of the FDC party in Uganda, is under house arrest. He has been leading protests in the country lately over cost of living, and with Museveni being sworn in for his 4^th term as president last week, things have been tense. There were several riots protests scheduled for the time we were supposed to be in Kampala, so we decided to call a vacation audible and head straight to Tanzania.

We were heading to Ngorongoro, Tanzania, a beautiful national park that is home of the largest unflooded caldera in the world. Our new Tanzanian tour guide, Moses, told us it would be about a 5 hour drive from Nairobi to Ngorongoro. Fourteen hours later, after bribing negotiating with the gatekeepers of the national park because we were there after they closed the entrance, we arrived at the beautiful Ngorongoro Lodge. As we pull up to the front entrance, our trusty driver Charles laughs, “Oh, there is an elephant there! We can not go there!”. Assuming he’s kidding I don’t think twice until I feel the car quickly reversing. An elephant had climbed up the crater to the lodge and was standing in front of the huge glass entrance doors, just hanging out, so we couldn’t get into the hotel. I later found out that the elephant comes most days to get a drink of water, and the hotel gatekeeper politely opens and shuts the gate for it each time. What can I say? TIA.

It’s low season for tourism in East Africa (high season starts in about 2 weeks, so we’re just in the knick of time) so we basically had the amazing Ngorongoro Lodge to ourselves. We also visited the nearby Olduvai Gorge, the “cradle of humanity”. The lava rock layers there contain various human ancestors’ remains, and because the rock can be easily dated there it gives a nice little timeline and essentially proves human evolution. My dad and I were really into it and had a lot of fun learning about the history of the beautiful gorge.

Next up: Moshi, Tanzania at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, then off to Zanzibar!

Ngorongoro Crater

The front of the lodge where the elephant blocked our path

Olduvai Gorge