June 2018

Since we were to be picked up at 10, I didn't leave a wake-up call. I waked up at about 7 and got dressed and organized before I waked up my granddaughter. She had fallen asleep with her ear buds in and I had to touch her before she waked up. She does sort of spring awake immediately. We went down to breakfast

Breakfast

and I decided to get down to the lobby 15 minutes early and the guide was already there. There was a lift for the scooter in the back of the van.

First we went to a little village called Monnickendam (founded by monks) and we got out and sat by on of the locks.

Then we went to Volendam but the lady I wanted to see was on vacation.

So I left the thumb drive anyway,
https://youtu.be/CdQFsyeHY5E
and also got my granddaughter to dress up in costume and have her photo taken. (People keep talking to her in Dutch and since she doesn't understand and maybe isn't paying much attention, she doesn't answer) They have people who dress you, down to the wooden shoes, but my granddaughter initially got two non-matching ones from two different pairs.


We had 15 minutes to kill before the photos would be ready, so we went and got fries with mayo. There was too much mayo for me but it was OK. Some ducks came to beg and we fed them some fries. One of them had mayo on his beak.

Then we picked up the photos.

Then we went to a wooden shoe factory

Granddaughter and Guide outside the shoe factory

and they gave us a talk on making the cheese and showed us how they made the shoes.

We got to taste some of the cheeses - or I did. (All this was what we missed on the Tulip canal cruise Bob and I took in 2016.) I sent Bob a year old and a 2 year old cheese - one Gouda and one Edam, plus a jar of horseradish mustard.

The guide gave us some of the waffle cookies,

and then we went to a kind of windmill museum, sort of like Kinderdjik but these windmills were in use making chocolate, sawing wood etc. We didn't go in any of them.

We got back here about 3 and I tipped the guide and the driver. I went up to the room to pack, but fell asleep and didn't wake up until about 6. They are very late about getting to this room to clean and did not clean today. I have now packed.

I went to check in and get a boarding pass, but since I could not print it out I wanted it on my phone. However my phone has a problem getting aol mail so I forwarded the boarding passes to my granddaughter's phone. I asked the driver for tomorrow to come at 6:30 instead of 7:15 and set a
wake-up call for 5:30.

We were picked up at the hotel before 6:30 by the same driver we had before

Leaving the hotel

and whisked to the airport. She snagged a wheelchair and took us to the assistance place

Assistance area

- then we had to get our boarding passes.

Problem - I had extra cabin class seats and had only paid for one. So I had to pay for a second one. Then they checked our bags and set us to wait. We were at the boarding area in the airport by 8 for a flight that was to leave at 10:25.

At the gate

They seemed to expect me to walk from there to the plane but I said no. We had two pretty nice seats but over the wing and I could not see anything out the window.

My granddaughter and I played some "Who wants to be a Millionaire" on the TV and then she went to sleep and slept through lunch and snack --- for seven hours. I read books on my kindle - I read 3 and started on a 4th. I tried to get back to the bathroom once but it was too far to walk so I didn't go again.

They offered ice cream cones which I think had walnuts, but my granddaughter was asleep, so she didn't have any and I complained that they shouldn't have been offered to her.

We got to the Kilimanjaro airport about 8. Walked down the steps - got to the bottom and had a wheelchair.There were people in line to get visas, but I was glad not to have to do that. Went through immigration. We waited quite long time for the bags, and then instead of customs, they scanned the bags. Now to find our driver....

There were about 150 people out there with names they were waiting for. The wheelchair guy found ours (named Kelvin) and we took off for Rivertrees. He pointed out the direction to Kilimanjaro but it was dark so we couldn't see it.

When I got to the room, I just took my pills and went to bed - about 10:00.

I woke up at 6:45 and repacked the red duffle bag so I could leave the big wheelie bag at Rivertrees, and just take the red duffle. I would have had to go to the reception to use the internet and I just did not have the energy. I walked to breakfast.

Rivertrees grounds

It was almost farther than I could manage, and then when I got there it was a buffet. I just could not do it. So they brought me an omelet.

Breakfast at Rivertrees

Our driver arrived (Jeremiah or Jerry for short), and we loaded into his vehicle (a Land Cruiser), and started off. Until about noon we were on real roads and watching life in Africa from the windows including one photo that I got of a guy giving someone the finger. My granddaughter noticed him and told me to look at the photos that I had taken from the truck.

Who is he giving the finger to?

Traffic

Selling furniture by the roadside

Camel Oil station

Roadside market

Roadside market

Crossing sign

roadside stores and Maasai

Even before we got to the park we saw animals - flies, cattle, goats, and burros

Maasai cattle

Donkeys at Sunday market

Jeremiah stopped at a Sunday market and picked up some BBQ for us to try.

Sunday market

Sunday market

Of course we were immediately surrounded by vendors selling trinkets.

Vendor at the van window

One of them was offering 5 necklaces for $10 and my granddaughter was interested, so I told him we would pay $1.00 for five necklaces. Eventually we settled on 5 for $5.00

Cultural Heritage Museum sign

Cultural Heritage Museum

Local airport

Candelabra tree (really a great big cactus)

Ebony carvings

Souvenir shop

We also stopped at a regular store to use the bathroom. I had purchased a Tanzanite ring for my granddaughter for her 16th birthday some time previous, so I wasn't interested in buying any more, which I think was a disappointment to them. Jeremiah stopped and picked up lunch boxes - My granddaughter's was marked - no cashews.

lunch box

eating lunch

We saw the following at lunch

red-billed hornbill

Diverse Cymru Kenyan starling

Starling in flight

Whiteheaded kingfisher

White-headed buffalo weaver

one of the few monkeys we saw

Then we entered the Tarangire National Park.

Baobab Tree

The first animals we saw were Impala

Impala

(herds of bachelors and some females but I only got a few photos)

vulture nests

Then we saw a bunch of vehicles clustered and Jeremiah spoke to some of the other guides, and there were several cheetahs resting in the shade.

Cheetahs

Cheetah

The three cheetahs did not like the attention they were getting so they sloped off to another patch of shade.

palm trees

We also saw Elephants

Elephant in tall grass

Elephant with a baby

Elephant

Elephant

Elephant from behind

A lot of giraffes

Giraffes

Giraffes

Giraffe

Giraffe

Giraffe

My granddaughter saw a water buck in the distance and we saw a zebra in the distance
Two herds of ostrich (I was surprised to see ostriches)

Ostriches

And a troupe of baboons.

Baboons

Baboons

Baboon family

The camp had these flags to capture tsetse flies which are supposed to be attracted to blue and black. They put insecticide on the flags. I do not know what scientific study has been done to determine that those are the colors that the tsetse flies like. It does not seem logical to me.

Tsetse fly trap

It was about sunset when we got to Mawenga Camp and I went out on the rock to take a photo of it. I had to be helped back

firepit to see sunset

Sunset from Mawenga Camp

We spent the night at Mawenga Camp. I sent emails from the bar as that is where there is internet. Jeremiah has got a wheelchair for me to use which is a godsend although the paths here are not very wheelchair friendly.

dinner table

Dinner started with celery soup, which both of us liked, and then chicken and rice and some vegetables (neither of us ate much veggies)

dinner

Granddaughter at dinner

And finished with what was called mango tart, but was a piece of pie crust with mango sauce, which I thought was OK but my granddaughter did not like. We got water to drink and it was $2.00.

Mango tart

Then two people had to push the wheelchair up to the tent. They zipped us in. No mosquito nets, but we had to keep zipped up so animals did not get in. I edited some photos and went to bed.

Mawenga Camp.

Bathroom in Mawenga Camp.

We had a wake-up call-which meant that they came to the tent and called to us as there were no phones.

Pathway in camp

It took two of them to get us in the wheelchair back down to breakfast.

Overlook in the morning

Granddaughter's watermelon breakfast

They had good banana shaped pancakes (long and thin rather than round). I liked them even though they were usually not hot.

pancake for breakfast

Then we picked our lunch from a buffet and loaded our luggage into the truck

loading the truck

Up to this point, my granddaughter had been using her cell phone for photos, but yesterday she discovered that a cell phone is not really adequate for wildlife, even as close as we would get. So she started using one of my cameras. Most of the photos of animals from here on are her photos taken with my camera with the 100-300 lens. I have a hard time using that camera as it is heavy and a day of using it gives me a sore neck.

We set off for Lake Manyara. On the way out we saw some more of the black and dark blue flags which they hang around the area treated with pesticide to kill the tsetse flies.

tsetse fly trap

Flies were very bothersome yesterday and we used some of the OFF wipes. I looked up sleeping sickness on the internet and it said that untreated it was 100% fatal. I told Jeremiah and he said that since the symptoms were like malaria, it was often misdiagnosed

I saw a tsetse fly on the back of the headrest and tried to take a photo of it but it did not stand out very well against the red and black check.

We saw vultures,

my vulture photo

my granddaughter's vulture photo

and then crossed a river and saw an

African fish eagle

a saddle-billed stork

I took a photo of one of the signs they have -the kind that the elephants can't tear up or push over (at least not easily)

Direction sign

Flowers

We left the park and I tried to take some photos of how they grow corn - they put squash or sunflowers in between the rows. (My photos weren't very good). We saw some more Maasai herds

cattle

cattle

Maasai

and then we went to Jeremiah's village.

Bananas

Roadside market

He stopped to give his mother something where she was volunteering at a clinic, and showed us where he went to school, and he also bought a paper showing the con-joined twins dying. He also bought some red skinned bananas for us to try.

red skinned banana

My granddaughter does not like bananas that much.

We saw more baboons

Baboons

baboon

Baboon

Baboon

baboon

and impala and my granddaughter got some better photos of them.

Impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

Then we saw a pair of wart hogs,

wart hogs

wart hogs

and herds of zebra,

zebras

zebras

wildebeest (Gnu)

Gnu

Gnu

The beard of the gnu

and also the Cape buffalo - the ones where the males have the big horns. There were cattle egrets around them.

Buffalo herds

Buffalo

(These are not water buffalo-water buffalo are bigger, have bigger horns and are not as bad tempered so they are not as dangerous, having been domesticated. Plus water buffalo are from Asia and not Africa)

I took a couple of photos of termite mounds.

termite mound

One of the roads we started down had been washed out so we had to turn around. .

We stopped for a picnic lunch.

I had potato salad, meat loaf sandwich (which they called roast beef), a hard boiled egg, something that was like a brownie, and ginger cookies

On the way out of the park we saw a giraffe,

Giraffe

more baboons,

The baboon baby eyes would roll up in his head so that the eyes were just white (like Orphan Annie), but we did not get a photo of that.

Baboon baby

and some sweet elephants with two babies. One had no tusks and one had just little nubbins.

Elephants

Elephant babies

elephants

Elephants

Then we left that park and climbed the escarpment

View

and tonight we are at the Bashray Rift Lodge. We had a nice room

Bashray Rift bedroom

with a balcony, and I asked my granddaughter to go out and take a photo of the balcony. The door had a latch at the top and bottom and she was too short to reach, so she stood on her suitcase to open the top latch so she could get the photo.

balcony

bathroom

Main room Bashray Rift

We went up to the bar for dinner, but the dining room had four steps with no hand rails and I did not think I could do them, so they brought a table down and served our dinner in the bar.

Dinner table in the bar

It was very noisy because there was a group of 19 Italians having a meeting in the bar and doing a lot of cheering.

Italians meeting

The appetizer was a stuffed tomato - stuffed with a soup I think.

Appetizer

Granddaughter with appetizer

Then we had meat and a kind of spinach and mashed potatoes in a shell which was bread crumbs.

dinner

Granddaughter at dinner

There were lights above us which attracted moths, and one of them fell on my granddaughter's plate. I told her it was more protein (as a joke), but she texted her mother that she had not seen me eat any of them.
I had to go up to the bar to sent emails. The internet was excruciatingly slow and I cannot get AOL to come up at all

This was a tiring, but rewarding day. The Bashray Rift Wake-Up call came (that is men knocked on our door) but when we turned the key in the lock, we could not open the door. It was stuck. So the guys outside the door told my granddaughter to go out on the balcony (she used my cane to unlock the top of the door because she could not reach it) and throw them the key. Then they unlocked the door from the outside and let us out.

They make paths with rocks - not really flat rocks either, So the wheelchair has to go backward as the little front wheels don't cut it. We went up to breakfast, which was of course a buffet. But they had our table down in the bar, and they brought me food. My granddaughter went up to the buffet to get hers, and they brought me a big bowl of pineapple and watermelon. She really loves watermelon.

Breakfast

They also brought me bread and toast, and two fried eggs sunny side up. They brought some for my granddaughter too. She only eats the yolks.

Eggs Sunny Side Up with Tomato

We drove in dense fog up the Escarpment of the Ngorongoro Conservation area which is in a big old volcanic crater. I did not see how we were going to be able to see anything as we were in a cloud. When we stopped to pay the entrance fees, Jeremiah our guide warned us to keep the doors and windows of the vehicle closed because troops of baboons were waiting to enter the vehicles and take food. Jeremiah said that the baboons carry rabies so if they scratch you, you have to get treatment. So while we were waiting, a van of Indians (East Indians from India) came and parked and several of them got out and went in leaving the doors open.One of the men was standing around cluelessly in the parking lot as about 5 baboons raced over and jumped in the van.

Baboon Bandits in the van

Baboon Bandits approaching

There was some screaming from the people still in the van.

Baboon Bandit standoff

Baboon Bandits - those in the van have found something

I opened the window and took photos

Baboon Bandits

Baboon Bandits-escaping with their booty

My granddaughter was yelling at me to close the window, but I didn't think she meant me

Baboon Bandits running away

I thought she was yelling at the Indians. So I continued filming.

Our guide

We continued driving in the fog and saw some elephants in the acacia forest.

Elephants in the forest

We descended into the crater (it was sunny there) and the first animals that we saw were the buffalo and zebra.

Zebra

Zebra

Zebra

zebra

Zebra butts

zebra herds

Buffalo

Buffalo

Mad Buffalo

Ox pecker birds

We went farther and there was a pool with egrets in the bushes in the middle

egrets

Blacksmith Plover

and I saw some white pelicans swimming in formation,

white pelicans

and then we saw what everyone else was looking at--- hippos.

Hippos

The pool was not deep enough for them - they kept flicking water up with their tails to keep their backs wet but the amount of water flicked with a tail was totally inadequate for the size of their bodies.

Hippos in a shallow pool

Egret on a Hippo's back

One of them rolled over to get his back wet.

Hippo belly- hippo has rolled on its back-muddy front feet

Hippo mama

A mother hippo and two babies which looked like twins swam down the pool and crossed the road. (Hippos do have twins, but it is rare)

Hippo mama and two babies

Hippo mama

Hippo mom

Fields of flowers

Lions hanging out

Lions

Lions

After that we saw a big bull elephant

Old bull elephant like Babar

elephant

Elephant

and a lake full of flamingos,

Flamingos

Flamingos

some gazelles (two kinds - one was Thompson's gazelle

Thompson's gazelle

Thompson's gazelle

gazelle

and the other one was a bigger Grant's gazelle).

We saw some lions on the bank of the river. The lioness drank some water and then lay down as if she was exhausted.

Panting lioness

Lioness

Lioness drinking

Tired lioness

I thought maybe she was sick or pregnant, but I guess she had just been running and was tired.

Group of lions with a kill?

Then we saw an enormous herd of wildebeests. We watched them for a bit.

herds of wildebeests

I tried to take a movie with my cell phone.

Male lion

Male lion

We saw a hyena

Hyena

Hyena

and a jackal,

jackel

ostriches,

Ostrich

a secretary bird, and a

Bustard

some

Egyptian Geese

an African crane, and some sacred ibis.

African Crane

Sacred ibis

Sacred ibis

Sacred ibis

Then it was time for lunch.

Lunch

I had two cups of tea for breakfast so I really needed the bathroom. Jeremiah said that the regular women's bathroom was closer than the handicapped one (and it was), but those toilets were just holes in the ground. I managed.

Toilet

Spakes's weaver bird

Guides exchanging information

After lunch we saw way in the distance a couple of black rhinos,

Two black rhino in the distance

Mother and child black rhinos

Muddy Buffalo

Buffalo

Buffalo

buffalo

zebra

zebras

Zebras crossing the road

and after we drove up out of the crater

Crater overlook

crater overlook

Overlook leaving the crater

-we saw some vultures

vultures

We had a long 4 hour drive to get to the camp in the Serengiti and most of it was over washboard roads. Jeremiah and my granddaughter can charge their phones in the van. I have not tried this yet, or needed to. As twilight approached, when we were close to the camp, we saw giraffes

Giraffe

Giraffe

Giraffe eating acacia

Giraffe

Giraffe looking down

Giraffe in the afternoon

Giraffe at dusk

Beds

The Ronjo camp is tents- they have a flush toilet, and they bring water and put it in a container over the shower and you pull on a cord, and you have a nice shower with warm water. They brought me something to sit on in the shower, which was good. They have sink with a water pitcher to use to wash in.

Bathroom

The only 24 volt electricity is in the tent with the bar and there is no internet.

We had dinner with a couple from south of Denver who were here to do cervical cancer screening education. We had soup, and what they said was beef, but which really was sausage (my granddaughter ate one of mine) .

There are no paths at all in this camp, just dirt and I thought this would be a problem for the wheelchair, but really pushing the wheelchair here was easier than it was anywhere else because it was mostly level and the dirt was not as rocky as the paved paths. It could be done by one person. They have a little iron grid (kind of like a miniature cattle guard to wipe your feet on at the entrance to the tent.

They said that the 12 volt lights in the tent could be on all night, but ours went off and did not come back on.

It was quite cold. I have not really been too hot, but I have had to put on all my clotting to keep from being too cold at night and in the morning. I have seen no swimming pools yet. I put several things out to be done in the laundry. This is a men only camp (for the workers) so one of the Maasai men did our laundry. He even did one of my shirts which was on the table that I had not put in the laundry basket.

Entrance to the tent (screened)

We could hear the lions roaring at dinner and after we got into the tent, apparently a pride of 25 lions came into the camp and were quite close to our tent, My granddaughter said she could hear them breathing and they were roaring quite loud. We couldn't see anything of course - just hear them. I would have liked to see them. They got Jeremiah to get the truck and chase them away, but they came back several times. They wanted to spend the night on the warmer dirt and didn't want to be in the grass which would get dew and get their coats wet.

They had told us that if we had a problem, we should blow a whistle (provided) and my granddaughter slept with it in her hand. They found it under her mattress this morning.