Tarangire National Park

11 February 2010

We just got home from safari today and had a blast. We are now in the mood to watch the Lion King :) , but we don’t have it here. We went to Tarangire National Park and stayed at the Tarangire Safari Lodge. Our “camping tent” was nicer than our apartment in Arusha so we definitely were on vacation! We went with a couple from Minnesota who were nice enough to let us share a safari truck. They lived in Tanzania ten years and taught at the Maasae Girls School in Monduli for two years and are just back for a few weeks to visit. We had a lot in common and had fun exchanging stories and experiences from our time living and working in Tanzania.

We went on almost two full days of game drives around the park and were able to see a variety of landscapes and animals. Some of the stuff we saw were: a leopard, two lions, elephants, giraffes, warthogs, impala, water bucks, dikdiks, hartebeests, klipspringers, mongooses, bat-eared foxes, cape buffalo, gazelles, ostrich, oryx, baboons, vevet monkeys, brown-crowned crane (endangered!), egrets, owls, eagles, vultures, turtles, and tons of other beautiful and colorful birds. We didn’t see everything we were hoping to, but that leaves us something to look forward to later.

We saw babies of almost all the animals, but the baby warthogs were one of our favorites. They are unfortunately, though, one of the most skiddish of all the animals and were hard to photograph. The elephants were the most abundant animals in the park, as Tarangire is famous for. There were thousands around and we were able to see them in many different habitats. Sometimes they were so close to the truck that we could practically reach out and touch them. They almost seem otherworldly and we laughed at how we felt like we were in Jurassic Park at times.

Overall, we had a great time. We wish our families could have been there to share the experience, but hopefully in the future we will get to make the trip together.

(One of our favorite photos of the trip was of the leopard in the acacia tree. They are so sleek, beautiful and rare and seeing it in the wild was absolutely exhilarating.)

Written collaboratively by
Whitney & Zach