day 1
tarangire national park
post by scott
When our guide Louis arrived in our safari vehicle for the next 6 days we were suitably impressed.. It was a custom built Landcruiser Troopy that had been elongated and had comfortable seats put in to replace the benches in the back. The roof had a pop top allowing you to stand up for maximum game viewing and there was even a fridge and power point!
First stop was Tarangire national park, about 3 hours out of town and famous for its large elephant populations. In the carpark we had our first wildlife experience - the cheeky vervet monkeys climbed in through the window of our parked car and snaffled our sweets! These monkeys have for some reason evolved to have irredescent blue balls which get brighter and brighter when they are ready to mate, contrasting fantastically with the rest of their drab grey fur. I suppose this allows females to select a suitable mate based on the vividness of his testicular hues.
Entering the park there were animals everywhere. We had a brief squiz at some impala and mongoose before seeing our first giraffes, reaching up with long leathery tongues to extricate the Acacia leaves from between their protective thorny spines. The poor Acacia has probably spent thousands of years evolving their deadly looking barbs but it still is not enough to stop the giraffe gorging on them. These elegant and graceful creatures were Allana’s favourites and we were lucky enough to see many on the trip, peacefully chewing the cud or shooing flies with their perfectly designed flyswatter tail. A baby giraffes head poking up out of long grass was like watching a periscope swivel about.
Next we saw an animal upon which I fondly remember riding on as Donkey Kong in the Super Nintendo classic “Donkey Kong Country” – the ostrich. These ungainly birds are really something to behold. Even larger than the emu and with a striking black and white colour scheme (in males – females are a more drab grey), they are a fascinating flightless behemoth and we saw them quite commonly throughout the trip. I would imagine that to a predator they have the appearance of a gigantic fluffy meat ball on toothpicks with a tantalisingly slender neck, easy to get the jaws around. However they can apparently defend themselves so well by kicking out (similar to a cassowary) that they have no real predators. This is discounting humans who occasionally eat them but more often use their enormous eggs to make enormous omelettes (one egg enough for 20 men according to Louis).
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From the top of a hill we had our first glimpses of the mighty African elephants down at the river, but our first close up experience came a little later when a large group decided to cross the road directly behind our vehicle. About 10 of them led by the matriarch were ambling slowly over from about 50m away and we had a solid 3-4 minutes of viewing pleasure as they gradually covered the short distance and trudged across the road, eyeing us off on the way past but not showing any alarm. Compared to the Asian elephants that we have seen previously, these guys are much bigger but apparently still not as big as some of the big bulls that are found in Kenya. We had heard stories of bull elephants 4 times the size of a landcruiser and although we saw some whoppers, none were quite this magnificent. Louis told us that they eat something like 150 kg of grass per day – a fact which makes it hard to believe there is any grass left at all.. Apparently they have to eat a staggering amount because their gastrointestinal system only absorbs about 15% of the nutrients, leaving most grass to exit incompletely digested. Later in the day we went down to a spot overlooking the river and were treated when a huge group of about 30 including many babies came down to splash about, drink and spray themselves with muddy water. They all had an efficient system of ‘suck with trunk, spray into mouth’ except for one small baby who hadn’t quite figured this out so would kneel down into the water in order to bypass the trunk step.
We spent the night in a ‘tented camp’ outside the park boundaries but looking over a beautiful lake. There are a lot of places set up like this one with a proper wooden floors, balcony and frame but with tented walls. Presumably this is to give you more of an “in the thick of it” feel and enables you to hear the hyenas howling at night.