Kenya and Tanzania -- Oct 2012 -- Part II of III

Reception desk. This building was on the crater rim, higher than the guest wings.

The decorations include spears and electrical light fixtures disguised as (or made from) oil "camp lanterns".

I kind of failed in one aspect of my "geek engineer" tourism on this trip. It did not occur to me until after I got home to inquire if the electrical power at the various lodges was generated on site (by diesel engines) of if it came off a grid (I'm not sure a "grid" means the same thing in these countries as it would in the US -- not sure either one has a truly national grid). I'm guessing it would have been on site power generation for most of the lodges in national parks. (This one at Ngorongoro could have been an exception, where their was some kind of an electrical power feed from offsite. I suspect this because (1) there seemed to be sort of a cluster of 3 or 4 large lodges -- perahaps a mile apart -- in this area; (2) the lodges were at the edge of the crater rim, above the main wildlife area on the floor of the crater; and (3) the lodges are in that puzzling "conservation area," rather than in a national park.)

Noticed in the pre-trip background research that the web sites for almost all of the Serena lodges we stopped at stated explicitly they had "24-hour" electrical power, which implies there are lodging places that do not have that.

Several years ago, I had read an article by someone about a tourist safari in Kenya in the early or mid-1990s (author might have been science fiction writer Mike Resnick). At that time, most of the places he stayed at had electricity (and hot water in the bathrooms) for only a couple 3- to 4-hour periods each day (morning and evening). He wrote about having to plan his time carefully to ensure being able to take a hot shower every day.

I was pleased things have apparently improved in that respect. Unfortunately, it did not occur to me to ask about their "electrical power history" while I was on the trip. The power was 240 V, with a three-prong plug, with the three prongs forming a triangle, one prong "vertical" and the other two "pointed" at about 45-degree angles from that vertical one.