Honeymoon Pt16 - Safari - The Serengeti

We had the longest wait due to paperwork at the gate to Serengeti National Park, an hour and a half!  As a result, our guide was racing to get us to the hotel before dark.  He did still stop a couple of times for us as we saw a hippo walking around out of the water which is quite unusual and we saw some elephants in the lovely evening light.

Hippo roaring at our 4x4

Elephant textures

Hippos in the late evening light

We were then bumping along the track road at 60km/hour towards the hotel during sunset which turned out to be the best sunset so far with really pretty colours!  Rather than my usual sunset technique of tripod, filters and cable release I resorted to a fast shutter speed to see what I could get and ended up with one or two reasonable shots which came out with quite unusual dark silhouettes with the light just in the centre which I actually really like.

Full Speed Sunset

We stayed at Bilila Lodge Kempinski which was the best hotel/lodge so far!  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures (despite us taking LOADS of this amazing hotel) as my lovely new husband decided to test my love for him by losing the camera when we left Tanzania complete with the last 4 days of photos!  Gutted is not the word to describe how I felt!  Luckily it was the smaller, cheaper camera (although we did manage to recover that loss from the insurance) and not the SLR with all of the above photos on, but we lost all of the videos he'd been taking of the safari and the photos of us and the hotel and our most amazing room.

It was the first one we stayed in that had a bath, the bath was situated beside a huge window, outside the window was 'the wild'.

Please imagine the fun picture of me in the bath 

(fully dressed although that doesn't matter now) 

pointing to the giraffe and warthogs we could see outside!

This is what our bathroom was like (big window on right)
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While staying there (we had 2 nights there) we saw elephants, buffalo, warthogs, giraffes and baboons right outside our room.  The rooms were raised so we could stand on the balcony watching them wander past.  Amazing!  Our room was also extremely nice, modern and stylish with amazing black and white African prints on the wall which inspired our own display in the study.  Oh yeh and another 4 poster!  :)

Since we don't have our own photos which would obviously have been amazing - here are a few I have found around the web...

This could actually be our room, same layout and picture arrangement but different ceiling.
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Another room view (different ceiling and arrangement of pictures)
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It had a huge balcony looking out over the Serengeti and the balcony door was a massive sliding door which could open right across and could be left open with a mosquito barrier only so you could lie there all night listening to the animals if you wanted.

We went for a lovely buffet dinner (best buffet I've ever had!) which also had open windows over the pool area.

The restaurant is the top level lit up on the right
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Buffet area
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Dining area
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There was a selection of curries and curry accessories, all sorts of western style foods - pasta, pizza, cottage pie, pork loins, veg, salads, a huge array of sauces and condiments, desserts....etc.

We had a lovely evening and I was super excited to get back out on the plains again after our zoom through success!