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Tarangire Sunday, August 20 Elephants near the park entrance of Tarangire were the first wildlife we saw in Africa. |
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Tarangire Sunday, August 20 Elephants near the park entrance of Tarangire were the first wildlife we saw in Africa. |
| Diana
and I got up at dawn to walk down to the stream to
find the herons. The tree we had seen the previous evening
was completely covered with birds. There must have been well over a
hundred - it was quite a site. As the sun started to rise, the birds left,
sometimes two or three at a time and sometimes in fairly large groups as
can be seen in this photograph. Within 15 minutes, all the birds had left. |
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We left the lodge to head to Tarangire National Park by
9:00. We made a short stop at the Hotel Impala to change some money - a
beautiful hotel with a glorious lobby of granite and hand-carved wood. A stop at
the Arusha "Cultural Heritage" shop - essentially a African souvenir shop and carvings gallery - took a lot longer than our guide had expected. We
ended up buying a bunch of beautiful things including two large wood carvings
that we had to have crated and shipped back. |
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Finally, on to Tarangire. The drive took us another hour to
the main gate, where we were greeted by a mother and baby elephant. We were
warned by the guards not to get too close. As we drove through the park on that first day, we were
awestruck by the wealth of wildlife. We spent at least fifteen minutes watching
each herd of zebra, gazelles, impala, etc. - while later on our safari we would
find these scenes so ordinary that we'd drive right by. |
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In addition to elephants, zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and
antelope, we saw our first giraffes. We never got tired of watching these
graceful creatures during our two weeks in Africa. After a few hours and many rolls of film, we headed for our
lodge. This turned out to be a new lodge located outside the park. While the
Tree-Tops Lodge is very close to the park, there is currently no direct
road. Instead, we had to drive about 90 minutes down a rough dirt road which
skirted several Masai villages. |
| Tree-Tops was certainly one of the most fascinating lodges
we stayed at - each room is a "tree-house" built around a Baobab tree
- the long rough drive (2 hours) from the park
made it much less attractive. When we visited the lodge
they were in the process of getting permission to build a road directly to the
park gate, which would be much faster and much more convenient. |
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When we arrived at the lodge, we were asked to sign a
liability release form. We were somewhat surprised by this since Thomson Safaris
had never mentioned it and we had never signed such a form at a hotel or lodge
before, but we later learned that every lodge in or near the wild animal parks
required a similar form.
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