Just because, I decided not to walk this morning, and sleep in. The alarm went off about the time we were pulling into port. We ate breakfast with Cyndi and Pat and then met them at the main stage since we were going on the same tour today.
Last evening, during the Captain’s announcement, he said that the officials from Dakar wanted to bring 100 dignitaries on board. He wasn’t sure what that was all about but they finally agreed on 10! Turned out they were doing a tourist video and he was interviewed for a local television station. He said when the talk changed from English to French, he had no idea what was being said. These were some of the “officials” that were lined up to come on board as we left on our excursion:
In yet another example of how a few people screw things up for everybody else …. They weren’t handing out excursion stickers until your tour was called. Seems that the people that f’d everything up were getting their stickers and then leaving early to be the first ones on the bus. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain that we are all going the same place. These are the same people that have to be told REPEATELY to not block the exit but they still stand there and block the exits anyway.
There were 300 people on our tour to Bandia Wildlife Reserve. That was a lot of people on a lot of buses. It was an hour drive to get to the location. After a potty stop, we loaded up into 4-wheel drive vehicles that were a little more difficult to get into then the one’s on previous excursions. We couldn’t figure out why the other vehicles were leaving and we weren’t. Well, first it was because we were waiting on someone’s wife who was in the bathroom – not sure why he even got in the truck without her in the first place, but that made us wait. Then, although 4 of us were sitting in the same row of seats, they could only get 3 of them in each of the other 2 rows. There were still other trucks loading up and not sure what took them so long to figure out they could go to another truck. Then, we didn’t have a guide. Although the rest of us can clearly identify a zebra from a giraffe, the others insisted that we wait for a guide, even though that meant it cut our tour short because there was only so much allotted time.
With the exception of Warthogs and Baobab trees, we didn’t see anything else that we haven’t already seen on another tour. Our guide didn’t add anything to our tour with the exception of the gestation period of the animals and wasn’t especially good at spotting game.
We passed this orchard on the way to the game reserve:
Our 4-wheel drive transportation, not easy to get into for those overweight or with mobility issues:
Baobab tree fruit:
The Baobab trees are so immense and magestic
The Eland are such beautiful animals
Warthog
Acacia trees that giraffes eat
Another power ship, this one powered by CNG
Street scenes
