Now that we are back home, we wanted to take a moment to give some general thoughts on our trip to Kenya and Tanzania before we start giving details about each of the specific locations that we visited. First of all, especially after over a year and half without travel, getting to go someplace was its own reward in many ways. This, however, was really a trip of a lifetime and if you’ve watched any shows about the wildlife of Africa, our trip was like all of them in many ways. We would, without a doubt, recommend to anyone who enjoys nature and wants to see animals in their natural habitat, going on a safari is something that you should definitely try to do at some point. It wasn’t just about the animals, though, it was about the people as well, especially our guides, Shabani, David, and Perminus who you will hear more about as we talk about the specific parks that we visited.
One thing that is clear is that travel during the age of the pandemic is not as easy as it used to be. Despite flight cancellations, delays, and getting tested for COVID four times in seventeen days, the end result of the trip was well worth the struggles that had to be overcome. Going on a safari isn’t necessarily for everyone and we saw people during our trip that probably shouldn’t have been on one. It takes patience, isn’t always comfortable, and you spend many hours driving through the parks looking for some of the more elusive animals. We found all of that to be part of the overall experience and it shouldn’t deter you from enjoying such an adventure.
We said this many times during our trip, on our site and to ourselves, every day of our trip was literally a different experience. Part of that is due to the fact that the parks themselves are different from one another as well as we covered a vast amount of area during our tour that took us to different parts of each of the countries. Some were savannahs, some were lakes, and one was even the world’s largest caldera. The other thing that is hard to describe is the actual abundance of wildlife that we saw as we travelled to each of the various parks. Whether lions, giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, elephants, or any other animal, it wasn’t if we saw a handful, but in some cases there were thousands of them. We even learned a little bit of Swahili and visited a Maasai village, which we weren’t sure was going to happen due to COVID.
There is no way to accurately describe what our trip was like in a single post, so we will be providing many details and specific experiences over the next several weeks. Now that we have had time to get some sleep, we return to “normal” life and this is one of those times where we really are still absorbing the trip as opposed to starting to plan our next adventure. The world certainly has not returned to normal yet and depending on where you might be some places are getter better and others are getting worse. We certainly hope that the world of travel gets better if not for the people like us that like to travel, but also for the people that run the lodges, camps, hotels, tour companies, etc. that are all hurting and we saw that first hand during our trip.
