I ate dinner with four wild genets watching from the rafters. If you don’t know what a genet is (much like me three hours ago), it’s related to the mongoose and looks like a leopard’s coat put onto a cat’s body with a fox’s head and a lion’s tail. And four of those are residents in the lodge, living in the rafters, and watching guests eat each night before they head out to look for their own meals (no, Audrey, we can’t get one).
Overall the lodge grounds are practically a petting zoo – dikdik’s (deer that are about a eighteen inches tall) tolerate people to within a few feet, you practically need to avoid stepping on birds, impala graze fifty feet from the main path, and long eared bats make chirping noises under the eaves. Apparently they’ve all come to realize that predators don’t hang out in the vicinity and that people aren’t a threat, so they’ve made the place into a wild animal park run by the animals.
In non-lodge news, we drove across the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater and down into Olduvai Gorge to see where the earliest hominid fossils were discovered. Bones are still washing up there after the rainy season each year, as we quickly discovered when looking through rocks in the wash. Strangely, the highlight of Olduvai was the birds on its rim, which were oddly tolerant, numerous, and amazingly colorful. From Olduvai we then did an off-road safari for about five hours, which was a massive amount of bouncy fun standing in the back of the pop-top safari vehicles scanning for animals. A more mature man would not have made a game out of trying to find more animals than the driver, but I am not such a man and came away with the first hyena sighting of the trip as well as a bunch of other finds. Gazelle were so abundant that we quickly got to the point where they didn’t merit a stop, giraffe and ostrich were also numerous, and a bunch of other critters made an appearance as we rocked and rolled over the terrain.
At one point during the drive a call came in that another jeep had become stuck in a collapsed aardvark den, so we went to their rescue and helped winch them out. Writing about helping to extract a vehicle stuck in an aardvark den is a subject that I never in a million years would have imagined would be a part of this journal, and I feel unimaginably lucky to have been able to put it into words. Tomorrow is another day and another adventure.
