Up at 5.30 for a 6am start to the game drive in the morning. The roof is up, hurray! It's a VW camper van style roof, ie. the whole roof rotates forward and up and becomes a sort of sunroof. The other Landcruisers have flip-over hatch style roofs. I take the opportunity of standing up and you get a great view. Sadly, however, two minutes later I was asked to sit down in case the roof fell on me. What?! It all started going downhill from there.
Herman settled into his usual routine of following in the dust cloud of someone else. We got a gutteral response to asking to stop to photograph things and had to ask what things were called. Herman took to starting the engine (which rocks the car) and moving off in the middle of shot-taking. It must be said, personally, that the two most irritating things about games drives are the other vehicles, you either follow them in which case the animal [that they spotted] moves off when you arrive or they follow you in which the animal moves off when they arrive. The animals seem to cope with one vehicle but get agitated with more. The second thing is movement, anyone moving about (standing, sitting etc.) rocks the camcorder, obviously, but must shake anyone setting up a still shot. People talking is a pain for me, I have a few clips where you can hear the animals munching on food etc. but mostly you can hear people talking or cameras winding on.
I also find that I'm interested in quite different things to other people. When we stop for almost anything, cue giraffe next to tree, behing tree, eating tree, walking past tree, then there's a flurry of shots to capture the postcard moment. Bizarrely, to me, there is a flurry when you get the same shot as you've seen before. Fair enough, maybe it's the camcorder effect but I want to see things happen. Capturing birds hopping on the ground, hippos waddling, heat haze, clouds rolling over the horizon. I find those things much more interesting. It does, of course, cause a conflict of interest when most people want the perfect picture of the big animal whereas I'd be happy to sit and watch the world go by. Filming a zebra flicking it's eyelashes doesn't keep other people's interest. Ah well.
We had two great Herman moments. The first was a pride of lions, about 9, spotted [way] off the road. Herman quickly whipped off the road and drove within a few metres. The other truck followed but 30 seconds later, mid-shooting, Herman powered up and sped off back down the road a kilometre. We then waited there for a few minutes as the others took plenty of photos then joined us. Herman's line was that you can get booted out of the park if you go off-road. So why did we go off-road at all? The second was just after we'd seen a cheetah [a long way off]. We came to a halt behind another vehicle (us, following?). Some Swahili was exchanged and Herman just looked out of the window where the whole of the other truck was looking. At what? Katja managed to ascertain that there were more cheetah. But where? We never found out where. btw, on the way back for lunch Herman managed to hammer down the road so fast the the roof did indeed fall down.
Over brunch we found out that the other guides are really quite good. Good spotters, informative, chatty. We've a lot of a bum deal, here.
We cane it off through the park, hitting 90 kmh in the 50 kmh limit, which doesn't sound much but is quite a lot on well cambered gravel roads when someone's coming the other way. We did pass a couple of examples of park road building: take a gravel plough (a snow plough with the plough between front and rear axles) and drive up the road spreading gravel about. Um, that's it.
Finally, in the rain, to Simba-A camp on the edge of Ngorongoro crater.
Simba-A Camp, Ngorongoro Crater S3.22791
E35.48999 Elev. 2254m. 
August 2004 Note: You may want to see a satellite view of this part of the world.
Simba-A camp appears to be a bit of a dive, poorly maintained, the toilets are shitty and two armed guards! The bloke from Drifters who originally spoke to us on the Tuesday night did say that the last camp would be the worst. It's a shocker. We're back to the old gag that a bush camp would be cleaner and more hygenic. Curiously, both camps operate in the same way. You camp in tents, there's toilets and showers (after a fashion) but instead of cooking over open fires there are two huts. Both have half-height walls with the windows wire-fenced over. One for the guides to cook in, the other is set out with camp tables and chairs (brought by each company) and that's where we gather around lanterns waiting for tea to be served. All the groups gather separately(!) in the huts. It's odd, compared to what we've had. The food has been good, soup, main course then fruit and coffee/tea. Tonight's main course was, however, more of the brutally hacked chicken variety. Much attention to bone hunting was paid by those who tried it. We loitered for a while hoping that Wilson, one of the other guides, would come in for a chat and we could complain about Herman. Sadly, it appears that they rotate the chatting-to-customers [thing] and it was our luck that Herman sidled in. He then proceeded to say to the half dozen left more than he'd said to our truck in the last two days! We left for our soggy tent.
En route to the tent we went for a bush-pee and saw a forest giant hog glide through the undergrowth behind us. We had been told to take all food out of the tents for fear of the hogs overturning the tents in the quest for nosh.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.