March 2009 Archives

Hello everyone. For this blog, we start out in Nairobi, where we met our guide, David, who was with us for the 10 days. For dinner on the first night, we went to meet the owner of Micato Safaris, the company we were going on safari with in Kenya. It was really nice to be invited to their house because we got to know the owner and we really liked having a home-cooked meal since we don't get too many of those these days.

The next morning, we woke up really early and took a prop plane to Amboseli National Park, where you could clearly see Mount Kilimanjaro. It felt really funny to be looking at a snow-covered peak while roasting in the African sun. One thing Amboseli is famous for is elephants because they walk right up to the jeeps. In Amboseli, they also have watering holes scattered around where we saw hippos, buffalos, and elephants wallowing in the water. One time, a family of elephants came out of the water right next to our jeep and there was a baby, just a week old, with them. David knew how old it was because it still had pink skin on its ears.

Hello, we were just in Kenya. When we got there, we met up with our guide David. David was going to spend more than a week with us and I was excited because from the minute we met him, he was really cool.

The first place David took us was Amboseli National Park. We flew there in the morning and we were able to see Mount Kimimanjaro, which is the biggest mountain in Africa. There was a big herd of elephants there and one of them was named Echo. Echo is a famous elephant because somebody has been researching her for a long, long time and even made a movie about her. Echo is easy to pick out because she has really big tusks and one of them is crooked. She's the leader of a big herd and we got to see her and her family pass right by our jeep.

On one of the game drives, we saw a whole bunch of hyenas relaxing on some rocks by the water, so we called it "hyena beach." Later that day, we saw a really newborn wildebeest! We were all excited to see the baby get up and walk, but because it was so windy, it had a hard time. It takes humans about a year to walk, but this baby wildebeest walked after only 15 minutes. It was super duper cool to see. The next day when we were walking around our lodge we met some of the workers who were taking care of an orphaned wildebeest baby they found. It was really cute and they allowed us to pet it.

Hello everyone.  In this blog I'm going to tell you all about our trip to the country of Tanzania, where we went on an 11-day camping safari with our friends, the Coxes.

We flew to Mount Kilimanjaro to meet up with our friends Kathy, Timmy, Brian and Jenny. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa and it was cool to see that it had snow on top of it while we were sitting in the hot African plains. Our guides, Raymond and Onesmo, met us at the hotel and then we set off for our first camping spot, in Tarangire National Park.

When we got to our campsite, it was a lot different then the places we had stayed on our previous safaris.  Here, we had our own crew from Wild Frontiers go ahead of us and set up camp, so when we got there, there were four tents set up for our two families. There was also a big dining tent and an area for the crew to do the cooking and sleep. It was cool to be right out in the middle of the bush with no fences around the camp, so animals could walk right through. One night there were eighty elephants around our camp while we were asleep. All of the adults where wide awake, but us four kids slept right through it.  So we didn't get to see the elephants, but our parents told us about it.  On our last night of camping, a hyena went over to Kathy's tent and decided to "mark its territory" on it!

The other thing different about this type of safari were the jeeps we rode in. They weren't open air like the ones we had in South Africa and Botswana. Instead, the roof could come off so you can stand up and stick your head out to look at the animals. There were two jeeps, so half of the time the parents would be in one jeep while the kids were in another, which was really fun.

Hi, I was just in Tanzania camping with our friends Brian and Jenny. We go camping with them every summer and each year it gets better, but nothing will beat this!   

This camping was the best kind because we were on safari. Our tents were right smack in the middle of the bush with lions, leopards, cheetahs, and other wild creatures. We weren't scared because we didn't actually see any of them at night, but we certainly heard them. Once we got into our tents for the night, we couldn't and wouldn't come out until morning because most of the animals hunt at night.

My favorite part of the trip was when we had a "kids only" jeep for the safaris.  It was really fun in the kids' jeep because we'd tell jokes and stories and play around when we weren't looking at animals.

Another thing we did in Tanzania was go visit some native tribes. One day we visited two different ones. With the first tribe, the Hazabe, we went hunting for animals and food. They didn't catch anything, but did get honey from a bee's nest, which they shared with us. It was the best honey you could ever get, fresh from the honeycomb. The tribe trades the honey for arrowheads and that afternoon we saw the tribe that makes them. They are called the Datoga tribe, and we played with their kids, giving them piggy-back rides and dancing with them. At the end of our visit, the people who were making the arrowheads let us make our own. We all decided that we're going to let the pros make the arrowheads because ours didn't exactly come out how we planned. Our friend Brian bought a bow and some arrows from the first tribe. And that's when we started trying to hunt birds at our camp. We didn't catch any, but it was really fun to try.