Day 5 Tarangire National Park

We awoke to a refreshing temperature of 20 C in our safari tent this morning. We dressed and headed outside to capture the sunrise at 6:39 AM above the Tarangire valley. Just a spectacukar view. Neil Zeller said “Welcome to Narnia” when insaw him this morning - and that aptly describes the view - lush and green (with elephants roaming to boot, and hyenas yelping)!

Our African version of Narnia!

After a breakfast buffet we headed to the trucks. Today we road in Cornell’s vehicle. We started off seeing a plethora of birds. Chris Fisher told us the sandgrouse which we spotted early on, found only in Africa, uses water as a tool to cool down.  I chose to use binoculars to really see the birds myself and will see if I can get some pictures from Suzan but our impressive lineup of birds included Red Necked Superfowl, Oxpecker red billed and yellow billed, Whydah, cordon bleu, kingfisher and European bee-eater. 

We saw elephants. Cornell told us that elephants drink 270 litres a day in the dry season. As a survival tool a person can squeeze elephant dung for water. Elephant dung can also be used as a medicinal tool for babies having seizures. You dry the dung, make smoke out of it where babies inhale the smoke and it opens up a vein in the head and assists with the seizure!

By radio the safari drivers communicate with one another and we learned where to find some lions. And so we saw our first pride of 3 lions!  They looked fairly skinny and tired but one female popped her head up for us to capture some pictures.  Generally lions sleep eight hours during the day.  They are nocturnal and tend to hunt at night or dawn. 

This amazing photo was taken by Suzan!!  Not me.

We also saw some giraffe up reasonably close!!

We saw so many birds - of note, ostrich and the Crowned Crane. Chris recorded all the birds we identified (perhaps I use the term “we” a little generously) in Tarangire - and the count of different species is over 100! 

We had the joy of coming back for a buffet lunch and having 4 hours of free time back at the Lodge. A number of took advantage of the pool to cool down.   Temperatures were over 30 C so the tents were pretty warm inside at midday. 

At 4 pm we reboarded the trucks. We saw our third member of the Big Five - and that is a leopard just chilling in the acacia tree!  

Again this photo is courtesy of Suzan!

We watched the sunset while out on safari and then headed back to the Lodge for 7 PM. Dinner is done. All that remains is finishing this blog, repacking,  showering and heading to bed. 7:30 AM will come soon enough. 

I wish I could upload more photos for you - but we are quite remote. Life is good!!