We also hit the nearby Olduvai Gorge, where fossils of hominins (possibly your grandfather from 1 million generations ago) were uncovered by the Leakeys. We passed, however, on taking a tour of a Maasai village after many reviews noted it had been so commercialized the encounter had all the authenticity of a Disney exhibit. 

In the end, our eight days in the country were only enough to get a small taste of the country and the continent. We encountered plenty of travelers who had been stricken with the Africa bug and were on their n-th trip back. That’s easy to understand. 

The sheer scale of everything, from the thousands of wildebeest and zebras to the unending plains, is hard to wrap your brain around. But it’s the way life has been for long before we were around and will be for long after we’re gone. 

Within an hour of arriving in the Serengeti, we were mesmerized by the antics of a group of lion cubs playing on and around a kopje (a rocky outcrop) while the females and a male dozed in the high grass. Despite being there with half a dozen other safari trucks, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the moment.

When one of the mothers flared her ears, blasted her trunk and started heading toward our vehicle, Joseph our guide was quick to start it up and back away. Once we were a bit farther away, the elephants went back to their business. 

This was also where we discovered that tsetse flies have learned to follow safari trucks and when they bite, it feels like a hyena ripping at your flesh. The honeymoon card did not work with them. 

The highlight here definitely was getting out of our Land Cruiser and going on a hike with one of the park rangers. (He carried an AK-47 in case any buffalo took exception to our jaunt through their grazing pastures.) Watching lumbering giraffe from a car window is one thing; standing in the grass while nearby these long-necked herbivores dined on lunch is quite another.

There are plenty of people whose idea of honeymoon bliss is sitting on a beach at an all-inclusive resort sucking down fruity drinks while watching other newly married couples suck down fruity drinks. Nothing wrong with that, but not our scene. 

When considering where to go for our honeymoon, we thought about the arc of a typical marriage: a house, kids, commitments, responsibilities. Looking ahead, we saw lots of excuses we could make for not shelling out a good deal of cash and flying more than 15,000 miles to take a vacation. 

In that sense, the decision was easy. But we spent a good deal of time researching our trip, from picking the country – Tanzania – to the tour company that took us on safari, Good Earth Tours. Make sure you’re getting involved with a reputable operator, because once you’re sitting in the middle of the Serengeti, making changes is not as easy as calling the front desk. 

We knew we didn’t want to rough it too much, so we were booked into mostly mid- to upper-range lodges with the exception of one night in a luxury tent camp when we really got spoiled. More on that later this week. 

We also arranged for a private safari, meaning Kim and I were the only people in the Land Cruiser with the guide/driver. The cost wasn’t that much more than a group tour, and the benefits of being able to go wherever you wanted whenever you wanted were enormous. 

During the trip, we played the honeymoon card a few times. My wife used it to try to get upgrades to first class on our flights from Newark to Amsterdam and an 8 1/2- hour backbreaker to Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania. It didn’t work, but the flight attendants did give us glasses of champagne and a collectable ceramic house we later discovered had whiskey in it.