A day that will live in infamy: Day 5

I will just get it out there. Day five wasn't the best. On day five I deleted our camera card. Reformatted it, really. The result is the same. I am 100% to blame and will regret it forever.

(The good news is that all the images from here on out are ours.)

Vultures

So day five was spent not only driving the longest stretch of the trip, out into the Masai Mara Reserve on the border of Tanzania, for 7 or 8 hours or something, but it was a quiet ride. One in which we just remembered all the good times we just had and had just seen and had just, not a day before seen on our camera, that were now all gone, in the zeros of binary.

Other than that.



Let's see. Stayed at an amazing tented camp in Sarova Mara. It was, like I mentioned, in the middle of nowhere. We drove 2 hours on a single dirt road to get there. The tents were canvas yet housed individually underneath their own small sheds, so it wasn't roughing it in the least. Hardwood floors, bathrooms nicer than our own. And they grow their own food, in a three-acre organic garden that had just about everything ever except for meat plants, which I think are still years away from commercial production. So after snooping around the grounds (pool, archery, putt-putt), we drove out for another safari ride.

main lodge

Our 'tent'

We also had to try to recreate all the images we remembered losing. So we payed special attention to all the animals we'd already grown so accustomed to, and began to shoot them all again. Not shoot like shoot, but, c'mon. You already knew that.

Giraffe squatting, stretching, leaning to drink water - so awkward!

Elephants

This was probably the most exciting day of safari, fortunately for us. We saw a two black rhino. There are only like 35 of them on the million square miles (acres, I don't know for sure) and we saw a couple. We saw a pride of lions. Or Lionesses, cause the male was away. But there were about 4 adults and a dozen cubs.

the illusive black rhino

Maasai Giraffes - different patterns than the others we've seen

I think there's some lions over there

We also drove into a gully and saw hippos. Watching them was nothing like the game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, but more like Whack-A-Mole, as there might have been twenty in the water but only three or four at a time came to the surface. On the way out we were able to catch an amazing rainstorm on the horizon and then on our van and one, it turns out, that would haunt us days later.

Hippos hippos hippos

Then it was Tusker at the bar, buffet dinner, apologize profusely, still, and hitting the sack.