Off to our next adventure. Three and a half weeks in Tanzania, Africa doing self drive safaris and touring. Upon leaving San Jose, California, our first layover was in Salt Lake City for about 5 ½ hours. There wasn’t a Priority Lounge in the airport, but since we were flying Delta Airlines and had a Delta American Express Platinum Credit Card, Delta had a lounge that we could use for $29.00 each. The layover was fairly long, so we decided to try their lounge. It was very nice! They offered a large seating area with many different types of chairs and bar stools with charging stations, and fast wifi. They provided many choices of foods and drinks, and the food was fresh and delicious. They even had Starbucks coffees and freshly baked snickerdoodle cookies. The people working at the lounge were busy constantly cleaning and bringing out more food and everyone was extremely friendly. It was a very nice experience!
We ended up having breakfast and lunch, and a nap.
After a stop in Amsterdam with a 2 hour layover ( we could not get into the lounge, it was full) we were on our last haul to Tanzania. All in all we figured from our take off in San Jose to landing in Tanzania and getting to our lodge it took a little over 30 hours.
We stayed at the Arusha Giraffe Lodge which is on the outskirts of the city, but close to where we needed to pick up our safari vehicles.
Our lodge drove us to their mall so we could buy some groceries for our safari.
The next morning we packed up the van and were driven to get our Land Rover. We had a lot of stuff to pack in the Land Rover. Sarf from Fortes was great! He went over everything about the Land Rover and helped us load our vehicle. He even wrote down all the places where we could buy fuel along our journey. He also gave us a recommendation for a place to stop for lunch.
Drew felt like Brad Pitt in the movie “The Mexican” when Brad wants to rent a more Mexican car and he gets the El Camino. We got something more African, we got the Land Rover!
Drew has a new “record” of how many times he has been stopped by the police in one day. The new record is three times. The old record was two times in Nicaragua and the police there wanted money. Here the police were very friendly and wanted to know where we were going and where we were coming from. The police use radar to give spending tickets, so we were very careful with our speed.
Our first stop was for lunch at a brand new rest stop on the way to Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Sarf, from Fortes had recommended this stop for lunch. It was a great clean place to stop for a break.
Continuing down the road we were feeling excited about being in Africa again.
Here is the gate to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. This is where you pay to enter the area for 24 hours and pay for camping and driving into the crater. The fees were $ 60.00 per person for entry. $30.00 per person for camping in the public campsite. $15 for our vehicle per day. A VAT tax of $77.40. We also had to pay $250.00 per vehicle to drive down the crater. Yes, that is a total of $507.40 for a 24 hour period. If you entered the park at 2:00 PM you had to leave the park by 2:00 PM the following day, or you would have to pay for another day.
As we drove up the mountain to the crater this was the view.
As you reached the summit, there was a viewing area for the crater.
We camped the first night on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater at 7500 feet elevation. It was very cold that night. We did not have sleeping bags, only a sleeping bag liner, and a sheet.
The next morning we drove down the inside of the crater.
What a beautiful morning on the crater floor.
We saw zebras, elephants, flamingos, wildebeests, warthogs, ostriches, jackals, hyenas, impalas, and way, way off in the distance a rhino.
After leaving the crater we drove about to 2 hours to the exit gate for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the entry gate to the Serengeti.
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