Safari - Day 1

We are currently on Zanzibar island, enjoying the blue water and HOT temperatures. Whew! But we'll write a little about our safari experiences.

We headed out on our safari the day after we got back from our Kili hike. After a great night's sleep, our driver and cook met us at the hotel and we set out for a ~3 hour drive to the Tarangire National Park. We dropped off our stuff and cook (Isaac) at the camp site and headed into the park.

Safaris in Tanzania are all done from the inside of your car. In our case, we had an almost new Land Cruiser with a pop-up roof, so we could stand up and look out in all directions. Under no circumstances can you get out of the car while on safari and the cars have to stay on the roads within the park. If you see an animal in the distance, you can't get off the road to get closer. We heard that in Kenya you can drive right up to the animal. I guess that might be better for the tourists, but I think it's much worse for the animals, so I think it's better this way. Here's a picture of us in our safari vehicle.
Upon heading into the park, we immediately saw a herd of impalas. It was a group of about 30-40 females and one male. The impala are all over the park and later we saw herds of the "bachelor" males. Apparently, only 1 male is with the group of females at a time. The 'bachelors' live together until one of them decides to challenge the male with the females. Then if the bachelor wins, he can take over the herd.
So moving on from the impala, we were so excited to see a giraffe. Dominika took about 50 pictures of this giraffe! Ooohing and aahing all the while. Then, we saw that they travel in groups, and there were about 10 more to be seen. Needless to say be the end of our safari, we weren't that excited about giraffes anymore as they are all over the place...

The Tarangire park contains these huge baobab trees whose bark soaks up the rain like a sponge. During the dry season, the elephants eat the bark in order to get the water from it. As a result, may of the trees are severely damaged and we even saw some that the elephants had eaten a hole right through the tree. Speaking of elephants, we were able to see a number of different families within the park, some at a distance by the river and some that were closer up among the trees.

Circling the park we also saw a pair of female lions relaxing in the shade of some trees. They were pretty far away, but we were able to see that one of them was belly up, feet in the air with a group of cubs around her. Ooooh! We also saw a dik dik (tiny gazelle-like animals), kudu, warthogs, ostrich and velvet monkeys.

On our way out of the park, we stopped at an overlook to get a great view of the entire park. It was really beautiful with plains and trees stretching in all directions and a thin river flowing through the land.