A little bickerson action this morning but only about 5 minutes. I think the girls are catching up on sleep still. We kind of missed the bickersons, for about 1 minute.
The four kids have been getting along famously. When we got back to the room late last night Robin said "how do I call their room?". Classic. She didn't do a repeat performance of the night before where they both clambered onto our bed and we sang Survival much to Beth's chagrin, then Robin unleashed the sisters with a repeat performance of her Mercy dance before they retired to their room. Last night, she just wanted to call the boys.
The kids are like cousins. They've been getting along great - they want very little to do with the four adults for the most part. Yikes. They are growing up. It's great to see how independent they are, but it also is scary.
We checked out and were picked up in time by our two guides, Grayson and Tom. When wee booked with Amanda a year ago, we scanned trip advisor and the top guide names that always popped up were Tom and Grayson. We'd all learned the importance of the people taking care of you are veery important. Both us and the Versly have had very good and very bad guides and this was not the trip we wanted to take a chance.
So here we are a year later and both guides show up with 2 8-person Toyota Land Rover and Tom and Grayson are standing there in front of us. We'd heard Tom was a little pudgy and he was - very easy to pick out with a kind face. Grayson is handsome and looks to be in tip top shape. The kids had figured that they were going in one car together and the adults would go in another....so be it. They took Tom and we got Grayson. The Land Rovers were modified. They have ceilings that pop out into covered sky windows, seats that fully slide back and recline, full windows - so cool.
The adult car was led by Grayson. He lived in Arusha whereby Tom lived in Moshi. You could tell right away that these guys were seasoned, professional and great. As soon as we got in the car, we peppered Grayson with questions. Every once in a while we would hear them radio back and forth, but generally we followed Tom's car as we crawled along the main road from Moshi to Arusha.
Grayson was married, with a five year old daughter and a three and a half month old son. He explained that getting a guide job was not easy, especially nowadays. It sounded like looking for an entry level job back home where everyone is looking for a minimum of three to five years experience. To be full time with a touring company was the pinnacle of the profession, while many guides have to be freelance for many years. This was Grayson's third company and he loved it. He repeated the mantra that Amanda was great, and that their big differentiator is that they were relatively small and that the owners were constantly in touch with the guides to make sure their clients were happy. In other companies, he said, it was common to only see the owners once or twice a year. Amanda also handled bookings mainly from here (with the exception of one Turkish booking agent). This keeps clients costs low since clients aren't paying for a local rep to come over with them to join together for a free Safari. This seemed pretty common with some of the US based companies I had researched.
Just before we got to Arusha, we loaded up on snacks and some other provisions, then continued into town. The kids report was that Tom peppered them with questions, taught them a song and some Swahili and then they all fell asleep except Matt.
Arusha was a town of half a million, and it was bustling when we got there. Our destination was a place to check out Tanzanite. We were dropped at the Cultural Heritage Center (http://www.culturalheritage.co.tz/) which had my eyes rolling at first, until we met the owner. The place was huge, with tons of different rooms and entire building dedicated to art - paintings and sculptures. When we got to the tanzanite section at the back, we met the owner - a crazy energy, 3rd generation Indian-Tanzanian guy who was pretty open about his operation. I asked him some questions and suddenly Alex and kids and I were taken on a huge cultural tour of the place. He basically said that he makes shit loads of money on tanzanite (mainly from Chinese and Russian investors) and that he used the profits to build the largest African art collection in the world. The art side of things is all consignment based where he takes a commission, while tanzanite is his real business. He employs lots of local people and I later confirmed with the guides that he has a really high standing in the community. His wealth of knowledge was certainly huge, and you'd be hard pressed not to spend a ton of time and money at his place.
We had to force the girls to buy some tanzanite, so they both bought rings, and I got a mask too which I thought would be hanging in my man cave but Beth liked it so I will need another for sure!
After downing our boxed lunches, we hopped back in the jeeps. The drive out of Arusha was immediately different terrain - more savanna like. I could see why the "winter" season was best here for animal viewing. The grasses, normally tall and green were all low to the ground, and it would be easier to spot animals.
We saw lots of Masai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people) along the road, either tending to sheep or cows some ways off the road, or standing by the road in hopes of exchanging photo ops for money. We saw groups of Masai boys in black, who apparently were on their three month post circumcision journey to manhood. They were also photo opportunists along the side of the road (apparently this is a modern edition of achieving manhood).
Eventually, we turned left and into the outskirts of Tarangire National Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarangire_National_Park), named after the river that crosses through the park. We would be staying here for two nights, and because it was mid afternoon, as soon as we checked into the main gate, we started our first game drive.
The boys flipped the roofs of the cars open, and we suddenly had a covered little lookout spot where we could all comfortably stand. Though the cars have 6 seats, I can't see it being comfortable with more than four.
As soon as we got into the park, we started seeing birds, zebras, giraffe and wildebeest. It wasn't long before we spotted a few elephants not far from the road. We were definitely in Africa now!
Just before dusk, we arrived at Tarangire Lodge, a beautiful camp with full service restaurant and pool and permanent tented rooms lined up along a c-shaped crest of a hill on either side of the lodge. The view was fantastic. We had a briefing from the front desk on how to stay safe as well as the timing of everything at the resort/lodge, and then we had what Tom called, some "blah blah blah" from the guides. They asked us what we wanted to do the next day, and we agreed we would do a post breakfast morning game drive, come back for lunch and rest, then do a late afternoon game drive tomorrow.
The tents were very cool. A large A-frame tent on a concrete slab, with one or two beds just inside on a kind of rattan floor, with a secondary tent section behind with a full change room and two little rooms for a shower and a toilet. The place was immaculately clean.
Dinner was amazing - it seems nobody will starve on our trip after all! The view at dark was pretty cool, because we could see the burning grasses of the savannah (they periodically burn the grasses to prevent the common creeper grasses from suffocating out the other plants) on the horizon - it almost looked like a permanently setting sun.
We hailed the night guard who escorted us to our tents. The boys were between the adults, and the girls were next to us. As per the norm, the adults hit the sack and the kids congregated in the girls tent to play cards and laugh. Eventually, the boys hailed the guard to escort them to their own tent.
As I retired under the warm sheets next to an already dozing Beth, I could hear a ton of sounds from the plains below. The stiff breeze trying to blow right at us through the screen was refreshing - like spring or fall camping in northern ontario. The fresh air was certainly an elixir for deep sleep.
The famous line from Lion King, Hakuna Matata (kind of meaning everything is good) is actually a change (maybe to fit the song lines better) of the original Swahili term. I can assure you, using the original expression, that everything here in Tanzania is Hakuna Shida.
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