Sunday, May 30, 2010

Our African Adventure

While I know I said I would share some journal excerpts with you from our recent Africa trip(I know I've been an extreme slacker about posting), after trying to decipher my hand writing from the bumpy overland trip I've decided it would be better to just give an over all review of the trip over a few posts. I will begin by saying that this was yet another incredible journey I've taken with my wonderful husband, and if you are of an adventurous spirit, and can occasionally conform to a "go with the flow" attitude (something required in Africa), I highly recommend doing an African overland trip.

Our trip was a total of 13 days with travel, as we left our apartment for JFK Airport on Thursday, May 13th and returned on Tuesday, May 25th. I must interject here, that I now believe that travelling mid-week is the much preferable option (I returned to work on a Wednesday of a short week, as it was Memorial Day Weekend, and I definitely couldn't have planned it better). We flew into Nairobi, Kenya, by way of Zurich, Switzerland, and flew back to New York from Dar Es Salaam airport via the same route. From the map below, you can see that Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam are a 12 hour drive from one another, and we spent our most of our vacation in some form of vehicle seeing the country.

While travelling this way could be exhausting, and you may be thinking that your idea of spending your first vacation in a year and half is not in a huge truck

I must say that it was honestly the most amazing thing to look out the window and see this unique and colorful country go by. Small children would wave and run after our vehicle, extremely excited to see Westerners, and I would be lying if I said it didn't warm my heart every time to see their smiling faces. As Mr. B would say this was a country where they may be poor, but you couldn't feel the poverty, they were poor but that was just how they lived. I couldn't agree more with that statement, and I was continuously intrigued as we drove by the small villages and the witnessed the way life was lead. It was amazing to me to think of all the things us Westerners deam necessary to survive when I saw the way the African people throughout Kenya and Tanzania lived. I found the landscape and the people to be extremely beautiful, and overall the trip was extremely eye opening.

Our trip was organized by a group called Nomad Tours(www.nomadtours.co.za, which we booked through a lovely woman named Nicky at www.africanoverlandtours.com. The group was a total of 12 people from all around the world (literally), and we were led by a tour guide and a cook. Mr. B and I went the more budget route, and were on the camping tour, and we stayed at some great camp sites and the tents were the nicest I've ever seen. We began our trip in Nairobi, where we met up with our new pals for the next 10 days, and headed towards Arusha.

The trip to Arusha consumed our entire first day of the trip, but as I said earlier I was alert and excited as I gazed out of the window at all of the sights. I kept missing pictures because we were driving, and either we went to fast or the road was to bumpy to capture what I was looking at, but here are some images of what we saw as we drove along.






The roads in Africa were something else as well! We would be driving along and you'd see something like this:

(picture courtesy of AR from our group), and you'd be off onto a dirt road on the side of the main road until eventually you found a paved road again. It was really wild, and really bumpy! They also threw stones along the road in place of parking cones, something I found highly amusing.

After a full day of travel we arrived in the town of Arusha, which didn't really seem like much of a town, but it was more populated then the villages we had passed, and had a Shop Rite super market, so I guess it could qualify. There was time to relax for the evening at our pretty campsite, where we had a delicious meal (I stayed veggie with the hubs for the trip) made by our chef, and got ready for our excursion to the Serengeti which we would leave for in the morning.

More exciting posts about Africa later. Sorry for being MIA! SB.

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