summer trip. aferca 2011.

Towards the end of this past summer, my family and I went on a trip to Africa.  We hit Uganda and then Tanzania for the last week.  But Tanzania absolutely blew my mind.  A safari generally has that effect.  One of the places we drove through was an massive valley way up in the mountains called Ngorongoro Crater.


We basically drove up through the mountains on a sickening and narrow path until getting up to the rim, nearly 12000 feet over sea level.  The fog here was incredibly thick, but whenever it was lucid, we were less than thrilled to be able to see the treacherous drop to our immediate right, while the left opened right up; you could see for some 10 miles out over sunlit plains before resting on the far edge of the rim beyond.  It was here that our descent into the valley began.

The first thing I noticed was the rapid warming of the air around me.  Temperatures shot up about 20 degrees when we reached the crater floor.  It was a welcome change.  The second was that the animals really didn't seem to care that much about us.  Turns out, they've become completely accustomed to seeing all sorts of obnoxious tourists over the years in their armored land-rovers. Now, they don't care and nothing keeps them from wandering, some times inches away from your vehicle.  This where the zebras came in.

The zebras were the first fauna we came across in the crater.  They saw our jeep approaching from a mile away but continued traveling across the road in a single file line.  Even when we stopped 10 feet away.  My sister snapped a shot of their voyage.  I found it fascinating; this could find a place in National Geographic as far as I'm concerned.  As you can see, there are several bands of color oriented in the same direction.  The mountains, the clouds immediately above them, and the dark strip of savannah below would ordinarily be nothing special.  Then this this harem of zebra comes seemingly out of nowhere, an indiscriminate point far off in the distance.  By cutting through the parallel quality of the rest of the scenery, they take makes this picture beautiful.