Safari!

ahhhh, such a good week! Went on a 5 day safari and visited: Tarangire National Park, Serengeti, Ngoragora Crater and Lake Manyara. Was awesome!

We saw all the Big 5 - rhinos (in the distance), loads of buffalo, cheetahs, leopard and lions! We saw like every other animal too - elephants, antelope, gazelles, giraffes, hippos and loadsss more!

The best bits were as follows:

• When we were camping above Ngoragora crater an elephant came into our camp!! Twice! To drink from the water butt, hehe. Was literally like 1 metre away from us and like 3 from our tents. Really cool but mega scary. SO funny, it started to charge @ Hayley and she's got in on camera!!
• Also @ the same during the night animals roam around free cos there's no barrier between camp and park so you're not allowed any food in your tent but we heard so many warthogs sniffing around the tent. I didn't get 2 sleep until 5 am!! Had to put my ear plugs in cos it was so scary! And then a herd of zebras galloped past our tent. How amazing?
• In the Serengeti (which by the way is huuuuge!) we saw a cheetah metres from our car munching on a Thompson gazelle which he'd just caught. There were like 20 vultures surrounding him so we got amazing photos!!
• Drove right up to 2 male lions which are really hard to find usually so that made our day! We saw 27 lions all together and 6 cheetahs, really really lucky!
  
• Oooh and we saw hundreds of monkeys and baboons which are fascinating to watch, sat in the car for like an hour watching them. So violent to eachother, even the little babies! We were really lucky with seeing so many baby animals too, some were just 3 days old! monkeys, giraffes, lion cubs, elephants, baby hippos are adorable!! but don't half smell bad!

Awesome week and we had perfect weather too which made it even better. We're off to Kidia on Thursday this week which is on the foothills of Kilimanjaro for 2 weeks of different project work which will hopefully be good fun! Time's flying past so quickly, have been away over 7 weeks now!! Still spending far too much on local handicraft, just bought a beautiful leather holdall for only 35quid!! And after internet am going to pick up a hoodie, pair of trousers and 2 bags I've had made out of local tradtional material! How exciting!

Hope all's well in England, missing you all a lot. Love Soph xxx