Safari Day 2

Day 2 in Africa was really our first full day for wildlife viewing. We had spend Day 0 traveling and sleeping. Day 1 was mostly driving to Tarangire National Park. So, Day 2 was extremely exciting for us.

I started the day early, while Jenna caught an extra hour of sleep. I was excited to get some pictures of the sunrise over the Tarangire River Valley, and I wasn't disappointed.

Our tent faced east so I was able to see this extraordinary view, by opening the tent flap and taking three steps out of the tent. It was amazing, and the sound was nearly indescribable. It was the sound of the nocturnal animals going to sleep, and the diurnal animals greeting the day. There was the sound of zebra, wildebeest, lion, and bird. A symphony to greet the day.

Time was scarce, however, and I only had a few minutes to enjoy the sunrise. We had to be at breakfast by 7:00 so that we could be out on the trail by 8:00. I woke Jenna up at 6:00 and we jumped into the shower. Yes, our tent had both a flush toilette and a shower with running water. We didn't, however, have hot water. It turns out that the hot water for the tents was solar heated, and the reservoir wasn't well insulated. So it had lost all of its heat in the night, and by morning we had a 50 F shower. It was exhilarating. We learned that in this camp, showers were strictly an afternoon activity, because by late afternoon the water was nice and warm.

We hit the trail, and the first thing we saw was a lone male giraffe.

We watched him for a while as he had his breakfast of acacia tree. We experienced the amazement of having these animals that we had only ever seen in zoos walk around us. The animals we saw had no real fear of people, and it was very easy to get close to them. We spent much of our time sitting in silence watching a herd or individual.

After the giraffe we saw our first close herd of wildebeest. They were making their way from the grasslands on the ridge to the river below.

This is a daily trip for the wildebeest, they travel down to the river in the morning, and back up the ridge in the evening. It was great to watch these placid cow-like animals, and funny to realize that they walked in a single file line.

After watching the wildebeest for a while we moved on, and saw a grove of trees with several varieties of birds.

The sheer number of bird varieties in East Africa is amazing. We could have spent the whole trip just looking for different birds, and still not seen them all.

We saw impala everywhere, and our guide Adam joked with us that he calls them the, "McDonalds of Tarangire."

I found it interesting that he used McDonalds in the analogy to imply that impala were everywhere. We drove through a coupe of small and medium sized towns on our trip, and then spent a few hours driving around Dar es Salaam, and I never saw a single McDonalds, and according to this wikipedia article there are no McDonalds in Tanzania.

Either way, he was correct. Impala were everywhere, and I really had to resist the urge to continue taking pictures of them. Otherwise I would have ended up with hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of impala.

The next new animal for was the warthog, which is much prettier than portrayed by Pumba in The Lion King.

I especially liked the long hair on their backs, and the way it changed color towards the tips.

One of my favorite animals on this trip was the olive baboon. We had plenty of opportunity to see these creatures, and while they weren't as plentiful as the Impala, they did seem to be everywhere.

We saw troops of baboon in several places, but mostly near the river and it's tributaries. The troops ranged in size from a small troop with 10 or so individuals to very large troops with a hundred or more individuals. We spent hours watching the baboon, and learning about their highly complex social structures.

Zebra are very common all over Tanzania, but we saw one of the highest concentrations in Tarangire.

They are great animals, and often stay near the wildebeest herds to take advantage of the added numbers and the protection of a bigger herd. I found the zebra to be much more social than I thought they would be. It seemed like you could easily pick out families in the herd, and they seemed to draw comfort from touch, just like us. It was very common to see zebra nuzzling each other, and pressing their flanks against their partners.

In England, a pedestrian road crossing is called a Zebra Crossing due to the black and white stripes that are used to indicate the crossing on the road. In Tanzania a Zebra Crossing looks like this:

What a great difference between these two worlds.

Our first big cat sighting was on day two. We saw a very distant lion paw in a tree, although it was so far away that it wasn't until I got the pictures home and enlarged that I actually saw it. More impressively we saw a cheetah with two cubs in a bush far off the road. We watched them for a long time, and it was amazing to see the cubs playing with each other. They were very far away from where we were parked. Can you spot the cheetah in this picture?

Our guide spotted the cheetah while he was driving down the path, we're still not sure how he did it. My best guess is that he has some kind of animal-tuned "spidy sense". After watching the cheetah for a while, we drove down to a swamp to have lunch. On the way we encountered a herd of elephant. One of them was a little upset with us, as can be seen in this picture.

Generally, we had good luck with the elephant. They were huge, and we treated them with great respect because it was obvious that they could easily tear our truck apart. After lunch, we headed down to the swamp. The goal was mostly to see more birds and small wildlife, but we were very lucky to see one of the only hippo in this part of the park.

This behavior is usually understood to be a sign of aggression from a hippo. We don't think that was the case here because we were not that close to the hippo, but it's hard to be sure. We were lucky enough to see another unusual event at the swamp. This time it was a giraffe drinking.

Giraffe don't have to drink more than once every few days, and when they do it, they try to make it fast. It is probably the most vulnerable that this animal can be, and so they are rightly cautious. It's also one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

We also saw a baby giraffe with the hair on his neck still standing out straight. This was the only baby giraffe we saw on the trap, but not the only baby we saw that day. As we were driving back to camp, we saw another troop of baboon. This was the biggest troop that we saw on the entire trip. It was at least a hundred members, and possible many more.

One of the most memorable pictures from this baboon troop was a mother with an infant. We were surprised at how human the baby looked. That was the last large animal sighting of the day.

We made our way back to camp for dinner and a hot shower. We were tired, and didn't have any problems falling asleep that night.

There are more pictures from this second day on my Flickr account, and for more on the safari see Africa Safari.