Month: February 2018

February 5 (still)

(Side note: I am typing this while on a plane from Dar es Salaam to Dubai. There are lots of free movies available and I started Murder on the Orient Express – a book I love and a new movie I haven’t seen yet. I only got through like 15 minutes before I turned it off and switched to Inside Out – another movie I have never seen. Ugly crying on a very crowded plane. Now back to safari and some yellow happy memories.)

OK – so I already made a post about day 2 on safari, but I wanted to get this on the blog without permanently scarring small children. So please use cation when showing to our nieces and nephews. I’m not sure it’s appropriate even for the oldest of them. Also I’m not sure some adults will want to see. That said, it was the most amazing thing we saw on safari and one of the coolest things I’ve seen in my life. Also Michael thinks it might be THE coolest.

So, we saw this lion from far away. Innocent drove over to get closer to him:

Once again we were the first truck there. We watched him for awhile and realized he had something with him. It was a zebra that he had killed. But he wasn’t eating it. He was dragging it. https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_6692.movWe couldn’t figure out where he was dragging the zebra, but his path was heading in the direction of the road. So Innocent redirected us to be right on his path. https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_0874.trim_.movBy this point a few more trucks had arrived. It was incredible. The lion was struggling with the heavy body of the zebra and took a bunch of breaks. Here’s video and pictures. He was tired and it took him awhile but eventually he pulled that zebra right past us. A bit gory but really incredible.

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_6739.mov

There is a reason he is called the king.

February 5

Another early morning and off to the Serengeti. Serengeti is a Masai word that means “endless plain” and that is an understatement as you look at the view.

We started the day with this bird (no clue what it is but look at the thorns on that tree!)

Zebras and Wildebeest!!!

Mount Kenya Hartebeest – easy to remember because their horns are kind of in the shape of a heart

Hyena!

White Bellied Corabaster

Mongoose (is the plural mongeese?) in the plural form eat black mambas which you can find in the Serengeti but we did not see.

Guenther’s dik-dik aka the cutest animal in Tanzania:

Hippos!

So many hippos!!!

We saw two male lions far away before seeing a solo male (shown here). I am going to write more about this guy in a separate post. It’s a little too “circle of life” to post without a clear warning for the kiddos and parents.

We also saw these lionesses with some cubs:

Silverback Jackal

A Superb Starline:

Mwanza flat-headed agama that we saw at a lookout that we hiked up to (with some boring lizard):

Grant gazelle

Fun fact – the all black ostriches are males. So these are female:

Marabou Stork – look at how big those guys are!!

This is our camp for tonight and tomorrow night. Super fancy tents – showers and toilets inside our tent!

Michael got a few beers to enjoy with the sunset and we ended up talking a kid named Golisen (no clue if that is correct – he told us just to call him Max, which is his father’s name). Max was very excited to hear that we are from the US. He has a really high opinion of people from the US specifically because there is a lot of things in Tanzania which are supported by people from the US (and have signage so they know “Support from the People of the United States of America” apparently). He was optimistic about the future of both Tanzania and the world although he was concerned about Trump. He is 21 years old and working in the camp for a few months but will go back to school when he is done.

He also told us that safari is Swahili meaning to travel or to visit.

Our sunset while sitting outside our tent:

Something incredible.

February 4

After arriving late into Arusha on Saturday, our safari tour guide, Innocent, picked us up early Sunday morning. We were set to have five days, four nights on safari. I’m going to try to give you any information we got and some pictures. If something doesn’t make sense, I could definitely be wrong. Feel free to review nature guides if necessary and let me know if I’m wrong. Nearly everything was amazing, which you would think would get exhausting eventually. It did. By the last day we were ready to stop seeing amazing animals up close. I was tired. But until then…. it was really incredible.

We started on day one in Tarangire National Park – 2850 square kilometers preserved since 1970. Tarangire is pronounced Taryn Geerie. Tarangire is from the Swahili words for river and bumba, which is a warthog. Tell me she’s not beautiful!

There was a lot of hunting in Tarangire until it became a national park.

A few things going on in this park: elephants, warthogs and baobab trees. Baobab trees are these huge trees. You can cut a big hole in the middle of them and they won’t die. This was the preferred blind of hunters – they would cut out a big hole and just wait in there.

Giraffes were the first up close and personal encounter of the safari!

The only predator for elephants is man (that Innocent knew of).

Waterbocks – they have a white ring on their rear and when they are attacked they emit a smell that is repulsive to predators. So none of the typical predators attack them.

This is a velvet monkey

A beautiful view with elephants crossing the river in the distance:

Then those elephants a little closer:

Male Impala

Birds that sit on giraffe will often warn them about predators

These hanging bird nests are built this way to deceive predators. The birds will build a lot of nests but only put eggs in one. That way it is harder for snakes and other predators to figure out where the eggs are hidden.

And this is a sausage tree because its fruit looks like hanging sausages:

Now for the main event! We saw two lions! Males. They were hard to see and Innocent was not impressed. We were though! I promise they are in this picture.

Leopards like to eat baboons. We didn’t see leopards today but we did see baboons!

Elephants often live to about 50 at which point their (second round of) teeth wear down and they die because it is too hard to eat. I’m starting to realize that a lot of my facts are about death and predators… sorry. But look how cute the baby elephant is!!!

Southern Ground Hornbill

We saw a bush bock running by (no pic – didn’t happen).

This cute baby hanging out at the picnic space trying to nab food from sucker tourists.

Female waterbocks

After a fairly long day, Innocent was clearly on the hunt for something. He was driving with a purpose. For the most part our truck was on its own throughout the day, but sometimes if we saw something cool or the animals were very close to the round a few trucks would be together. The different guides also would talk back and forth on the radio if they saw something cool. But Innocent usually went his own way unless he had word of something amazing. He drove us further away from the other trucks into dead end road and sure enough… there were two lionesses.

The one lioness had a collar. Innocent said it was for tracking – it was the only time in five days that we saw an animal that was tagged or collared.

We spent about 5 minutes right next to them, alone with them, before Innocent called it in to the rest of the guides and then we got out of dodge. 6 trucks were pulling up as we were leaving. It was a really nice way to have our first up close encounter with lionesses – especially because some of the other tourists are pretty noisy when they are observing animals.

This is a crane – it’s the national bird of Uganda. The giraffe is the national animal of Tanzania. What a goofy looking bird.

We ended our day at a beautiful lodge just outside Ngorongoro Crater which we will visit on day four. Here is a view of the crater from above:

And here are pics of the lodge flowers.

That’s it for day one – hard to beat for sure.

February 3

Today we flew from Addis Ababa to Arusha, Tanzania via Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We arrived to Dar es Salaam and did another round of obtaining visas and finding ATMs. The process was long but easy. We then walked out of customs and then back into departures… to head to Arusha. That’s when we were informed that even though we booked a flight into airport code “DAR” and a flight out of airport code “DAR”, they were actually different airports. Why. Why do two different airports have the same airport code!??! Not a huge deal, but come on…

So we took a taxi to the other airport and got a glimpse of what type of planes we would be flying:

So small!! Once we got onto the plane, our pilot, along with a few other people actually had to push another plane out of the way so we could leave:

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_6375.mov

The flight was super easy and successful. A few bumps and frights, but really safe and successful. Even though there were only 8 people on the plane, it really just flew like a small plane carrying 30 from Chicago to St. Louis. Here are a few pictures/videos:

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_6381.mov

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_6389-1.mov

And now – off to Safari!!!!

February 1-3

OK – so this looks like three days in Addis Ababa, but really it is just 36 hours as we got in late on the 1st and left early on the 3rd. So we had one main day to see as much as we could. This post has three parts:

1. The Airport

This was not our best airport visit. We knew two things when arriving: we had to get a visa and we needed cash to get that visa. Online I had read that the visas were $110 per US citizen. This was mostly true. We went looking for an ATM and got turned around pretty quickly instead of following the rest of the people who got off our plane and were heading to customs. The money exchanger who took visa wouldn’t take our cards, so after a few loops around the terminal we finally found customs and an ATM where we pulled out about $250 worth of birr, which is a ton of birr, and went towards the visa counter. We filled out the paperwork at one counter and the power went out in the entire airport. Uh oh. Not the end of the world – it came back on and we moved on with the process. Off to pay for the visas. We found out that they were only 50 bucks a piece (yay!!!) but when we went to pay we were told we couldn’t use birr – only USD. Uh… but they’d take credit card! But none of our cards were accepted. I’m sure it was just chase and capital one shutting us down on random Ethiopian charge. So Michael tried to go back to the cash exchange and exchange the birr for the USD – but they wouldn’t do it. It was a big fiasco and ultimately they took 96USD from me (that was all I had) and the rest in birr.

We walked away a bit flustered, but had our visas and had our passports processed quickly. We were heading to grab our bags when we were pulled aside for additional screening. This is where things get interesting. There were already two women in the room and 3 or 4 officials. The one woman was from Venezuela and didn’t speak English. They had searched her bags and found a package that the officials claimed had drugs in it… but they never opened the package, so I don’t know how they know what was inside. The woman just sat there. The other woman had an expired passport and claimed to be a missionary and wanted us to pray for her. I don’t know how my praying is going to make her passport unexpired, but…

So we got mixed in with these two women and the men who were doing the additional screening were not the most put together people. They were a bit paranoid and kept getting the four of us mixed up. They kept accusing the Christian and Michael of being with the Venezuelan woman. At one point they were putting Michael’s boarding pass in the Venezuelan woman’s face and asking her questions. We didn’t want to get involved and tell them they were getting things confused, but I also didn’t want to get mixed up with her problems which were much larger than ours. They searched all four of our bags and at one point were mixing up the belongings of the two women. I was actually nervous about them going through my backpack because I have an entire bag of prescription meds in there. It’s an excessive amount, but it includes malaria pills which take up a lot of space and a much of random “in case you need it” stuff. But for whatever reason, when he went through my bag, he didn’t look twice at it. It took about 25 minutes for them to realize that Michael and I were married. Once they got that, things got easier for us. I felt bad leaving when we were excused because I was doing the tiny bit of translating for the Venezuela woman, but we also didn’t want to get too involved. For the record, when I told her that they thought she had drugs she adamantly denied it.

Now I was not that worried – probably because Michael and I were together, but I will say that if I was flying solo I would have been nervous in that room. But things worked out ok for us and as we were leaving, the one man said to us “you see – just a joke”. I don’t think that was exactly what he wanted to say, but didn’t make us feel better. We headed to our hotel, grabbed dinner and passed out.

2. The City

I woke up at 8:30 and Mike was gone the next morning. I knew he wanted to go for a run and I knew that it might not be the best place for me to be running solo, so I woke up leisurely and went downstairs to grab breakfast. Cup 1 of Ethiopian coffee and a few traditional dishes for breakfast. By 10am I started getting nervous that Michael hadn’t returned. I wasn’t really sure what time he had left. He rolled in about 10:10 and proved my suspicion – he had gotten lost. Really lost. He had to ask some cab drivers for help and they hadn’t heard of our hotel and eventually he had a super nice man take a bus with him and escort him back to the hotel. I finished my second and third cup of coffee.

After he got showered, we headed into the city. A friend of Betsy’s is from Addis Ababa, and he suggested either getting a taxi to take us around or hiring a car from a tour company for the day. We felt good about taxis, so we went that route. We bargained with blue taxis for the entire time we were in the city. Not totally something in my wheel house, especially since we have no frame of reference – no idea how much things normally cost, etc. But we were mostly successful at it. We had the first cab take us to a coffee shop that Michael wanted to visit. It was in one of the city centers. We found it easily and walked inside and were told that they weren’t taking tourists today. Ok… luckily the place right next door was! So we grabbed coffee there:

As soon as the woman put the coffees down, I kicked the table and made a huge mess. Ugh. This is probably why the other place wasn’t accepting tourists. A note on coffee: I love Ethiopian coffee. Most people who have had it love it. But it is really strong. Super strong. And I was on cup 4 of the day and I have mostly weaned myself off my coffee addiction over the past 3 months. So needless to say, I was super jittery going into this cup. But when in Ethiopia, you have to take advantage!!

After our coffees, we wandered around the center and visited a few stores. I bought a really cute long skirt that you’ll see in 1/9 of every picture of me going forward.

Then we went to see the Monument to the Lion of Judah which is the symbol of Ethiopian Emperors. The statue is particularly well known because in the 1930s it was taken to Rome where a protest broke out by Eritrean patriot Zerai Derek’s who wounded several people with a sabre. He was protesting Italian colonialism and is now considered a patriot and national hero.

So we asked the guy to drop us off there. And he did, but my google maps said it was another 5 or so blocks away, but he promised this was it. We also asked another random person who confirmed this was it.

Note: when I google it, we may have gone to the wrong statue. There is a Lion of Judah statue and a Monument to the Lion of Judah. If our resident Ethiopian can weigh in, that would be awesome!

After the lion we headed to the market! We had a self appointed guide, Wynn, who walked us through showing us all the different areas of this massive market – spices, cloth, food, it was huge! This was also a great opportunity to talk to a local about a few things. He asked almost immediately what we thought of Trump, but otherwise didn’t talk too much politics. He told us a bit about the country and the people. He said that he thought about 50% were Orthodox Christian and about 40% were Muslim. I asked him if there were every issues between the religions and he said an immediate “no”. I followed up on that (how can there be no problems with so many issues in the world between religions). He told me something I thought was very insightful. He told me that he thinks problems between religions are actually government issues and politics, not really issues with the faiths. Wynn helped us find a guy who sold us a table cloth and a scarf who also was very excited to talk with us. We definitely don’t have room for that table cloth in our bags, but the experience was great (another cup of coffee – 5 on the day if you’re keeping count).

Wynn wanted to take us to see more, but we wanted to get back to the hotel to drop stuff off and head to dinner, so we said our goodbyes and negotiated another cab.

After the market, we went to lunch! Another slight misstep that ended up awesome. Michael had a restaurant that he wanted to go to, so we negotiated another blue cab. But when we got there, it was closed. So we went to the restaurant across the street. Such a great decision. There was some language barrier issues. Zoom in on this menu for me, please:

So… not only do we not speak that language, but those are not letters that I can translate in Google. Thankfully, the guy helping us communicate with the waitress ultimately just ordered for us and we had a great meal and a few great Ethiopian beers. I don’t know what type of meat we had, but it was delicious and we were super grateful to another really kind person who wanted to help us out.

Cards and beers!

3. Dinner

Betsy’s friend suggested two restaurants for dinner that were cultural dinners – meaning that they include traditional music and dancing. We’re in! We went to Habesha 2000 and had a great time. The place focused on a stage that had insane dancers and musicians going nonstop. Also, the food… not sure if I’m said enough about how much Michael and I love Ethiopian food. It’s incredible – all of it – so of course we just ate to extreme for the entire day. We can cut back when we get to our next country.

Here’s our dinner:

It was the sampler and it was incredible! So Ethiopian food is… well I’m not qualified to speak on this, but I will anyway. Most Ethiopian meats we’ve had are stews, some are really spicy. Then we typically have a few side dishes – like the spinach shown here and some beans and grains and maybe some cucumber – and then you tear off a piece of the injera (which is the brown stuff underneath all the food above – it is a crepe like consistency and has a sourdough taste to it). So you tear off a piece of injera and then use that as a utensil to grab the other food. No forks or knives – just delicious injera to get all that amazing food into your mouth. There are Ethiopian restaurants in Chicago. I’m not sure about Ann Arbor and STL, but google it. If you have an Ethiopian restaurant nearby, go there!! The food is incredible and just ask them to help you order because it can be a little intimidating. But the food is amazing. So do it.

And here are some videos from the show:

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_0758.trim_.mov https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_0781.trim_.mov

They were incredible. At one point I was strong armed into dancing with one of these women. It was really awful (on my part). There is video and there is zero chance I’m posting it here. That said, Michael has been pretty loose in sending it out, so maybe you’ve seen it already somewhere else.

So that was it – we flew out the next morning and are off to Tanzania now for a safari. We are incredibly grateful to all of the kind people in Addis Ababa who helped us navigate their city without knowing the language. We are also reminded how lucky we are to speak English as many people in the city knew at least some and could communicate with us. Thanks also for the great food and coffee (although I’ll have to take a few days off caffeine). We will definitely have to come back to Ethiopia to spend some more time in the city and perhaps visit a few things outside in the country.

January 29-31

We arrived late into town after a short bus ride from Rio (yes – 6 hour bus rides are now considered short). We checked into our AirBNB in Paraiso and then asked for recommendations from the doorman for a place to grab a bite to eat. We then immediately ignored his suggestion after finding out that the burger place one block away is called St. Louis and features midwestern burgers. Yes please. We had been looking for a good burger without success for a few weeks now. Plus the picture has Heinz ketchup on the tables. Real ketchup!!! Plus come on… it’s called St. Louis. It did not disappoint.

The diner was decked out in signs from all over the US with a prominently placed Cardinals hat. The burgers were delicious, and Michael was pumped to get some onion rings as well. The only issues is that we wish the burgers were bigger! They were amazing.

After missing out for Thanksgiving, we ordered apple pie for dessert. The pie was not as good as Mom B’s and the whipped cream was not as good as my mom’s, but it was still real apple pie and delicious.

The next morning we went for a run in the park down the street.

It was perfect: big, beautiful, well taken care of, and safe. Plus, at close to sea level and with cooler weather, we both had great runs. There was some art in the part, but my favorite was this statue:

What I like about it is that you can see the obelisk in the distance, but this memorial is to the people who built it. I like that.

We only had about 48 hours in town, and a lot of that time was spent making plans for the next leg of our trip. But we did get in some good beers and we got in some great meals. Besides St. Louis, we also had dinner at Izakaya Issa which is a Japanese restaurant. But the main event was our dinner at D.O.M. Currently considered the 9th best restaurant in the world, DOM has 2 Michelin stars and serves Brazilian cuisine by chef Alex Atala. Atala’s main theme is to showcase food that is often considered food for the working class, alongside food from the Amazon that isn’t as widely consumed. He then puts a contemporary spin on it. It makes for really interesting, complex, delicious food.

We found out about Atala from Netflix’s show Chef’s Table. So if you have an hour to spend – check it out. Atala is a very bizarre mix of outdoorsman, aged punk rocker and chef. It is definitely entertaining.

A few highlights:

Heart of palm fettuccine with mushrooms (Heart of palm is grown in the Amazon – it comes out of a tree, not a can. Who knew?):

Oxtail with yam purée (you can see I like it because of the thumbs up I’m giving in the background):

This ball of amazingness. I don’t remember what it is but it was doughy and cheesy and amazing:

It was an amazing meal and a great way to celebrate the end of our three months on the continent. Afterwards, we picked up our bags and headed to the airport.

I’ve talked a bit about all the planning we did over these two days. We’ve been traveling for three months and we 1. haven’t run out of money yet and 2. aren’t sick of each other yet. So we’re going to move this party to Africa!! We’ll be sending word from Ethiopia soon!