For the safari there was a choice of either sleeping in a tent with a cook like on Kili, or sleeping in a Safari Lodge. Don picked the cheapest option, i.e. the tent. Jeff wanted a tent for one night so he could show Mistry what it was like on Kili, and a lodge for the rest, with some luxury 5* lodge for the last night. I didn't want to split the group, so I went for a compromise. First night at a camp by the Lake Manyara reserve, then two nights in a lodge in the Serengeti National Park, and at the end another night in a camp. We imagined a lodge as a wooden shack with palm trees, like it was on Mt. Meru.
We set off, as usual, more than an hour late, because the night had been rough and nobody felt like getting up. While packing we again had to separate the stuff for -20 from the stuff for +30 and take the right half to the storage room at the Catholic church. Then through a traffic jam for dark bread at our special request, through an even bigger traffic jam to the supermarket for wine and goodies, well, in short we got to the reserve around three.
Even so we saw a decent collection of elephants right next to the car, monkeys all along the road, hippos wallowing in the water, interesting birds etc. (beautiful giraffes, for instance).
We somehow spooked a herd of about five elephants and two of them charged off into the forest with loud trumpeting, not looking left or right, smashing a brand new path through the tall bushes with everything cracking around them.
At six we had to clear out of the park so we wouldn't get a fine. At the camp the tents were already up and in a moment a three-course dinner was ready. Compared to Kili the only difference was that the cutlery was sturdier and the mugs a bit bigger and made of tin.
After dinner we went to the bar by the pool (which nobody dared to get into) and got talking with a bunch of Australians. They've been driving around Africa for about three months in a specially modified truck, they'd already been to Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and now they were getting ready for Kili. They knew nothing about it, they didn't even have gloves, hats, jackets, let alone poles etc. But they were a laugh, we discussed the pitfalls of Australian English and the expression TIA, or This Is Africa, comes from them. Whenever something incomprehensible happened to them (like 5 minutes meaning an hour, or that paying by card is of course always possible, just not today, not tomorrow, and not on Wednesday either), they learned to just say TIA and have a laugh about it.
