6.02.2014 – 6.02.2014  24 °C

If you are familiar with the terrible kids programme from the late 70s, HR Puff and Stuff you may recognise today’s blog title. For those of you with more sense, I’d better explain! One of the few things I can remember about the show (mainly because even as a kid I could recognise poor tv when I came across it!—no apologies to those of you who loved the show!) was Garry the Gnu.. At the time I thought Garry was a the depiction of some sort of alien creature who stupidly read the daily news on the tv programme.. He would open (or close I can’t quite recall) this short part of the tv show with “There’s no Gnus like good Gnus with Garry Gnus”… For some reason this wording has stuck with me throughout my life. Today the memory came flooding back when I discovered that the Swahili word for Wildebeest is Gnu!!! Well, holy snapping ducks, Garry wasn’t a depiction of some alien creature but was actually a Wildebeest!!!!! And did I see some Garry Gnus today?

Ngorongoro Crater is FILLED with wildebeest and zebra and lions and giraffe and HIPPOs and elephants and flamingos, bucket loads of different types of antelope and birds…….. and RHINOs!!!!!! Today was a truly unforgettable day. The crater is 800 or so square kilometres and houses thousands upon thousands of animals. Every where you turn you see another animal and for us today was all about two animals, Rhino’s and Lions. Today, we officially ticked off the Big 5 with us seeing four different Rhinos.. That is pretty amazing, considering, there are only about 30 that live within the crater. It is common for tourists to not see one, although, they are ginormous so are pretty hard to miss! No joke, you can’t miss them (actually you can think you see them regularly when you get a couple of wildebeest or buffalo standing together!!). They are big big cows with a unicorn! Rhinos graze quite contentedly next to Buffalo/ Wildebeest/ Zebras etc but apparently get quite stressed and will charge if humans are around! No need for us to stress though because most of the Rhino’s we saw today are what I would describe as grey blobs on the horizon (at least by the naked eye). Thru the camera you could make out the horns so I’m happy to tick off Rhinos (aka big grey blobs).

The crater is divided into different parts and each of the animals tend to live in 1 part of the crater. Luckily for us we had all day driving around the crater so we didn’t have an issue of seeing most of the different animals. There were many highlights today but one of particular note was on the “plain” part of the crater. Here we saw very baby zebras (hunda in Swahili)—one had even just been born!, baby wildebeests and from a 360deg point of view, all we could see was wildebeest and zebra! I can only imagine this must be what the Serengeti will be like!!

The big highlight of the day came right before we left the park. Earlier in the day we had seen a pride of lions devouring a buffalo. This was quite a site but on our return journey we were in for a REAL treat! We had the lions come right up to our car, two of them even tried to sleep next to our car in the shade!!! To see the biggest of the big cats up that close is pretty amazing. 1 female lion was almost half the size of our truck! At one point she lifted her head and put her beady eye on me inside the truck.. Let’s put it this way, it gives you a real jolt to see an animal, who can clearly devour you, that close! (we promptly closed all of the windows up tight and stood up to take photos of the lions!) Definitely one experience that I will never, ever forget!!!

Animal Tally: