Tanzania Adventures in 2019!

In October of 2019 we joined my sister and her spouse & friends on an adventure to Tanzania.  We went through Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) on their Safari Serengeti: Tanzania Lodge & Tented Safari with a pre-safari stop in Amsterdam.  I have to admit that we were a bit nervous about going through OAT for our, perhaps, once-in-a-lifetime African safari.  We knew literally nothing about the company, although we did have some friends, who have traveled the world from one end to the other, tell us they had heard good things about the company.  But there are SO many companies that lead safaris in Africa, and specifically in the Serengeti, that we were still nervous; turns out, we had no reason to be!  The trip was incredible!  OAT not only took us on the safari we never could have imagined, but they took us into the communities where we stayed.  We got to interact with the people of  Tanzania - from those working  within organizations to improve the quality of life, to members of the Masai Tribe in one of their villages, as well as some wandering along the side of the road.  We wandered through a Sunday open market, visited a small private school, shopped for food for a local family, and got a tour through Shanga, which employs  individuals with disabilities to create a variety of jewelry and housewares from recycled materials of all sorts. 

In Arusha, our first stop on the trip, our amazing OAT tour guides took us to Safe Water Ceramics of East Africa where they introduced us to this organization whose focus is on creating ceramic bowls that help locals clean the water before they drink it. 

"The mission of Safe Water Ceramics of East Africa is to save the lives of Africans and reduce disease to improve the lives of Africans."

From there, they took us to the Albino Peacemaker Center, where we met Sister Martha Mganga and one of her volunteers, Terry Morton, who was soon leaving after several years to go back to her family in western Oregon. What beautiful women they were!

From Arusha, we traveled down to the Tarangire National Park, where we not only saw the wildlife and birds of the park, we also  a visit to a Masai village.  This was, perhaps, the most "staged' event of the trip, but it was still worth the time.

From Tarangire, we made a quick stop in the Ngorongoro Highlands near the town of Karatu.  We stopped here again on our way back from the Serengeti.  We were in Tanzania for a total of 12 days, and what a dream trip it was.  I took nearly 8,000 photographs and had an amazing time.

Each page in this post (links to the right) is devoted to one of the several stops we made along the way.  Compared to our other travels, this one ranked right on or near the top!  And now that we're pretty much stuck at home because of the Coronavirus, I may as well get this blog post done! The pandemic has been going on for about 3 months already in the U.S.A, but we've managed to stay busy while maintaining the proper social distancing in order to keep ourselves, and everyone else, safe and maybe a little bit sound?