Topdeck Travel Blog

1. Our first afternoon in Maasai Mara National Reserve and we spot a sleeping Leopard in a tree right beside the track. It was a good find because they say leopards are often the hardest animal to spot out of those in the Big Five!

2. Elephants everywhere! Not only in Maasai Mara but also in the Serengeti and the savannahs outside of the national parks.

3. Up close and personal: this cheetah strolled up to us and posed for our cameras for a little while. They are really beautiful animals.

4. The secret of getting a good giraffe photo is…stopping the vehicle for a while and waiting patiently! They are quite timid creatures but they would always be curious about us and for a while, they would come up close to check us out eventually.

5. King of the jungle: this young male lion was just gorgeous. We found him with about 7 others from his pride taking a break from the midday sun by some trees in the Maasai Mara.

6. Jumping with the warriors: we visited a local Maasai village where the people live in the traditional way, in mud huts and herding cows and goats. The men did a performance for us, singing us their traditional songs and invited the other guys from our group to jump with them.

7. Cultural curiosity goes both ways! The Maasai women were interested to know how many babies the women in our group had. They were quite surprised to learn that none of us had had any children yet. In Maasai culture most women will have had a few children before they turn 20.

8. Meet the truck! Our truck was called Shashe, named after the famous river in Botswana. Shashe became our home away from home, and even though some of the drives were long, it always went fast because we had heaps fun together. Our truck was really good; it had lockers at the back for our stuff, power points for charging our cameras and an on-board freezer and esky.

9. Our trip leader Masivu was awesome, he made the trip an amazing experience for us. As Masivu is from Kenya he helped us see East Africa from a local perspective. In this picture Masivu has a bunch of red bananas, a local specialty near Arusha in Tanzania.

10. When we were in Arusha in Tanzania we visited a local village. It was really interesting seeing the day to day life of the people who lived here. The children in particular loved our visit, they were so excited to meet us.

11. Sweets= popularity! The local children in the village really wanted us to pick them up and play with them. Also some of our group had brought sweets to give away...

12. Drive day lunch, yum: Masivu our trip leader, and Antony our driver would have something prepared for us and we would also help out. Usually we had sandwiches, with freshly baked bread, ham, cheese, fresh salad, and array of different sauces. They would always have fresh tropical fruit ready for us as well, which was delicious.

13. Hitting the Serengeti! When we visited Maasai Mara and Serengeti, we left Shashe behind and got around in smaller, off road, game-park-friendly vehicles, which got us closer to the action.

14. Camping out in the Serengeti was amazing, with no fences separating us from all the colourful wildlife. It was perfectly safe though, we were just told not to stray too far from our tents in the middle of the night, and to make sure we had no food around which might attract hungry hyenas. We spotted this Cape Buffalo just near our camp not long after sunrise.

15. How not to become a lion’s dinner…On our last afternoon in Serengeti our truck blew a tire. It wasn’t that unusual, we had already punctured a couple of others and our drivers had lots of spares on hand just in case. As our driver was changing the tire, one of the guys in our group noticed two heads in the savannah watching us – it was two lions, about 50 metres away. Our driver told us to stand on the other truck, while he finished, as lions see the truck was one big animal and won’t attack it. Phew…

16. Night camping on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. The crater was once a huge volcano millions of years ago, but collapsed after an eruption. What is left is the huge crater floor wilderness that is a popular home for local wildlife. Our campsite on the rim was pretty cool, and after dinner we had a shy elephant wander in to say hello!

17. Zebras crossing. In Ngorongoro Crater there were zebras everywhere, I couldn’t believe it. There were also hundreds upon hundreds of wildebeest, at this time of year they tend to congregate in the crater before their big migration later in the year.

18. Hippo-watch. We stopped by this beautiful lake for lunch in Ngorongoro Crater. There were a few hippos in the water enjoying themselves, but we were warned not to get to close to the water because hippos are actually the most dangerous animals in Africa. You don’t want to get stuck between a hippo and his water hole!

19. Next stop for us was the beautiful island of Zanzibar. We spent our first day in Stonetown, Zanzibar’s capital and spent the afternoon at a local spice plantation. This was really fascinating, we found out how nutmeg and cardamom grows and that cinnamon comes from the bark of a cinnamon tree.

After Stonetown, we ventured further north to west coast of the island to Kendwa beach. We took a snorkeling trip out too the Mnemba reef, which was beautiful. Not long after this picture was taken it bucketed down with rain – one of the downsides of traveling in rainy season. However the rainy season wasn’t all bad, usually it would only rain for an hour, before the sun was out again, and we would get to watch some spectacular storms in the distance over the ocean in the evenings.

I had a fabulous time on this safari, hope you will enjoy it too! Love, Rebecca.