Mt. Kilimanjaro: Hahn & Team Explore Tarangire National Park
Posted by: Dave Hahn
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Kilimanjaro
We explored the sixth largest national park in Tanzania today. Tarangire is a year-round, dependable water-source for thousands of elephants. We saw families big and small of pachyderms, but also wildebeest, zebra, giraffe, gazelles and antelope. The birders in the team wee kept quite busy ID-ing "new" flappers. We roamed the savanna for hours with each former climber standing half out the open back of a land-cruiser, looking hard for the next stunning wildlife display. The land we explored is essentially a wide-open baobab forest cut by a number of rivers. Up one of those giant baobabs we spied a cat... upon closer inspection that cat -a large civet- turned out to be dead. This got us looking a bit closer at the other branches of the humongous tree, where finally we discovered a sleeping leopard. We tried to imagine the strength and skill that had gone into this leopard making a kill and then dragging his kill in his teeth while climbing twenty feet vertically up the wall-like trunk of a tree. He'd stashed the kill in a fork well off the ground to keep scavengers from bothering it while he... Or she... Took a well deserved nap.
At the end of the day, we exited the park and made a short drive to Kikoti Camp... A comfortable lodge just east of the park boundary. We watched Maasai tribesmen start a fire without matches and then perform a welcome dance for us. We joined in, eventually, in trying to jump higher.
We'll get a little more chance to see wildlife in the morning on the way back through the park.
Hard to believe that we'll begin our final day together.
Best Regards,
RMI Guide Dave Hahn
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