Day 14:
We woke up in the misty chill on top of the crater, packed
up and headed back in the direction of Arusha.
Along the way, we met another van and driver. Elisha and I hopped into that one to join a
really awesome Australia couple heading to Tarangire National Park. I am blanking on their names, but they were a
really cool and excitable middle-aged couple.
The guy was an agricultural biologist and his wife was a biology
teacher, so they knew a lot, which made it cool. But they were also big time travellers and
had visited so many cool places that I think they really made Elisha and I
think about more big trips, and they gave us some cool ideas.
Tarangire is a beautiful park with some amazing
landscapes. A river runs through it,
which has some palm trees. And there are
also some scenic steep and escarpment areas throughout the park. The park is well-known for its
elephants. It has one of the highest
densities of elephants in the world, and we saw hundreds of them. Everywhere you looked there seemed to be
elephants. But one of the most iconic
species of the park, isn’t an animal, but a tree…the baobab tree. This is the tree that Rafiki of the movie the
Lion King lived in. They are massive
trees with trunks that are incredibly wide and often have large cavern type
holes in them. They also call the trees
“upside-down trees” because the branches only have leaves for a very short
period and the branches branch out in such a way that they look like
roots. These trees, like the elephants,
were everywhere.
On the afternoon game drive, we of course saw lots of
wildlife, the highlight being a cheetah and her nearly grown cub.
Day 15: We woke up
early for a morning game drive. In the
morning we also saw a cheetah; actually a mom with two older cubs. We followed them for a while before they were
too far in the distance to see well. One
of the coolest experiences of the morning was arriving at a watering hole when
a large herd of elephants was running towards the water. They dashed into the water, and we got to
watch them guzzle it down. They then
continued through the water towards us, so close that we could have almost
reached out and touched a few.
After the morning game drive and some lunch, Elisha and I
left the Aussie couple (who were heading to the Serengeti next) to head back to
Arusha.
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| Baobab Tree |
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| king fisher |
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| Mongoose Family |
2 comments:
Thanks for journaling our days so that I can remember everything;) I think the Aussie Guy was named James... But I don't think either of us retained the wife's name.
That's right. James! I wish we could have gotten their contacts. They were fun and quite inspiring
You're welcome. That's part of why I blog, so I can look back when I can't remember where I was on a given date or what the name of a place was. I seem to always have a vision of the place in my head, but names, dates, and situations often fail me
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