It's The Posh, Post Traveling Life, The Traveling Life For Me

Despite the fact that Kenya and Tanzania have strong relations, getting across the border legally is not easy.  Sure, in Masai Mara (Kenya) you can walk or drive across the border into the Serengeti in Tanzania, but I presume the exits from the park are few and monitored for border crossers.  

It's also possible you could walk from Kenya through the Serengeti and into Tanzania, but I don't care how fast you run, you won't outrun lions, leopards, or cheetahs.  So those are, in their own way, an effective border control.

So we flew from the Masai Mara airstrip near Camp Bateleur to Migori Airstrip closer to the border.  From there we hopped into a passenger van and drove to the border.  We went through a relatively painless immigration checkpoint.

Bidding a fond farewell to Robert.

Then it was another ride in the passenger van to a small airport in Tanzania.  Like everyone else at the airstrip, we sat outside in plastic chairs in the shade, screwed up our courage to use the seat-less toilet that wasn't clean (not a problem for the guys, but the ladies were, understandably, not thrilled.  It was a pleasant time waiting for our plane to come in.  It was a direct flight to Manyara, in which we flew directly over the N'gorongoro Crater.  It was neat to see where we spending our next day. 

Great design on the tail

of one of our planes.

One of our planes.  Might have been the

one that flew us from Masai Mara to Migori.

After landing in Manyara, it was back into another shuttle van.  We drove 20 minutes or so to a nice lodge overlooking Lake Manyara and had a buffet lunch.  Then it was back in the shuttle van for the hour trip to the Neptune N'gorongoro Lodge.  Our driver, Hassan, who was to be our guide for the Crater the next day, asking if we wanted to stop at some shops.  The vote was a resounding 4-0 against an added stop, as we just wanted to get to the Lodge and relax.

The Lodge is outside the Crater walls, with beautiful views of part of the wall of the crater.  We spent the chunk of the afternoon relaxing at the pool.  Carol went in, but I didn't, because the water was pretty cold.  We then headed back to our spacious cottage and I blogged while Carol relaxed by reading.

The main lodge building looks like

something you would expect in East Africa.

We spend some time before dinner having drinks with the Bansals at the Zebra Bar (no actual zebras in the bar, which was definitely a disappointment!)  As much as Sirikoi Lodge is my favorite of the three places we stayed (one night in Nairobi doesn't count), the food was best at Neptune.

After relaxing over dinner, we retired to our cottages, read/blogged a bit and called it a night.  It wasn't the most exciting day, but that's part of travel -- sometimes it takes a while to get where you want to go.