130821 Ngorongoro Crater – Amboseli National Park

The Plan

After breakfast, continue your journey via Arusha and travel north into Kenya to Amboseli National Park, located beneath the tallest freestanding mountain in the world, the majestic Mount Kilimanjaro.  Late this afternoon, en route to your lodge enjoy an Included game drive through the national reserve with its wide, dry plains and where the horizons stretch into the furthest distance and become one with the sky.  FB L D

How the day turned out

It is Lyn’s birthday today and this is to be a day she will remember as a ‘hard’ travelling day.  An early start requires an early rise.  Our breakfast is at 6:30am with departure at 7:15am as we have a lot of ‘hard’ travel to do.  Much of the time on the road is to be hard, corrugated road surface.  Enduring such an experience is something we all hope can be put out of our minds for the 36 hours we are at Amboseli, until we return on the same 70km of rough road.

We stop at the Tanzanite shop for a comfort stop that ends up taking 45 minutes or so as folk want to purchase whatnots to take home.  We drive on a sealed road for a further 2 hours to our lunch break at Arusha and another 2-3 hours to the Kenyan border.  As mentioned in a previous day’s post, border crossings can be time consuming with many of us having our fingerprints taken at exit from Tanzania and also entry into Kenya.

Leaving the border, we get onto the ‘special highway’ as one of our drivers has named it; special because you get a free massage as you drive along.  The wait at the entry gate takes quite some time but we are ‘entertained’ by Maasai Mara people selling their jewelry and head dress.  Our windows are kept shut tight.  If you give one of them eye contact, they seem to think that they have a buyer and so keep hassling you no end.

Ol Tukai Lodge is like an oasis in the true sense of the word.  For miles around is just flat, bare countryside where we can see elephant, hippopotamus and buffalo in the distance.  The grass appears to be lush near the lodge with ‘desert’ in the background.

The accommodation is appropriate for the remoteness of the location but they can still put on a good feed.  The kitchen staff come out from their workplace in single file, singing a once a year song, eventually making it to our table to present Lyn with a chocolate cake for her birthday.  Ah just 3 more years to retirement.