One year ago today: Oct 8, 2005 (Squinting at rare animals from a distance)

[Note: original post from the trip is posted here]

By this time on our safari, we had already seen a fair amount of game so our goals were pretty defined. We hadn't yet seen a rhino (very rare), cheetah (one of my favorite cats), and leopard (relatively common, but very elusive) -- and we hoped to see at least one or two of these in the time we had remaining. Felix, our driver, was single-minded in his determination to find these animals for us; he would routinely ask other drivers about their sightings and was constantly on his cell phone scooping for information.

Luckily for us, Felix's persistence paid off, and we would see all three this day at Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The sightings were at very large distances, as evidenced by the photos below. Note that these photos are taken with a big, powerful zoom lens but are still quite small; it was impossible to see these animals with the naked eye...


A rhinoceros sleeping. Hilariously, it sleeps while lying down on its side.


Cheetah in Ngorongoro Crater.


Do you see the leopard in the tree (larger size) We spent about 1 hour looking in these two neighboring trees until we could definitively make it out. Bunches of other jeeps would drive up, squint for a while, and then declare a (usually incorrect) location, then drive away. Pretty funny stuff.

This was also a day of large birds, including both ostriches (the world's largest bird and Kim's favorite) and the kori bustard (the world's heaviest flying bird).







We returned to Lake Manyara for the night, and would head for Tarangire National Park, the final stop on our safari, the following day.