Happy Birthday to Candice!!

It was Candice's B-day when  we went to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.  It's a old volcano that has filled with fertile soil, and other diverse animals.  On safari in Tanzania, you are in national parks.  You see a ton of animals but you have to stay on designated roads (no off roading) so you can't get as close as we would have liked.  Here's some action shots.

After having been on safari in Southern Africa and having used open-air land rovers, I was a little skeptical about the pop-top land cruisers of east Africa.  It turns out they are perfect for that environment because of all the dusty roads you encounter.  If we would have been in open-air rovers we would have been covered.  Another cool thing is that we had our own cruiser for all our safari adventures.

The elephants in Ngorongoro are the biggest I have ever seen in any part of Africa or Asia.



The black rhino, super elusive and also very aggressive.  Our guide told us he had only seen black rhinos a few times in his whole career.  Candice felt like he showed up because it was her birthday... 
We stayed at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge.  It's generally considered to be one of the best hotels in the world and for $2,500/night, it should be.
It was an amazing/unusual design that I have never seen before.  Elegant, Middle-Earth and Africa are all fitting adjectives to describe this sublime property.  In the picture above, you can see a rack of spears for the guests to use at their leisure, I felt right at home.  After our game drive our own private butler, Mokoi, was waiting with freshly made chocolate cookies and mocktails-how delightful!  We were then taken to our hut/dwelling thing where a warm, bubble bath with fresh rose petals was waiting for us.  It had a view that overlooked the crater-freaking decadent!!Our room had, it's own bar, 4 dozen of the most beautiful roses I've ever seen and a well-stocked chocolate box.  What more do you need?

NCL is not a fenced hotel/lodge, whenever you want to go to dinner or be outside, you must be escorted by a guard or in their case, a Masai-warrior.  I half expected him to be riding a zebra but was equally impressed when he arrived brandishing a sharpened spear.  As we left our hut, he pointed out a cape buffalo not ten feet from our door.  We had walked past it not one minute earlier and had no idea it was there.  Yes, the cape buffalo kinda looks like a cow but is actually one of the biggest killers in Africa.  One killed my dad's friend while he was hunting, unzipped him from his crotch to his throat.  Yikes!!  Several of our guides told us that the buffalo is the one animal that frightens them the most.  Very unpredictable.  So yeah, ten feet from our door...  I love experiences like that, Africa is the best!!!!!

Below is a pick of one of the dining rooms.  The ceiling is constructed of folded banana leafs.  Strange and beautiful.

Birthday din din and yes, there was a huge cake and the whole staff came and sang African birthday songs and danced.  It was wonderful, especially the way African women can shake their rumps, art in motion.

Breakfast in bed, brought to us by our dear Mokoi.

View of the crater from our room.  

The crater is really cool and a place that one should definitely go.  The crater lodge was a dream filled with personal butlers and dangerous animals lurking around every nook.  Now on to the Serengeti...

Life's a Beach

Frolicking through Large European cities, check, trekking through central Africa to see mountain gorillas in their natural habitat and snacking on goat skewers (Matt, not the gorillas), check. It seemed only natural with the diversity of this vacation that a gorgeous beach destination with historical significance would be next, and off to Zanzibar we went. Stone town, the old city on the island, was this amazing narrow-alleyed, African/Colonial/Arab dilapidated city with stunning, ornately carved wooden doors. During the slave trade there were two areas in Africa where everyone was taken to to be sold. Zanzibar was the "point of no return" on the Eastern side of Africa. It's horrible, of course!!!! But the island itself was very intriguing.

It was also a significant place during the spice trade. Matt and I went on a fascinating spice tour where we heard about the process of growing, drying, manipulating, etc... spices from the ground up. We tasted many of them as raw plants to try to figure out what each of them were.

To top it all off, the water off of the island was a stunning turquoise blue - and the weather was not too hot, not too cold, not too many mosquitoes, perfect! There were long stretches of uninhabited beaches and firm white sand. We went scuba diving one morning, which was awesome, but after we got in the boat Matt chucked over the side. While we were waiting in the water to get in the boat he swallowed some sea water and it made him a little sick. Poor guy, he was fine after that though.

Me, contemplating the blue seas

Besides Matt's arms, clearly neither of us had seen the sun in a while.

Impromptu photo shoot - mind the gut.

There was a rock pathway from the beach by our hotel that went straight out to a swimming lagoon in the middle of the ocean - awesome!

The lobby of our hotel

On the wooden boat getting ready to go scuba diving.

Ready to conquer. We saw three octopus, a sea turtle, beautiful fish, sea anemones, sea urchins (one of which Matt stepped on while we were swimming in the lagoon - and I believe the spikes are still in Matt's foot), a fish that looked exactly like the coral it was in, and much more. It was delightful.

Our cute spice tour helper guide displaying the lipstick plant. Just open up the shell, squish the orange seeds, and voila - sumptuous circa 1985 lips.

The strangest looking spice that ever was... nutmeg. Holy fuscia, who knew?

Our guide also made us several things out of leaves while we were going through the tour. Note the neck tie, purse to hold our spices, hat, glasses, and a frog necklace. Sweet!

Phase two of the vacay

For the second part of our trip we went to Central Africa in search of endangered mountain gorillas.  We flew into Kigali, Rwanda and spent some time checking out the city.  It's a lot nicer than we anticipated.  We were picked up by the two guys in the photo below, Emmanuel, our guide and David our driver.  They are both from the DRC or Congo.  They were both so nice and went out of their way to make sure things were going okay.  We sang gospel songs together and everyone would explode into applause after every song was finished.  Apart from the singing if there was a soundtrack to our lives for this portion of our journey, it would have to be African reggae.  Yes, windows down, sunnies on and reggae beats bouncin' as we rolled through the African streets and countryside. We checked out the genocide memorial museum which was informative and sad.  We also went by the Mille Collines, the hotel that was used in hotel Rwanda as a refuge for people trying to survive the genocidal massacres that were taking place in 1994.  It was also cute because Emmanuel and David wanted to show off a new store that resembled a small wal-mart.  We  do like looking around in foreign grocery stores so it was actually kinda fun.

Next we travelled on to Uganda which is where we were  supposed to go on our gorilla treck but our guides neglected to get the permits ahead of time (this was the theme for this segment of the trip).  We stayed in a town called Kisoro and there, we visited a pygmy village.  I was a little skeptical about such a visit.  Usually these kind of things are pre-set, milk the tourist type events that feel canned and pre-packaged.  Our experience was totally unplanned and felt authentic.  As we walked on the path into their "village" we acquired a large following of the dirtiest/ cutest little kids in the world.  One little guy grabbed my finger with his tiny hand and we walked down the path together.  We  got to the center and we encountered their parents, who were drunk as hell.  It was sad to see, the kids looked to be raising themselves.  We all danced together and they sang songs.  The kids were the best part our experience though.  They had never seen a video camera or a digital camera.  They laughed and giggled as we did an impromptu photo shoot and showed them the results on our cameras screens.  We basically wanted to pack these little cuties into our suitcase and take them with us.  It was a memorable experience that we shall not soon forget.

Muscle shots are always a kid pleaser

 Instead of Uganda we headed off to the jungles of the Congo to find our elusive primate companions.  I've always wanted to go to the Congo so it was a fortuitous turn of events.  Central Africa doesn't have a lot of tourist infrastructure so you have to be flexible.  Because of this, it feels raw and unexplored.  We set out on our journey with two rangers with AK's, a tracker and the only dude who spoke a little English.

After hiking a few hours through the densest jungle I've ever been in, we finally caught our first glimpse or the Mawpua family.  Because gorillas share a great deal of our genetic make-up you have to put on masks so as not to transfer diseases.  You can also, only stay with the family for an hour so as not to disturb them too much.  The Mawpua family has two silverbacks, 8 females and a baby.

Above is a close up of a silverback eating some spiky vegetation.

Right after we saw them, this female comes up within a few feet of me and starts staring me down.  Now I'm used to aggressive women but this black beauty was intimidating.  The following three photos are of her approach.  I just kept shooting, as she got closer and closer.  Finally, she settled on a log and I got the heck out of dodge.

A little later another female came up to me and then beat on her chest as a sign of intimidation.  It was really cool.  The rangers would tell us to move back and try their best to get between us and the gorillas as they approached.  They would also grunt at the gorillas to try and get them to settle down and move away.  Please ask Candice to do her best gorilla sound the next time you see her, she's really good at it.

So that was it, a magical thing to do for sure.  Now onto Zanzibar....

Bon Voyage

Vacations never last long enough - we can't skip around Paris at midnight while munching on pastries, or scuba dive in the Indian Ocean in perfect turquoise waters, or watch lions nap lazily under a tree while their latest kill sits 10 feet away, endlessly everyday. Who knows, those things might become mundane if they happened all the time?

Not a chance!

We just returned from a most stellar holiday abroad. Because we took hundreds of photos we'll post them chronologically in multiple blogs - so as not to overwhelm. In order to fly to Africa, you fly through Europe, so we broke up the trip by staying in Paris for two days and London for one. We hadn't been back to Paris since our honeymoon (8 + years ago) and found we loved it even more than we remembered. Despite the reputation the French were nothing but warm to us, not even just polite but outright friendly. A ton was crammed into those two days - we walked a lot, went to the Louvre, the Decorative Arts Museum, waited in line at the catacombs - but left in order to make our lunch reservation at Guy Savoy's L'Atelier, and much more. A fabulous time was had by all!

We arrived in the evening the first day and took to the streets, hence the mood lighting. Matt clearly has a real love for Petit Dejeuner, it's quite dear to his heart.
While this moment was happening the music from Amelie was playing in the background, literally.


Our sweet, contemporary hotel located in Bastille
Pledging his love to the boar. He managed to find every boar in the Louvre - a divine mission really.
delicious + hip + traditional meets modern = L'Atelier

embracing the column, he's not partial - be it corinthian, doric, or ionic he's in love
I was a little chilly and grabbed Matt's coat on my way out the door - hence the over sized get-up and obvious bravado.

Then we took the train to London - where we stayed at St. Martin's Lane, a sister hotel of Philippe Starck's Clift hotel in San Fran (with the giant chairs that we posted a picture of a couple of blogs ago). Killer location and such a beautiful hotel. We maximized our one day in London by cruising to the Tower of London for several hours, having dinner at this adorable Chinese restaurant located in the bowels of the earth - really (we only saw the store front, and we kept going down and down and down to where there was this extensive beautiful restaurant behind a small facade). We then topped the night off by getting lost on our way to see Peter Pan in the park (it was a HUGE park!!).

All three of the above were taken in the lobby of our hipster hotel. The first being my fav, very Alice in Wonderland.
Ahhh, room service at midnight - a fabulous idea consisting of mexican donuts, pineapple cake, and ice cold milk
Matt and the beef eater comparing guns at the Tower of London. We had just finished attending a Henry VIII exhibit titled dressed to kill, highlighting his armor. It was super well done, and really engaging. We're in line here to see the crown jewels.
I'm a little tall for the space. Fat guy in a little coat.
We took the beef eater tour that was really interesting! In this very square many people had been beheaded. They kept political and religious prisoners here.