Exploring Tanzania(Day 1)

Welcome to todays post! In this new series I will be sharing the amazing experience my family and I had in Tanzania!

Starting off, we had quite the journey making it there. First, we had an initial six hour flight to London, following a tiring eight hour flight to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. After a grueling two days of traveling we stayed a hotel nearby the airport. It was super late when we got there too! We went to bed at 12 am, and got a quick five hours of sleep before we took off for the airport once more. This time we had a nice and short one hour flight to Kilimanjaro Airport. And during the ride we got to see Mount Kilimanjaro, it was so tall, it was easily some hundreds of feet above the clouds! Matter of fact I think the height we were cruising at in the plane was actually lower than the mountain's summit. Then we relaxed for about an hour at the airport where we waited for a bush flight. Basically, they are these really tiny flights you can't even stand up in, they had around nine seats and only traveled for one hour max, sometimes the trips we took in them were even only 15 minutes long. We took one of those bush flights to Chem Chem airstrip, which was about a 25 minute long ride.

On day one we landed at the Chem Chem airstrip, which wasn't much of an airstrip to be honest, it was really just a long strip of dirt with a good lot of zebra and impala feces. Once we got off, we met our guide, Henry, and had a short 15 minute jeep ride to the Chem Chem lodge, where we met the staff and had the best hibiscus tea ever! After a nice meal we went out onto the first of many game drives on this trip where we dove around the Chem Chem concession in search of animals! For that drive we went specifically near where the concession shares a border with Taringire national park.

First off we saw some wildebeast! And surprisingly they didn't scurry off like I expected them to. And they were massive! As surprised as I was, this would be the first of MANY wildebeast we would see later on.

Next we saw a load of giraffes! Even though I was expecting them to be tall, I didn't realize how tall they really were until I saw one in person. They had the longest, most nimble legs ever! We also learned how to differentiate male and female giraffes, females have skinnier horns with more hair on top, while male giraffes have much thicker ones with significantly less hair.

We found these guys near a pond, where we also saw a herd of zebras taking a sip of the pond water and munching on the surrounding grass.

And look at this cute baby, it was so small and cute!

After hanging out with these guys for a while we decided that the rest of the game drive was going to be dedicated to finding elephants. No matter what, before we returned to the Chem Chem lounge we would 100% see an elephant. So, after searching and searching for an hour, we finally stumbled upon a group of ten or so elephants! The only elephants I have seen outside of a zoo were ones in India, which are completely different (and much smaller) than these African elephants.

And just in time for when we saw the elephants, we saw the sunset... and my camera died. Even though I was bummed out my camera died right once we saw the elephants, it was a truly magical experience. And I guess elephants really aren't scared of anything, since we were able to get really close to them without them running away. It was amazing sitting in the open jeep experiencing the elephants in all their glory with the sunset in the background. After hanging out with these guys, we finally turned around and headed back to the lodge, where we had an awesome dinner.

The neat thing about the main area of the lodge was how it was completely open, it was situated right next to an open plot of land with a small waterhole, so while eating meals we would see zebras, wildebeast, giraffes, and impalas!

After eating our meal, we called went to the main area, since we needed to wait for a night guard to walk us back to our tent. Since the Chem Chem lodge is in the middle of the land where so many animals live, the threat of anyone making an encounter with a lion, lepoard or any other animal was a threat, so as soon as sunset rolled around, we were only allowed to go around the lodge with a guard. It made me feel nice and safe, since all of the tents are pretty spread apart from each other. Regardless, we went back to our tent and called it a day.

Thanks for reading today's post! I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you in the next post!