July 29th

ZEBRA!

Ngorongoro crater was even cooler than anticipated. It's a giant crater left by an extinct volcano about 10 miles wide. It's a conservation area with a TON of natural wildlife, so there are some dirt roads cutting through it for people to see the animals. I was expecting to see some animals, but figured they'd probably be really far away, but we got extremely lucky. I was about 2 meters from two sleeping lions!! And we had some zebras and a herd of wildebeests cross the road in front of our vehicle. I have seriously about 50 pictures just of animals.

I'll tell you what we saw based on the lion king characters because that's what we did the whole time. When we started singing Hakuna Matata, our driver was very confused. I found out that "pumba" actually means warthog! Simba means lion, and rafiki means friend. Anyway, yeah, I'm excited to look at the pictures from today. I was also about 3 meters from an elephant, and a giraffe crossed the road right in front of us after we left the crater. So yes, basically THE MOST touristy day of our trip ever, but it was fun. We all had fun giving each other a hard time... with me being the target a lot of the time... which is good because I can probably take it better than most people.