We also had to book our tickets to Zanzibar, which proved to be more of a challenge than expected. Internet service was sketchy, most of the local travel agencies were closed, there weren't many options that worked with our return flight home (which was out of Kilimanjaro Airport), and some of the airlines websites did not have accurate information. After spending an hour or two trying to search and book online, Lukasz and I snagged a taxi and headed into town. A local helped us find a Precision Air travel agency that was getting ready to close, but they were kind enough to assist us. My best options would be very tight with our departure flight back to the states, and wouldn't allow for any delays. Lukasz had it worse as he not only had a tight flight, but had to use 2 airlines, fly back to the mainland at Arusha Airport, and then take a taxi (hoping for no traffic jams) to the Kilimanjaro Airport over an hour away to catch his flight back to the states.
We needed to hear back from our guides on which flight to Zanzibar worked best based on when we'd return to Arusha from the safari, so we walked to a hotel that had Internet service and computers, waited for our guide to call, and then booked our flights. Lukasz learned that Coastal Air doesn't allow you to pay for your ticket online, so we would need to make a side trip to the Arusha Airport on the way to our first safari park in the morning to pay.
We walked back to our hotel as it started to rain (go figure), brought the things we had hanging outside to dry back into our hotel room, and grabbed a bite to eat. It's interesting to see the prices in shillings, which is the African currency. The exchange rate is about 2000 shillings to 1 US dollar. This was our dinner bill.
We slept well and before we knew it, our Land Rover arrived to pick us up. Our driver and guide was Ezekiel (aka Ezzie), and our cook, was Joseph (nicknamed "Josephina" by Lukasz, because he was such a good cook that Lukasz wanted to take him home as his wife so he wouldn't have to say goodbye to the meals once the safari was over). Ezzie (on the right in the picture below) and Joseph (on the left) made the experience so much better than expected with their good sense of humor and adventure, amazing cooking and driving skills, and their vast knowledge about the birds and animals. They are part of Team Kilimanjaro's sister company that does the safaris and I highly recommend them if you're ever looking for a guide!!
The safari parks all required high clearance 4-wheel drive vehicles, and since it was just the 2 of us, we had a lot of room in our Land Rover! The top also goes up so you can stand up, look out, and take pictures. It was the perfect vehicle for this adventure.
As you can see, we are already having a great time and haven't even left the hotel yet! :-)
We made a side trip to the bank to turn more dollars into shillings and then stopped by the Arusha Airport (which is much smaller than Grand Junction's tiny airport and off of a long dirt road). Luckily Coastal Air was open, so while Lukasz bought his Zanzibar ticket, I bought a few souvenirs.
Along the road, we passed more school children.
There were also many Maasai tribe members herding livestock, working in the fields, or carrying water and other goods into their village.
These are the homes the Maasai live in, which the women built.
And the children were all very excited to see people passing by!
Lukasz brought balloons for the kids, which they were super excited about! We stopped a few times over the 9 day period to blow up and give balloons to the kids.
The first day of our safari adventure was in Tarangire National Park. The park got it's name from the Tarangire River that winds through the park, which was almost dry while we were there. It's the 6th largest park in Tanzania and the largest breeding ground for birds in the world. It also had lots of Baobab trees, which reminded me of The Little Prince. :-)
At all of the parks, we had to wait for about 10-15 minutes at the entrance to get our permit and register. That means...time for more pictures!! (And yes, I'm going to throw in some educational tidbits we learned along the way with the pictures so you can learn more about the animals and people if you want.)
There were many Tsetse flies that like to bite. According to Lukasz, the bite is painful, and like mosquitoes, they feed on your blood. (Lukasz killed one on his arm and a lot of blood came out that he didn't think was his own which is rather disgusting to me...) In some places in Africa, their bite can transmit trypanosomiasis, also know as the sleeping sickness disease.
After reading about them and talking to Chip, who has a lot of experience traveling through Africa, I opted to wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts, thick socks, and a hat while on safari. I didn't get bit once the entire 9 days. Our guides and Lukasz got bit quite often.
This is one of the many Baobab trees. It's known as the "upside down tree". There's a legend about the Baobab tree that it once made God angry, so God ripped it out of the earth and planted it upside down.
Some are much larger than this one, but you can see how large they are by how tiny we look.
Baobab trees can live for hundreds, even thousands of years and are beautiful!!
This park had many ostrich. These are the largest and heaviest birds in the world, and at over 300 lbs and up to 8 feet tall, they are too large and heavy to fly.
Ostrich have long strong legs and only 2 toes, which allows them to run over 40 mph (and they can outrun most predators). If you look toward the bottom of the photo, you'll see all the little babies that this one has to protect!
Ostriches eat seeds, leaves, insects, lizards, and just about anything else they can find.
They also eat sand and small stones, which lets them grind up food in their stomach so they can eat different types of food that other animals can't digest.
For those of you who have seen The Lion King, you may remember Pumbaa the warthog. "Pumba" is actually the Swahili name for warthog. Who knew you could learn so much from an animated children's movie, but actually, most of what's in The Lion King is an accurate reflection of Tanzania wildlife, and many of the names and songs (including the opening song and "Hakuna Matata") have words in their native Swahili language.
And like the movie, pumbas are smelly and not the most attractive animal. They are short and squat, looking like wild hogs, but can weigh over 200 lbs. They are called warthogs because the males have 2 large warts under their eyes.
Below is a mom and her baby. Before a mom has another baby, her other "kids" all have to leave so she can be alone. These other young warthogs sometimes find another "mom" to hang with until they are ready to be on their own.
The warthogs have to watch out for predators like lions and leopards. They can run fast despite their size and have curvy tusks that can cut predators who try to attack them.
Giraffes were plentiful in Tarangire. They always remind me of spotted horses with long necks. People used to think a giraffe was a mix between a camel and leopard and it's scientific name " Giraffe Camelopardalis" actually means "one who walks quickly; a camel marked like a leopard."
Giraffa camelopardalis.
Giraffa camelopardalis.
This one looks like she's smiling for the camera.
Giraffes are the tallest land-dwelling mammal in the world at 16-18 feet, and babies are born as tall (or sometimes taller) than adult humans!
It takes human babies almost a year to start walking and newborn giraffes can stand when they are 1 hour old (and run when they are only 10 hours old)!
They are herbivores and like to eat the leaves of the tall acacia trees. Of course, even as tall as they are, they can't reach the leaves on all of the acacia trees!
Unlike Lukasz, who sleeps 12-15 hours/day... Giraffes only need 10 minutes to 2 hours of sleep a day!!!
Like Lukasz, giraffes are very social and rarely ever fight.
They can sleep and even give birth standing up, and unlike other animals, when they walk, they move both legs on the same side of the body at a time and then swing the legs from the other side. (When they run though they rotate legs like other animals.)
Most of the elephants hung around by the river eating grass and leaves from the nearby trees.
We decided this was a great place to eat lunch, so we stopped the Land Rover right next to about 20 elephants and watched them while we ate.
How can you tell which ones are male and which are female? Both the male and female African elephants have tusks and the male do not have scrotums. They also both have loose skin between their back legs.
As Ezzie says... Look for the 5th leg and you'll know you've found a male. :-)
Some of the elephants were reddish-gray because they covered themselves in red dirt to stay cool.
Elephant is "tembo" in Swahili.
This is a mother and her baby. The gestation period for an elephant is almost 2 years, more than twice as long as humans!
The African elephant is the largest land mammal alive today and their ears are twice as long as an Asian elephant's ears. By flapping their ears when it's hot, the blood circulates in the massive ears, and can cool their blood by almost 10 degrees! They also use their ears when they're angry or to warn other elephants of danger.
Elephants spend most of their day eating. (Can you imagine how much grass you'd need to eat if you weighed over 1000 lbs?)
Lots of elephant love in this family. :-)
I love how wrinkly their skin is!
This park also had many different types of antelope, many of which I recall seeing on Chip's wall. :-) I'm hoping I get the names of the animals correct, but am not promising anything...
This is a gazelle running and jumping by his zebra friends.
Zebra and antelope were often found together. They aren't a threat to each other and often help each other by alerting others to predators. The river provided a great spot to see a variety of animals in one spot.
We saw thousands of wildebeest in other parks due to the migration, but there were a few here as well.
This is an impala I believe. I get the impala and gazelles mixed up, especially in pictures, but I believe one of the big differences is that the impala are larger (we also saw some antelope that looked like miniature deer, and I think those were gazelles).
And this is a waterbuck, which is a larger and darker antelope.
Like impala, only the male waterbucks have ringed horns, which they use to fight with.
These would be a mom impala and two of her young.
This is a close up of the two young impalas.
And this is a male impala. All of the impala we saw had white ears with black on the tips.
I like zebras because unlike all the different types of antelope, they're hard to confuse with other animals, and they're just pretty to look at. LOL
Zebras are very social and hang out in large packs. We sometimes found hundreds of them in the same area grazing together. Just like the giraffe's spots and our fingerprints, no two zebras had the same stripe pattern.
Our guide told us they have stripes to use as a form of camouflage that confuses the predators when running and changing direction, and it's hard to tell distance with the stripes, as well as the differences among the animals when there are a lot of them running together.
The mongoose are small and were hard to spot. They looked like prairie dogs and live in burrows like them, but have odd rodent faces with snouts.
These cute little guys eat just about anything smaller than them, including insects, rodents, and lizards. They sometimes eat nuts and berries as well.
They can also eat eggs by throwing them against another object and breaking them to get at what's inside. (I wonder if there's a baseball team called "The Mongooses".)
I think this mongoose looks particularly like a miniature bear!
Finally, we saw a few Vervet monkeys in this park.
These are small monkeys that have black faces. They are not quite as long as the baboon; about the size of the Colobus monkey.
This is a mom carrying a little baby in her pouch. :-)
In all of the parks we saw many, many different species of birds. Our guides told us what they all were, but my memory isn't so great and it's hard to remember which name goes with which bird. I'll try to identify the species when I can...
This is the Egyptian Goose.
This is a Blacksmith Lapwing.
These are Southern Pochard ducks.
And this odd-looking guy is a Hamerkop (named this way because its head and beak look like an anvil or hammer).
Below you have the colorful Helmeted Guineafowl.
This blue and orange bird is a Superb Starling.
The Superb Starling are small, but have a very shiny and bright colored coat.
That's it for the animals and birds. We also saw a couple of eagles, though I'm not sure what kind, flying around.
After about 5 hours in the park, we headed out to Lake Eyasi to camp, which is close to where the bushman live. After sitting in the Land Rover most of the day or driving, it will feel good to spend a couple of days walking around.
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