Saturday-Sunday

Today, I got up and took a shower. Now, that might sound normal, but in Tanzania, there isn't any running water. The shower was basically hot water in a bucket. It cleaned me off all the same, though, so I wasn't to worried about it. Besides, today is my first day in Tanzania; I don't think anything can ruin my spirits, especially with my friend with me.

After my "shower," Hannah, Nicole, and I biked over to Ngorongoro Crater to go on a safari. Right when we got in the vehicle, the driver introduced himself. He said, "Habari! Ninaitwa Watende." If I translated him correctly, with Cristian's help, though this is completely fallible, he said, "Hello, my name is Watende." He then went on to say that he would be our tour guide for the next two days and all of the rules we had to abide to. He was really nice and had a sense of humor.

The safari was really fun. On the first day I saw a ton of animals: tigers, elephants, zebras, and a few strange and different animals too: gazelles, a hippo, which are uncommon in the crater, and even a black rhinoceros. The rhinoceros was very scary, but absolutely intriguing as well. For some reason, in 1966, there were over 100 rhinos, but now, there are only about 10 left. I want to know a lot more about why this happened. Maybe I'll look it up later.

We had to stop after that for the night, it was almost dusk. We slept in this little hotel in the middle of nowhere. Even though I would never have found it alone, it was a nice little hotel, and comfortable too. I easily went to sleep that night, thinking about the black rhino.


Today we woke up and had breakfast at the hotel's quaint restaurant. We had to eat quickly, because our safari was going to begin at about seven. When it did, we saw the same things as the other day. It was still pretty fun and exciting. And we all enjoyed ourselves.

I knew the time would have to come, although I didn't want it to, and the safari was over. I had a really great time and I'm pretty sure Hannah did as well, seeing as she was smiling the whole time. It was about five o'clock now, time for dinner. We didn't exactly know what the food in Tanzania was like, so we asked the woman at the front desk of our hotel what we should make. She told us that the main foods in Tanzania were rice, beans, and a strange meat called ugali. Ugali is a cornmeal based food, that can be different textures from porrage to dough. It was suprizingly good, even though it didn't look that way. It was also very filling, and we were ready to just lie down.
However, I really wanted to find out more about the rhinos, and since it was only seven fiteen or so, I went outside to ask around. Not very many people knew about it. The only thing I could really find out, and it had varied reasons, was that a lot of them were killed in the 1970s. I'm still not sure why they were killed though. I looked it up later, and found this website.

Finally, I went to sleep.