SHARING THEIR SNAPSHOTS — Bill and Diane Wilson of Butler Township traveled to Tanzania in February, fulfilling a longtime dream of his. Bill is retired from the Army Corps of Engineers while Diane is a nurse at Butler Memorial Hospital. They are pictured on their trip with an elderly Maasai woman.

Bill and Diane Wilson of Butler Township spent 10 days in February fulfilling Bill's long-held dream to walk across the Serengeti plains of Tanzania.

They traveled to three national parks in the African nation, sleeping in tents, photographing wildlife, meeting with Maasai tribesmen and enduring one rhino-induced traffic jam.

But to begin their trek, which was four years in planning, the Wilsons first had to endure 24 hours of air travel and plane changes beginning in Pittsburgh and ending at the Kilimanjaro International Airport on the outskirts of the Tanzanian city of Arusha.

The next day they were driven by Land Rover across the wide acacia tree-covered Maasai Steppe to Tarangire National Park.

Across the open landscape, Wilson said, “All you could see were puffs of dirt coming off the ground because of all the herdsmen driving their cattle.”

Wilson said Maasai wealth is determined by the size of a man's cattle herd.

The Wilsons' modern safari of 16 tourists, four vehicles and one guide saw massive herds of zebras and gazelles, as well as elephants and lions.

At night, the travelers slept in tents in their nyumba or encampment, Wilson said. “It was pretty interesting. You stay in tents and a park ranger on loan from the government patrols the encampment 24 hours a day.”

“The camps are interesting,” he said. “The tents are solar-powered for lighting. The bathrooms have 5-gallon jugs to hold water,” he said. “The beds in the tents are just like the ones at home. You can lie there at night and hear the lions roar in the distance. The hyenas would come right up to the tent. There was a less than an inch of cloth between you and them.”

Wilson said alarm systems and the guard were needed: there were snakes in the undergrowth and lions in the underbrush.

And there was the threat of a charging elephant, although, Wilson said, the Land Rovers tended to be ignored by the animals.

“Once you are in that vehicle, you blend into the environment like a box turtle or a rhino. It's only when you step outside the vehicle that you are seen as potentially lunch,” Wilson said.

After two days in the Tarangire National Park, the Wilsons traveled to the Ngorongoro Crater, a large, unbroken, unflooded volcanic caldera formed when a giant volcano exploded and collapsed on itself millions of years ago.“It's been called Noah's Ark without the giraffes,” said Wilson, saying the crater, 12 miles across and 65 miles in diameter, is a natural enclosure to thousands of animals: Cape buffalo, elephants, wildebeests, hippos and hyenas.“But what really bothered me was there really were a lot of vehicles down there,” said Wilson.At one point, he said, a black rhino was prevented from crossing the road because 15 to 20 vehicles had stopped so their occupants could take the rhino's picture and blocked its progress.“It reminded me of the San Diego Zoo safari where you see a lot of that, a lot of vehicles,” Wilson said.During their visit to the Ngorongoro Crater, the Wilsons stayed at Gibbs Farm, a hotel surrounded by a coffee plantation on the outskirts of the crater.The resort was originally a coffee farm established in the late 1920s.Leaving the crater, the Wilsons traveled along the Great African Rift — an active continental rift zone where the tectonic plates appear to be shifting — to Serengeti National Park.The park covers nearly 6,000 square miles of grassland, plains, savanna, hills and woodland.Roaming across the Serengeti are herds of wildebeests and zebras, gazelles, buffalo and giraffes and predators such as cheetahs, leopards and lions.It was in the park that Wilson had his most vivid experience.“Lions brought down a wildebeest. We didn't see the killing, but as one lioness was eating, another lioness and three cubs showed up, they were part of the pride,” said Wilson. “Then one male lion and then a second.”“You could smell and hear the tearing of the carcass, said Wilson. That was a big deal there, that was my highlight.” Wilson said, noting that the lion pride made the hourlong encounter memorable.“We sat there and watched the interaction between the lioness and the cubs. The guide said ‘I have not seen this in 10 years,'” Wilson said.

In their travels across the Serengeti, Wilson said they saw all of the animals that made up the big-game hunter's Big Five: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and Cape buffalo. The phrase refers to the five most difficult animals in Africa to hunt on foot.Wilson would probably add the hippopotamus as the animal most difficult to approach, period.Hippo ponds “were disgusting,” Wilson said, “a hundred hippos defecating and leaving off gas. It smells like a cesspool. But along the edges, there were 14-foot crocodiles waiting for the zebras to come down to drink.”As a national park, the Serengeti is supposed to be forbidden to human settlements, but Wilson said he worries the endless plain is threatened.“We feel that more and more people are going to be coming into the area. You've got people from Somalia coming into Kenya. People from Uganda coming to Tanzania. People are being forced into these areas. They are cutting down the trees for charcoal. They have to eat, so they are eating ‘bush meat,'” said Wilson, referring to wild animals killed for food.“Tanzania has a democratic government and good conservation groups,” he said. “But eventually, they will migrate into that area.”While the park is off-limits to permanent habitation, a number of tribes, including the Ikoma and Maasai, continue to live on its borders.The Wilsons visited an Ikoma village market and its weaving cooperative and a Maasai boma, a circular settlement of huts.With temperatures in the mid-80s to low 90s with clear skies and very low humidity, the retired federal park ranger said, “It was one of the best trips I've had.”

“It's just spectacularly wild. When you ride out onto the Serengeti all you can see are miles of wildebeests and zebras,” he said.Just two things marred the trip said Wilson. First was a long-ago tune.“That damn song keeps coming to you, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,' but the lions don't sleep at night,” said Wilson.And they never did see the famous Mount Kilimanjaro, Wilson said. They arrived in the airport that bears the mountain's name at night and left to begin their Serengeti trip in the early morning darkness. When they flew out of the bush and back to Arusha, Wilson said the mountain was hidden by a sandstorm.

Tanzania is an East African nation, bordering the Indian Ocean, between Kenya and Mozambique.Covering 362,340 square miles, including the islands of Mafia, Pemba and Zanzibar, it is slightly larger than twice the size of California.It contains Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa and one of only two mountains on the continent that has glaciers (the other is Mount Kenya). It is bordered by three of the largest lakes on the continent: Lake Victoria (the world’s second-largest freshwater lake) in the north, Lake Tanganyika (the world’s second-deepest) in the west, and Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) in the southwest.• Shortly after achieving independence from Britain in the early 1960s, Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form the nation of Tanzania in 1964. One-party rule ended in 1995 with the first democratic elections held in the country since the 1970s. Zanzibar’s semi-autonomous status and popular opposition have led to two contentious elections since 1995, which the ruling party won despite international observers’ claims of voting irregularities. The formation of a government of national unity between Zanzibar’s two leading parties succeeded in minimizing electoral tension in 2010.• Tanzania is one of the world’s poorest economies in terms of per capita income, however, Tanzania averaged 7 percent GDP growth per year between 2000 and 2008 on the basis of strong gold production and tourism. The economy depends heavily on agriculture, which accounts for more than one-quarter of GDP, provides 85 percent of exports, and employs about 80 percent of the work force. Recent banking reforms have helped increase private-sector growth and investment, and the government has increased spending on agriculture to 7 percent of its budget.GDP growth in 2009-11 was a respectable 6 percent per year due to high gold prices and increased production.• Tanzania still hosts more than a half million refugees, more than any other African country, mainly from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, despite the international community’s efforts at repatriation. Disputes with Malawi over the boundary in Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) and the meandering Songwe River remain dormant.SOURCE: The CIA World Fact Book

Birdseye viewof sunrise in Nyumba

On their February trip to the Serengeti, Bill and Diane Wilson saw herds of zebras and gazelles as wells as elephants and lions, including the cubs at right. Charging elephants and lions in the underbrush were a concern, although Bill Wilson said the animals basically ignored travelers in their Land Rovers.