29 JULY 2005 ‚ 0650 HOURS ‚ NGORONGORO SOPA LODGE NGORONGORO CRATER TANZANIA
It's yet another travel day today and I'm up early anxious to get moving to our next destination of Stone Twon, Zanzibar, as well as perturbed that I've done little to record my impressions of the land I've seen so far. During dinner our first night here, we sat near to a family, the father of whom was reading aloud from his handwritten journal. I couldn't help but over here him mention Kigali and later on Virunga Lodge where he stayed. In those few sentences he recited it seemed he'd done more to capture the experience than I have throughout here. What I mean is, writing about seeing a black rhino ‚ no matter how rare and magnificent such a creature is ‚ or a lion or a leopard or a cheetah with its kill only goes so far. It's somewhat like trying to relate a humorous situation to someone who wasn't presentÖ there's always going to be a "guess you had to be there" quality.

My primary hope at this point is that I haven't just blathered on about the quality of the rooms or the condition of the roads and other relatively inconsequential items ‚ forsaking the forest for the trees, so to speak. But at the same time, describing the Serengeti to someone who hasn't been there seems a waste of effort.

Before I forget, with today's rhino, Susan and I have seen "the big five": Cape buffalo, elephant, lion, rhino, and leopard.

Undoubtedly I will flesh this account out, aided by the maps we purchased of the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which will enable me to put some names to the places. Oh well, I'm off to finish packing up so that we can head back to Arusha before our 3:30 p.m. flight. Is it ironic that at the point I've come to in Hemingway's "Green Hills" he too has moved out of the area of Lake Manyara and the Great Rift Valley in search of the elusive kudu?

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