Tanzania 2001 - Tarangire National Park and Lake Manyara

Tarangire

In Tarangire, we saw elephants. Their eyesight is not great, but they have excellent hearing and smell. When they heard us, they would raise their trunks to get a big whiff and figure out just what we were.

Elephants passing nearby would pause to face us and spread their ears in a gesture that our guide explained meant they did not like us.

This baby copied exactly what the adults had done.

These two bull elephants got into a fight. One of the females was in heat, and tensions were high. Later we heard them screaming at each other and saw them running through the trees.

We usually saw peaceful herds like this, grazing or travelling.

Oddly, the rock hyrax, an animal about the size of a housecat, is the elephant's closest relative.

We saw many handsome impala in Tarangire. A single male leads a herd of females and young. He must be constantly vigilant in protecting them from danger, mating with those in heat, and keeping other males away, so he eats and sleeps very little. After two or three months he is a weakened, nervous wreck, and another male takes over the herd.

Vervet monkeys eat seeds by the side of the road.

This eagle seemed to be posing for us.

The dik-dik is the smallest antelope. They are quite shy and tend to hide in the bushes, so we felt lucky to see this one on the road.

Vultures are always looking for action.

This hornbill was next to the path on the way to our room at the lodge.

Lake Manyara

We had seen baboons before, but here they were much less shy. Many times, they filled the road ahead of us.

Baboons are highly social animals. They spend a lot of time playing, squabbling and grooming each other.

It was hard to get pictures of babies. They move quickly, and are usually protected by adults who hide them if we stare too closely.

This elephant started to get a little too close to the jeep, so we drove on.

Leopards outnumber lions, but are much harder to find. They are solitary, elusive animals. The highlight of this day's drive was catching a glimpse of this spotted cat resting on a fallen tree.

Travel Diary

May 31, 2001 (Thursday) Arusha town and Tarangire National Park

Rosemary: We packed up and moved on. The day started with a tour of the town of Arusha. Dirty and poor, very busy with people going places and doing things. The workers use hand tools, with little or no machinery to do big jobs. Casually dressed men do road work with big pickaxes and shovels. Men pull big wooden carts loaded with whatever they have to haul. Goats, cows, chickens, and bicycles compete for space along the edge of the road. Women and girls carry enormous burdens on their heads. There are many stores in town selling secondhand clothes from Europe and America. Amongst all this, an Internet cafe.

Steve: This is more 3rd world than any other place we have been, including Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. People build their homes out of anything they can find (bricks, wood, sheet metal, thatch, etc.) on land owned by the government. At several locations, we saw homes marked with a big red “X”, indicating that they had been condemned for being too close to a road that was to be widened.

Women carry really heavy loads of everything balanced on their heads. Men haul huge loads in pushcarts or on bicycles. Most cars we saw ran poorly (there’s smog in Africa, Mr. President), if they ran at all. We saw numerous vehicles broken down on the side of the road.

We stopped by the "Cultural Center" for shopping and bought a couple of things. At least here, the souvenirs don’t say "Made In Taiwan".

As we drove through the streets, which are noisy and crowded, we saw people selling produce and used clothing in the street, along with the farm animals brought to sell for meat.

Rosemary: Dropped off for shopping at Cultural Heritage, we bought some carvings to be shipped home. Bargaining is invited, but if you don't want to bother the manager will just tell you the bottom-line price (about half the sticker price). You can visit the workshop where men sit on the floor working on more carvings.

Some houses are built with framing and plaster much like those in the U.S., but most are put together from whatever is available. Obviously, there are no building codes. People rarely paint their houses, or if they do, they just paint the side that faces the street.

Steve: We lunched at the Impala Hotel, then drove from Arusha to Tarangire National Park. On the road, we passed many Maasai people and villages. They live mostly by raising cattle and goats. The more cattle a man has, the richer he is and the more wives he has (funny, in this country, the more wives a man has, the poorer he is), each of whom has her own "home", built in a cluster.

The Maasai have lived this way for years and have no intention of joining the 20th century, much less the 21st.

The main highway was in pretty good condition and any breaks in the asphalt were marked with white paint so that they could be seen easier and avoided.

Rosemary: In the countryside, Maasai houses and villages. They are herdsmen who measure their wealth in cattle. Children tend the herds instead of going to school. Cows, goats, sheep, donkeys. They like to live far from other people and don't mind walking long distances to get water, which is carried by donkeys or on the heads of the people. The Maasai around Arusha have broken somewhat with tradition and taken up farming.

Steve: After reaching the entrance to the national park, we spent the next couple of hours looking for game and saw:

giraffes elephants baboons warthogs dwarf mongoose Grant’s gazelles impala vervet monkey zebra

guinea fowl ostrich jackal vulture eagle dik dik cuckoo lilac-breasted roller storks

Rosemary: Here we also met tsetse flies. They are very aggressive. We are grateful for Deet.

Steve: We tried to spot a leopard but didn’t have any luck.

Hassan told us a story about catching guinea fowl, which (not surprisingly) taste like chicken. He said that they were hard to catch by hand but that he would add some cognac to rice, feed it to the birds, they would get drunk and pass out, so all you had to do was walk over and pick them up.

We checked into the Tarangire Sopa Lodge, our home for the next two nights, and were again welcomed with orange juice. Our room is OK - two double beds, not enough light, hot water that was rationed twice a day and no sound proofing. We kept hearing a German couple in an adjacent room every time they said anything.

Dinner was only fair (the food here turned out to be the worst on the trip) but we were too tired to care. We went back to the room, listened to the Germans for a while and finally got a decent night’s sleep for both of us.

June 1-2 (Friday & Saturday) Tarangire National Park

Friday

Steve: Started the day with breakfast at the lodge, where both the waiter and manager came over to apologize and explain about something unusual at dinner last night. Seated at a table next to us was a group of about eight or ten very official looking people, some of the men wearing ties. Two of them were listening to something on transistor radios, which was very annoying because of (1) the sound quality and (b) because we couldn’t understand what was being said. I mentioned something to the waiter when we left about how unusual it was to have people listien to the radio during dinner. It turns out, they were government officials, listening to the evening news which only comes on once a day. Fortunately, we were not arrested.

Rosemary: We began with a morning game drive. We had a brief glimpse of a leopard as it jumped across the road and vanished into the grass. The grass is very tall this time of year, making it hard to see animals. They could be just a few feet away, watching us.

The afternoon was a festival of elephants. There was a huge group spread over a large area. Some of them crossed the road. They didn't like us, and showed it in the way they looked at us. Lots of babies. Another group was involved in some kind of dispute over mating. There was a chase partly obscured by bushes, and loud trumpeting. Then they stopped arguing and went back to eating.

The tsetse flies begin to go away in the late afternoon, but other insects remain persistent until sunset. Then the night insects come out. We are always greasy with sunblock and Deet.

Steve: The morning game drive started fairly routinely with a giraffe standing very close to the road. Other animals seen were dik-dik, herds of impala, which were usually one male with numerous females. (Hassan's joke: "That impala has so many wives, he must be a Maasai.")

We also saw elephants,

The sighting of the day (so far) was a glimpse of a leopard, first in the road and then running across the road.

It’s hard to see much game because the grass is very tall. Most contact came with the tsetse flies, who are everywhere and like to bite.

And now, a word from our sponsor DEET. Formally known as diethyl-meta toluamide, this is an amazing insect repellant. Most commercial sprays like "OFF" have 15% DEET. We have "Jungle Juice", which is 100% DEET. Expensive, but I’m worth it. The flies were so bad that even Hassan used some of it.

Back to the lodge for lunch, a brief break and then out again at 3:00 PM for another game drive. Today’s featured animal: elephants, and lots of them. We encountered numerous herds, one of which must have had 50 members.

The first large herd we saw was about a dozen elephants, mostly females with some children and some babies. We were in their way as they tried to cross the road (insert your own elephant joke here) so we saw them lift their trunks to smell us and show some aggression. We moved up the road a little so they could cross behind us, and one teenage male came within about 20 feet of us, trying to show what a big guy he was. Got some great photos here.

A little further up we saw the large herd of 50. As we were leaving, we saw two males starting to fight, with tusks aimed and trunks high locked, charging each other. It only lasted a couple of minutes but was fascinating to watch. Later we found another herd where Hassan thought there was a female in heat because one of the younger males had "five legs". Unfortunately for him, the older male kept him away from the female.

Hassan’s eyesight is unbelievable. While driving, he saw three vervet monkeys nestled in the "Y" of a tree from about 200 feet. The tree was gray and the monkeys were small and gray. It took us a few minutes to see them even after he pointed them out to us.

We made it back to the lodge just before dark, showered (there is hot water only between 6-8, both AM & PM), had another mediocre meal and went to bed. We both slept pretty well.

Saturday

Rosemary: We started before dawn, hoping to see big cats on the road. We saw some jackals, and a hyena running across the grass. There were a lot of vultures gathered in trees by the river. We saw a hyena running up the riverbank with a big piece of meat in its mouth. Something had died down there, possibly an elephant, but we couldn't get into a position to see it.

Steve: It was still dark when we left the lodge at 6:00, but the sun began to rise around 6:30 and the flies were still asleep.

Saw a couple of jackals in the road in our headlghts. As dawn broke, we saw families of baboons come down from the tops of palm trees.

We were hoping to see some big cats in the early morning but the grass was so tall, they could be right next to the road and we wouldn’t be able to see them.

We did see more impala, zebra and a small group of elephants, including a baby of about two or three months.

Rosemary: There were baboons high in the palm trees, eating the fruit. We saw more elephants with little babies. They still don't like us! Wild rosemary is in bloom throughout large areas. It fills the air with fragrance. Occasionally we have gone off the road, and the scent is especially strong as we drive over the plants. Not much to see in three hours. The tall grass hides everything. The tsetse flies being to come out at the morning warms up.

Hassan obviously feels sorry we haven't seen much game here, but we knew there would be no guarantees. Arusha was great, and we are confident that Ngorongoro and Serengeti will be full of animals.

Breakfast is the best meal here. Fruit, juice, breads, meats, an omelette chef, yogurt. The coffee is good, as is the local honey. Lunch and dinner are hard to eat. They are trying to provide "contenintal" cuisine with unskilled chefs. I'd rather try some local dishes. So far we have been careful about what we eat and drink, and have remained healthy. (We brush our teeth with bottled water.)

My description of this room: Imagine a Motel 6, remove the TV, phone, and thermostat. Make the electricity uncertain, ration the hot water, and add a mosquito net. And, of course, put some monkeys on the roof.

This was the bar of the lodge at Tarangire. It never got crowded. At several of the lodges, the public areas were very grand, spacious and unused, while the guest rooms were shabby and uncomfortable.

Steve: We came back to the lodge at 9:00 for breakfast (easily the best meal of the day at this location) and a couple of hours rest before lunch and a trip to Lake Manyara. The trip to the lodge at Lake Manyara was fairly uneventful. We saw some more zebra, elephant, impala and giraffe leaving Tarangire. Strangely enough, we’ve become somewhat jaded from seeing so many of them the last few days.

Upon reaching the main highway, we had to double back towards Arusha before taking the road to Lake Manyara. Saw lots more Maasai with their herds of cattle and goats, many tended by children under 10.

Hassan told us that the Maasai believe that all cattle belong to them, so if anyone else has any cattle, the Maasai think that that person’s grandfather must have stolen them from their grandfather and that the Maasai have the right to steal them back. In fact, when the Maasai sell their cattle to other people for money or goods, they often try to steal them back also.

Rosemary: The road was what I had expected all the roads here to be -- very rough and dusty. The road is built of huge jagged rocks partly embedded in hard dirt. Our vehicle carries two spare tires, with good reason. This is not a trip for anyone with a bad back, sore hip, stiff neck, or inclination to get car sick.

Steve: Passing through some small towns, there were fields of crops on one side of the road and forests full of baboons on the other, sitting along side the road waiting for a chance to cross and get some dinner. Many homes are marked for demolition to make room for a new, wider road, allowing for more travel (and more tourist dollars) in the area.

We arrive at the Serena Lodge at Lake Manyara and are again welcomed with juice. A small woman carried both our bags to our room. (Note to self: start working out!) The room had twin beds, which looked OK on first inspection. Later, however, when they hung the mosquito netting and tucked in the edges, it was quite claustrophobic.

Had a little time before dinner, so we went to the pool bar for a drink and a great view of the lake, which more than tripled in size after El Nino a couple of years ago. There was a marimba band at poolside, playing a strange version of "Guantanamera". Dinner was buffet and was actually good, far better than any of the meals at Tarangire. The lodge and grounds are very nice and we went straight to bed after dinner.

We saw many of these huge baobob trees in Tarangire and Lake Manyara. Sometimes the trunks were more than 20 feet in diameter.