Day One of our Tanzanian Safari

 We had an adventure even before we left Victoria!  There was a snowstorm that basically shut down the Victoria airport, so after a fun night of rebooking our cancelled flights (and then rebooking when they got cancelled again) we ended up taking the ferry to Vancouver and departing from there.

Here we are “before” in the snow, and “after” enjoying a beer after our arrival in Tanzania (two days later).

We arrived in Arusha. We had given ourselves a couple of days to acclimatize, so we visited a couple of local tourist attractions.   First the natural history museum, which included a variety of exhibits about the local history, wildlife and geography.  Here I am inspecting an exhibit on malaria.

Next we visited a local cultural center and gallery, which is just a big tourist trap in my opinion.  (We visited a similar place during day one our safari, I think this will become a theme.

Here is the view from our Arusha hotel. (That’s Mt Meru in the background).

For our first safari day we drove from Arusha to Tarangire National Park, about a 2 hour drive. On the way we saw a herd of zebra, along with a few wildebeast, elan and gazelle all en route not even in the park yet!  (I guess the animals don’t know the park boundaries.). Anyways we had a good view thru the binoculars but they were too far to take pictures unfortunately.

Once we arrived at Tarangire we caught glimpses of some monkeys and impalas so we felt we were having a pretty good first day. And then, elephants!!!

They were hanging out right next to the road so we had a good long visit. After awhile we moved on and quickly came upon a giraffe!!!

Actually there were about 5 giraffes, including these two youngsters that were cavorting playfully.

When we moved along from the giraffes we came across some more elephants!!!

A bunch of baboons playing in the road… 

More and more elephants!!!  We think overall we saw more than a hundred elephants, close by the road or wandering in the distance.

One reason Tarangire is popular with elephants is because there are a lot of baobab trees, which apparently the elephants like to eat.

(The first group we saw were gathered around a baobab tree)

There were a few naughty monkeys hanging around the picnic area at lunch (one attacked Chris and stole a donut) and afterwards we saw some ostrich and a few waterbuck (no good pics sorry).

Then we left the park and drove 3 hours to Karatu, and tomorrow we will visit Olduvai and then Ngorogoro Park and Ndutu.