Up, up and away

Another early morning…we were picked up by Abdul at 4:30 AM! We were driven for about 1.5 hours to the balloon launching site. They had coffee and pastries for us while we waited to load the balloons. We got our briefing, put on some extra layers of clothing and got ready to go. We started just as the sun was rising.

The flight lasted an hour and a half. We saw some animals – Cape buffalo, impala, hippos, the cheetah and 3 cubs, giraffe and others. Sometimes we flew low, barely over the tree tops and got as high as 2,000 feet. The pilot, Trevor, had a GoPro and took photos while we were in the air. It was an amazing experience.

We were then taken to have breakfast. They had tents and a cook house and made us breakfast to order. There was fruit, 4 kinds of breads, eggs to order, pancakes and other sides. They had special cakes for people celebrating a birthday or anniversary and one for Jacob for his high school graduation.

They also had a fancy bathroom set up called “Loo with a View”.

After this we went to the park information center and had a tour with a guide, Lomyani. He had so much information to give to us. We spent about 45 minutes there and saw maps, learned about the origins of the Serengeti National Park and saw information on the Great Migration. One thing we found out is that the Great Migration is really with several different animals, the biggest numbers are the wildebeest and zebra.

We then did a game drive with Richard. We also used the BNN to help us find these elusive animals. We were still looking for leopards. We actually found 2 at different times. One of the times there were about 30 vehicles trying to get into good position to see the leopard. Both were in trees and hard to see. One had just finished eating a warthog and the remains of the carcass was still in the tree with the leopard.

We saw lots of other animals on our game drive but thought that more elephant and giraffe photos would be too much. We are now getting ready to go to our next park tomorrow.

The Ngorongoro Crater will be our next destination.