Holy Hyena!

Hello all from the singing city of Cairo! It's hot. And noisy. Car horns beeping. Mosque's singing. And it's crowded. And almost everyone here is trying to rip us off. But we just ate this awesome dinner for $2 each and we have an awesome view of the Nile River and the Cairo Tower from our hostel window, and all for under $10 a night!
Since Zanzibar - We drove to Arusha, Tanzania and from there safaried off into the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. I don't even know where to begin to tell you how awesome that safari was! It was just awesome! We had an afternoon game drive into the Ngorongoro Crater on the first day. Does anyone know where Ngorongoro gets it's name from? Anyone? Well, I'll tell you. The Ngorongoro Crater sits in the middle of the Maasai people's territory, and the Maasai people are nomadic cattle herders. They put bells around their cows necks, and before theTanzanian government prohibited them from living there, the crater was full of the Maasai and their cows, and you could just hear the sound of the cow bells throughout the crater: ngoro ngoro ngoro. That's what a cow bell sounds like. Say it out loud, you'll hear it.
OK, so we were in a safari truck with 4 others and our guide, Simba (his name is lion in Swahili!) The crater is not very big, but a ton of animals live there - all the cool ones, except for giraffe, it's too steep for them - so you're pretty much guaranteed to see a lot. Here's a quick run down of all the awesome stuff we saw: A rhino which is really rare there. 7 lions and a couple of cubs. A female ostrich doing a mating dance and then a male ostrich chasing her at full speed around and around in circles. A cheetah!!!! One of only 3 that live in the crater! A hippo humping another hippo. And - are you ready for it? - The best thing we've seen yet! A hyena chase and take down a full grown wildebeest on it's own!!! Do you know how rare it is to see that?? Our guide has been doing this for 6 years and he's only seen 12 kills. And to see a hyena, alone, take down a full grown wildebeest! Just crazy! I'll spare you the details since it was pretty gory, but we did get some pretty good shots and we do have a video of it (whenever I get around to uploading those photos).
OK, so we camped on the ridge of the crater that night and all night long we could here wild bush pigs sniffing around our tents and zebra wandering through our camp. Next day we drove to the Olduvai Gorge and looked into the valley where they found some of the oldest fossils, and the oldest foot prints of man. It was neat, and the museum was interesting, but you can't see the footprints anymore since they covered them back up to protect them.
Then we drove into the Serengeti! The Serengeti! Speaking of Serengeti, does anyone want to take a guess at how that got it's name? No? I'll tell you. The Maasai called it the Siringet - meaning endless plain - but when the mzungus (white men) came they couldn't say Siringet, so they called it Serengeti.
It really was so beautiful and seemingly endless. One of the first things we saw when we got there was a huge male lion lying atop a giant rock, like he was posing for us. At the bottom of the rock was another male lion, sleeping, and just across from them on another rock were 2 female lions. We were so close to them!
What else did we see? Well, baboons and monkeys and zebra and ostrich and gazelles and hartebeast, well tons of different antelope, and elephants and the only one of the big 5 that we hadn't seen yet: the leopard! We saw a female leopard and her 2 cubs hanging out on a rock! That was great. And we saw more lions after that. And the next day we saw 5 cheetahs - one with her cub stalking gazelle. And a lioness nursing her baby cub right on the side of the road! So awesome!
OK, after all that we drove back to Arusha where we went for a village walk through a Maasai village. They are the most photographed tribe in the world, and they really are beautiful and wear wonderful colors. And well, that's pretty much it.
After Arusha we drove to Nairobi, Kenya, which has been the cleanest, friendliest city we have been to so far. We didn't spend enough time there. And then we flew into Cairo late late late last night. And we had a bit of a fright with our cab driver, but all is OK. Our hostel is on the 7th floor of this really dilapidated apartment building, but it is really so wonderful and (amazingly) clean. I uploaded some photos on our flickr page today (I'm trying to catchup!) www.flickr.com/photos/chasetherisingsun The rest of Paris and some of our time volunteering at Enkosini. Enjoy them!