Yay! It’s the weekend, and it’s time for the Safari trip!
Who goes to Africa without a safari trip back? All I can say is, without a safari trip, you won’t really experience the natural beauty of Africa.
Our trip began at 5:00am… since driving to the national park required around 3 hours. It’s extremely helpful to go as early as possible since there are countless groups of tourists going to the same park at the same time, so going as early as possible can save you from the crowd that may possibly scare away any animals. You wouldn’t want that to happen, despite the beautiful landscape, the animals are what really makes the trip mesmerizing.
The most exciting part of the trip was the safari jeep. Our jeep had six people, and what was exciting about it was that the roof could be raised so we could stick our heads out! It was so exciting to stand up and have the wind blow in your face… along with some dirt, but it was a lot of fun! At the end of the trip, all of us had at lease a centimeter thick of dust on our faces, and even our cars!
Tanzania is very well known for its numerous national parks, such as Ngorongoro, famous for it’s massive populations of rhinos, giraffes, and zebras, and the Serengeti, famous for the big migration of the wildebeests, as well as Tarangire, which is the park that we went to.
Tarangire National Park is great for short one day trips, if you’re planning to visit Tanzania, I highly recommend it. In a short day, we got to see many of the animals such as, antelopes, zebras, wildebeests, ostriches, giraffes, elephants, and of course LIONS! One of our groups actually got to see a cheetah in the middle of hunting, which was super cool! Another group actually had a lion walk by their safari jeeps, so they were super close!
Quick Fact: Did you know Simba, is actually ‘Lion’ in Swahili!
At the end of the day everyone was super exhausted, and we were all so excited to get to our hostel, which turned out to be a catholic school, where we stayed in their hotel rooms? The food there was absolutely amazing, we had cream of celery and garlic bread, along with a super yummy buffet! The BEST part? We got an acrobat and booty shake dance show, where at the end, like always, the audience gets dragged up to dance along!
The next morning, again at 5:00am, we had to get to our next location ASAP, before 10am, because we were going to go hunting with the bushmen, and they could only hunt certain animals until 10am. We drove over land that had huge holes everywhere and even crossed dried up rivers, at one point a jeep even broke down, actually that particular jeep broke down 5 times during that trip, and we almost couldn’t make it. But fortunately we did, and when we got there, the bushmen were nowhere to be seen… I panicked for a second thinking that we missed it, but it turns out that we had to walk in deeper to reach their camp.
Quick Fact: The bushmen speaks a traditional tribal language originated from South Africa, commonly known as ‘the clicking language’
At their camp, you can see all their bows and arrows, as well as their prizes from their games. They also wore the furs of some of the animals they hunted on them. Their camp was literally made out of nothing, there was not visible structure of a house, but rather a small shack made with branches, but there were far more than 10 people for sure living in that little camp. On the side, there were cactus like plants, and they were broken off, this is because the tribe gets water out of that plant. The nearest well is 5km away!
Quick Fact: Surprisingly, the bushmen loves to smoke tobacco, and MARIJUANA!
We ended up hunting with the bushmen for over 2 hours, running through bushes and trees trying to catch a bird. In the end, they caught one bird and they brought us to locate the impala that they killed the night before. We were extremely lucky, since it’s not easy to hunt an impala.
A tradition done by the bushmen is that they prepare the meat of the animal right then and there before transporting it back to the camp, to reduce the weight, and to prevent the meat from going bad in broad daylight. So right then and there, the bushmen skinned the impala, cleaned the guts, and even cooked some for some of us to try. The guy who caught the bird simply ripped off all the feathers, just threw it in a fire, took it out with his bare hands and started munching on it.
Honestly, the bushmen has introduced a whole new world to me. I look around their environment, and I literally cannot stay there by myself for more than 1 hour at most. I couldn’t see anything that I could use to survive. In fact, I had trouble just even finding my way back to the Jeeps.
Quick Fact: The bushmen tribe has a tradition of cutting a baby’s face when they cry to stop them crying, this is also a common ritual in other African tribes
