Day 1 Safari: Amazing luck

Breakfast at the hotel included what looked like a yummy beef stew. It turned out to be liver. Eeewwww! Along with coffee and tea, there were three kinds of drinking chocolate, namely Milo, Ovaltine and Cadbury’s! Tanzanians must be cocoa connoisseurs as I noticed that in other places there was more than one on offer!

We checked out and handed over some laundry to the hotel so that it could be done during our safari.Richard from Bobby Tours & Safaris arrived promptly at 0830 to take us to their office. We met with Abdullah, the boss (aka Bobby) who checked some of the details and collected our cash of USD2000 (80% balance of the 5 day safari price in addition to the 20% deposit paid months ago). I was relieved to have lightened my cash hoarding after meeting the British couple who got burgled.

We were taken to a big supermarket on the edge of town where the carpark was absolutely filled with safari 4WDs. Everyone was there to get water, snacks and in some cases real provisions. We got going in earnest from there around 0930.

It was about 2h drive to Tarangire National Park on mainly excellent sealed roads. We called past a masai market in action where cows and goats were being traded. We saw plenty of tall skinny masai people, often wearing orange blanket wraps but we’ve been told their choice of colour depends on some kind of hierarchy. Some were on bicycles, some carried a staff and some were herding many cows. What they had in common generally were the sandals that were made from old tyres.

At various points of the journey, there were also masai women dressed up with beads for pay-photo opportunities. Then there were boys in black with white paint on their face after having recently been circumcised; also available for pay-photo opportunities.

Richard did the paperwork for Tarangire National Park after which we entered for about 2h of game drive. We had a lunchbox interlude around 1330 accompanied by very persistent wasps that were especially attracted to anything sweet (oranges, drinks).

We were very lucky seeing a pride of lions quite early in the piece and a few big herds of elephants too. And there were lots of others common animals like zebras usually accompanied by their good friends the wilderbeest; warthogs, impalas; gazelles, digdigs; water bucks etc.

It hit me how lucky we were when we saw people staring into the tall grass for a glimpse of one lion hiding in there, or a couple of elephants by the roadside. Because of how lucky we had been, I thought a 5-day safari might have been a bit long. But if we had opted for a shorter one, you can guarantee that we’d see nothing! And besides, the price of some shorter ones was disproportionate and there is quite a bit of distance to cover coming from Arusha to Serengeti.

In terms of trees, we saw plenty of baobabs in Tarangire; it wasn’t something we had noticed in the other parks on later days.

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We left the park around 1600 and headed to Endoro Lodge. The last bit of the journey was a long way off the main road. We were greeted by a couple of masai porters in traditional blanket wraps and they took our luggage to our chalet.

The chalets were huge and very private set amongst terraced gardens. Ours had a indoor shower, an outdoor shower and a large triangular bath.

Dinner was a buffet in the elegant restaurant. The food was OK for a buffet but the Dodoma Dry White wine made locally was surprisingly nice. The chocolate pudding was a thick paste resembling what one would normally inject into little chocolates and needless to say, it was heavenly.