Aug21

Tarangire

Monday, August 21

The birds in Africa are almost as exciting to watch as the larger animals. This Bee-Eater was one of many pretty bird species we saw.

At 4:00 AM, we were awaken by something traipsing through the woods outside our "tree house". In my half-sleep, I assumed it was one of the hotel staff stoking the boiler under our room which provides the hot water, or something like this, but my wife was sure it was some kind of wild animal. We got out of bed and walked over to the balcony over looking the woods and sure enough, there were two elephants not more than 10 yards away eating small trees and bushes. After watching for a few minutes, we climbed back into bed and fell back to sleep.

At 6:30, our scheduled wake-up arrived - hot tea and coffee brought right to our rooms - now this was service. We showered and dressed and were just heading out of our room to go down to breakfast when we heard our daughter screaming. We ran down toward her unit, which was quite a distance since each room is located around its own tree which are quite spread out. By the time we got there, she was up in her room with a bleeding knee and feeling very frazzled.

Apparently she and her brother had started walking down toward breakfast when they came upon the elephants we had seen earlier in the morning. One of the elephants was about 20 feet from the path. They had decided they could sneak by slowly, but the elephant had other ideas. It trumpeted at the kids and started walking toward them. They ran back toward their room, and in her haste, my daughter tripped over a tree root and fell and gouged her knee.

The guide and drivers also heard my daughter screaming and arrived in their trucks at about the same time my wife and I got there. We calmed my daughter down and cleaned out and dressed her wound, then drove down to breakfast. My daughter was less than enthralled with the elephants for the rest of the safari but it was a good lesson to learn - these animals are wild and totally unpredictable.

The rest of the day went much better. Our first predator sighting! Charles, our guide, was in the other vehicle and had spotted a leopard under a tree. We had just been over by where he spotted it and hadn't seen it. Our driver raced back so we wouldn't miss it. Charles said that the leopard had a cub, but I never saw it. We were all excited to see our first cat, however.

On our long drive back to Tree Tops Lodge, we saw a vultures circling above. As we got closer, we found a dead zebra off the road with swarms of vultures competing for the left-overs. Our driver drove off the road to get closer (since we were no longer in the park, it is ok to go off the roads). We watched the vultures swarming in for about ten minutes before the smell and flies started to get to us.