From the 2nd to the 4th of August we, Ole, Jonas and me, went on our first Safari, in Mikumi Nationalpark!!! We were so excited about this trip 🙂 So, we started our 4 hours drive Saturday morning. Already the trip to the park was an experience (like every step you take here). We saw some accidents, passed real African villages (you just can’t believe in which way the people live there), saw transporters with interesting loads (“Abnormal wide load”), tomato and basket sellers at the street in the middle of nowhere and much more. One of the highlights were definitely this one painting at the back of one transporter saying “Still wanted” and showing a painting of Osama bin Laden and the American flag. Hilarious.
Also interesting were the three times, the police stopped us. The first time, we were definitely too fast, but our tour guide managed to go down from a fee of 30 000 shilling (15 €, which is already nothing) for the state, to 5000 shilling tips for the police man himself. Thats how it works! The second time, we didn’t wear our seat belts, but there they couldn’t do anything (because that’s just normal there) and the third time really funny and strange: There was no problem at all actually, but the police men still wanted to have money. After a discussion about 15 minutes, we finally just gave one of the police officers a lift to the next village, but didn’t have to pay. That was a good deal.
Arriving in Mikumi Nationalpark, we immediately started to see the animals. Monkeys on the street, a giraffe just 20 meters away and many antelopes. So that was promising. At the main gate then, we paid the entrance fee for us (15 instead of 20$ because of our residence permit), our tour guide and the car. It was just amazing there. First time in my life that I saw all these animals in freedom. That’s such a big difference. We saw giraffes, antelopes, monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, hippos, zebras, buffaloes, warthogs (or according to our tour guide: Mr Forgettable – my new favorite animal!!!) and lions.
On the first day, we just saw a sleeping lion, but on the next day (we went there at sunrise which is the best time there to see the lions), we saw two lions very close to us! That was incredible!
Lions at Mikumi
Also check out this video 😉
So, this first Safari in my life was great. Unfortunately, I had the worst dinner in my life on Saturday evening so that I felt very bad on Sunday and missed the visit of the snake park… But anyway, feeling sick must have happened once in Africa and even though it was an unforgettable trip 🙂