Safari!! Tarangire National Park

February 4

After arriving late into Arusha on Saturday, our safari tour guide, Innocent, picked us up early Sunday morning. We were set to have five days, four nights on safari. I’m going to try to give you any information we got and some pictures. If something doesn’t make sense, I could definitely be wrong. Feel free to review nature guides if necessary and let me know if I’m wrong. Nearly everything was amazing, which you would think would get exhausting eventually. It did. By the last day we were ready to stop seeing amazing animals up close. I was tired. But until then…. it was really incredible.

We started on day one in Tarangire National Park – 2850 square kilometers preserved since 1970. Tarangire is pronounced Taryn Geerie. Tarangire is from the Swahili words for river and bumba, which is a warthog. Tell me she’s not beautiful!

There was a lot of hunting in Tarangire until it became a national park.

A few things going on in this park: elephants, warthogs and baobab trees. Baobab trees are these huge trees. You can cut a big hole in the middle of them and they won’t die. This was the preferred blind of hunters – they would cut out a big hole and just wait in there.

Giraffes were the first up close and personal encounter of the safari!

The only predator for elephants is man (that Innocent knew of).

Waterbocks – they have a white ring on their rear and when they are attacked they emit a smell that is repulsive to predators. So none of the typical predators attack them.

This is a velvet monkey

A beautiful view with elephants crossing the river in the distance:

Then those elephants a little closer:

Male Impala

Birds that sit on giraffe will often warn them about predators

These hanging bird nests are built this way to deceive predators. The birds will build a lot of nests but only put eggs in one. That way it is harder for snakes and other predators to figure out where the eggs are hidden.

And this is a sausage tree because its fruit looks like hanging sausages:

Now for the main event! We saw two lions! Males. They were hard to see and Innocent was not impressed. We were though! I promise they are in this picture.

Leopards like to eat baboons. We didn’t see leopards today but we did see baboons!

Elephants often live to about 50 at which point their (second round of) teeth wear down and they die because it is too hard to eat. I’m starting to realize that a lot of my facts are about death and predators… sorry. But look how cute the baby elephant is!!!

Southern Ground Hornbill

We saw a bush bock running by (no pic – didn’t happen).

This cute baby hanging out at the picnic space trying to nab food from sucker tourists.

Female waterbocks

After a fairly long day, Innocent was clearly on the hunt for something. He was driving with a purpose. For the most part our truck was on its own throughout the day, but sometimes if we saw something cool or the animals were very close to the round a few trucks would be together. The different guides also would talk back and forth on the radio if they saw something cool. But Innocent usually went his own way unless he had word of something amazing. He drove us further away from the other trucks into dead end road and sure enough… there were two lionesses.

The one lioness had a collar. Innocent said it was for tracking – it was the only time in five days that we saw an animal that was tagged or collared.

We spent about 5 minutes right next to them, alone with them, before Innocent called it in to the rest of the guides and then we got out of dodge. 6 trucks were pulling up as we were leaving. It was a really nice way to have our first up close encounter with lionesses – especially because some of the other tourists are pretty noisy when they are observing animals.

This is a crane – it’s the national bird of Uganda. The giraffe is the national animal of Tanzania. What a goofy looking bird.

We ended our day at a beautiful lodge just outside Ngorongoro Crater which we will visit on day four. Here is a view of the crater from above:

And here are pics of the lodge flowers.

That’s it for day one – hard to beat for sure.