Serengeti, Tanzania

Just the word Serengeti, for me, conjures visions of ancient nomadic peoples wandering around in loin clothes, carrying spears and living in harmony with wildlife. The Serengeti lies within East Africa's Rift Valley; from the confluence of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden the Rift Valley makes its way south across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and finally into Tanzania and it was from this wide plain that humanity entered it’s adolescence and migrated across the continents. What really excited me about the Serengeti was being in that place, understanding what life meant for the first of our ancestors and feeling some brotherhood with those early humans.

We stayed at a new safari lodge, the Simba Lodge, which was just outside of the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area. We relished in the quiet and spent 2 days catching up on sleep and our books. The last day of our stay we took a drive into the Ngorongoro Crater. I had been told the Serengeti was the best place in the world to do a safari, but even that didn’t prepare me for the raw beauty of the crater and the unthinkable number of animals wandering the crater’s valley floor.

The Ngorongoro Crater floor is wide and flat and is a sort of Garden of Eden that supports the densest wildlife I’ve ever experienced. There was literally never a moment on our drive when a zebra, wildebeest or water buffalo couldn’t be seen. We saw lions sleeping, we saw lions peeing (on our car), we saw lions hunting and we saw lions fighting (just in front of us as we were taking pictures). We saw the nearly extinct black rhino, which are so rare that many have armed guards with them 24/7 to prevent poaching. We saw hippo, elephant, ostrich, hyena and more.

To be in a place that wild and see that our world is made up of more than streets, cars and the internet is to examine your place in it and your place in the universe and to contemplate what it really means to be an animal.

Zanzibar, Tanzania

Zanzibar is a Tanzanian island off the east coast of Africa where the spice trade has been the predominant industry for hundreds of years.This has brought people from all over the Indian ocean who left their customs, skin color and religions behind. It’s a place where you can wander through the stone streets in it’s aptly named capital, Stonetown, scuba dive in world class waters, explore tidal pools, windsurf and eat incredible seafood.

The east coast of Zanzibar, where we spent most of our time, is a long stretch of beach oriented towards the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. It is protected from the waves of the ocean by a system of reefs about a mile off of the shore. This creates a long flat area for tidal pools that span the distance from the reef to the high water mark on the beach and when the tide goes out it goes out nearly the whole mile to the reef, exposing the tidal pools. The tidal pools were teeming with life. Sea grasses, urchen, fish, seahorses, shrimp, crabs, octopus, sea cucumber, starfish and the reef itself where all under various depths of water, from a being totally exposed to being a foot or two submerged, during low tide. This was the time for us visitors to explore and the time for the locals to harvest what they could from the oceans bountiful reefs.

We spent a week exploring the island, staying in Paje, Nungwe, Stonetown and Pongwe, without much agenda. To our very pleasant surprise, Frank had been scheming with Chris to come and meet us there (yes, Frank plans random surprise trips to small African islands many days and many plane rides away) for the week and Frank brought his girlfriend Alex. It was wonderful to reunite with Frank, who we hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and to meet his new girlfriend, Alex. It was really just a time for us all to play, enjoy fresh fish barbeques, swim in the warm water of the Indian Ocean, learn about the spices of the island, read, relax and enjoy each others company, which was a great last leg of our journey with Chris and Courtney.