Or Perhaps it should be Discount Lion Safari! (or, "You're the fattest thing I've ever seen, and I've been on safari!" It's tough to pick a good Simpsons quote to entitle a post about safari.) Safari ain't cheap (neither is Kilimanjaro), but I guess that's why we're getting danger pay in Afghanistan. Or maybe we get danger pay because people here want to kill us... in any case, after Kilimanjaro, we went on safari and we saw a ton of cool animals, as demonstrated by the convenient slideshow above.
Safari is a great activity to follow up a week of walking up a mountain - since it involves basically sitting around in a jeep and having a guide point at animals for you.
The big surprise is just how many animals there are. You go to a National Park in the U.S. and if you spend a couple days driving around or hiking, you just might come across a moose or a bear. In the National Parks of Tanzania (we went to Tarangire, Manyara, and the Ngorongoro Crater), you mostly have to be careful you don't run into any of the elephants or ostriches or warthogs because they are everywhere. Also: zebras, wildebeests, impalas and various other antelopes, baboons galore, black rhinos, hip-hop-opotomuses, cape buffaloes, giraffes, birds, birds, birds, bats, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It was seriously like the Lion King; there's just all sorts of animals running around all over the place hanging around each other. Highlights included adorable lion cubs and what looked like actually a kind of half-assed attempt by a lioness to catch a zebra.
Your correspondent managed to mostly keep Elton John's "Circle of Life" out of his head during all this. Mostly.
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