roderick

So I'm a little late in getting this trip report out, is eight weeks really that long Would like to start off by giving my thanks to the many frequent posters on the Fodors Africa forum. This forum is really amazing and helped in so many ways. Thanks to everyone for their very prompt and detailed input.

Here are the basics of our trip:

Left Sept 3rd from San Francisco to Amsterdam
Spent two nights in Amsterdam at the Hotel Vondel
Flew from Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro on 6th
Two nights Tarangire National park staying at Tamarind tented Camp
Two nights hiking through the Ngorongoro Highlands from Olmoti Crater to Empakii Crater
Two nights Ngorongoro Crater staying at the Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge
Two nights Serengeti staying at Kirawira Tented Camp
One night Nairobi
Three nights Masai Mara staying at Little Governor!|s Camp

We booked our trip through Predators Safari Club and we used their guides and vehicles for all of the Tanzanian portion of the trip. I thought Predators did a great job in helping me plan the trip, and I would give their drivers and vehicles a 7.5 out of 10 if I were asked to grade them. Their knowledge of the parks was fantastic but I didn't feel like they were teaching me a lot about what I saw, felt like they were really reciting facts to me.
They could answer all of our questions, I guess I just expected a little more.

First of all, this trip was amazing. I went with eight other friends and we had the trip of a lifetime. Picked our plane tickets up from Airbrokers.com and they cost about $1700 for all of our international flights (SFO to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro, Nairobi to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to SFO).

Our trip is pretty much in line with your typical first timers trip to East Africa with the exception of our three days of hiking in the Ngorongoro highlands. This was probably the most amazing part of the trip for everyone. This was booked through Predators and turned out to be incredible. The route we took was a little different from the one that is offered on their website. We compressed the hiking to three days and two nights and eliminated the long walk back to Nainokanoka.

After our two days at Tarangire we drove to the Ngorongoro Crater, picked up an armed ranger at the post and were taken to Nainokanoka village to begin our three day trek. It was during our hike that we were really able to get away from all of the 'commercialized' aspects of East African and really feel like we were interacting on a closer and less forced level with the land and the people.

I can not recommend enough this aspect of the trip and would encourage anyone who has a chance to do this hike. A very detailed posting with pictures has been posted at:

www.employees.org/~rschultz/Safari/intro.htm

There is a travel journal that you can read with quite a bit of detail. Please let me know if you have any questions, I feel like I owe quite a bit back to this forum for all the help it gave me in planning my trip.

Kavey

Sounds great - thanks for the report. Looking forward to reading the full report tomorrow - for now it's my bed time!

Night night and sleep tight! Dream of Africa!

sundowner

WOW Roderick - Your pictures are great and you saw some amazing stuff! Thanks for sharing them.

girlpolo33

Rod, thanks for sharing your amazing pictures! They are nothing short of spectacular : )

I've bookmarked the website to get me through these next months until I can return to Africa in May. Your pictures brought tears to my eyes -- they are so beautiful. Truly a special trip for you and your friends.

excitedtraveler

Roderick,
excellent pictures.
What camera equipment did you use for your Safari?
I am looking for something to buy and pictures like that would be wonderful memories.

Clematis

Rod, beautiful website - did you do it from scratch, html and all? Really nice. Your photos gave me a sense of how fun your trip was - your group seems so nice. I was especially knocked out by the close up of the young cheetah... also loved the tree shots. And of course the wildebeest shots.

roderick

Glad you guys like the pictures we posted. The intro uses Flash and the site was created with Dreamweaver, both from Macromedia. They're great tools if you are looking to do web development. We used a template for the pages but everything else was done from scratch.

So I shoot with a Canon EOS 10D. I mostly used a 35mm - 80 mm and an 80mm - 300mm lense for this trip. The pictures actually look a lot better than the ones on the site, we degraded the images so that they could be downloaded faster.

I couldn't be happier with the camera. It takes fantastic pictures (6.3 megapix) and is pretty easy to use. There is also a little bit cheaper version of the camera that was just released by Canon in their Rebel line that has a few less features but is probably just as good.

We took three 512 meg memory cards and used up all the memory on the trip. Took about 1200 pictures, not counting the ones we deleted.

sandi

Roderick - great photos. Nice that you could travel with a group of friends, all of you enjoying the excitement at the same time. It's so difficult to try to explain the experience to those who weren't there. Sure, they'll think the photos are great, but actually being a few feet away - nothing like it.

Thanks for sharing your holiday with us.