Day 24, Tarangire National Park

By patmarkovich2015May 30, 2025

Dan and I had a lovely evening at our new home. After arrival and some r and r, we headed to the campfire to watch some bush TV! It was lovely to be served a cool glass of wine while sitting by the campfire and watching the sun go down. Our view over the grassland was lovely. And once darkness fell a Maasai kept us all safe while he was on alert. (Indeed, the rule again was: No venturing outside of your tent at night without signaling the Maasai security for an escort!)

After a good night sleep we started out the day with a lovely breakfast overlooking the grasslands beyond.

Dan enjoying breakfast on the deck of our dining room

Since we had seen an amazing number of animals over the past 5 days, including the big 5, we had no agenda for today’s adventure other than to explore this beautiful park and take in all we could.

One of the things we wanted to see was the huge Baobab Trees. These massive trees can reach up to 30m in height and 11 m across. Their root system can extend for hundreds of metres! If it is extremely dry they hold moisture in their bark, and thus are favoured by elephants as they can eat the bark and get both water and nutrition.

One of these trees we explored was immense. Most mature trees are hollow inside and served as shelters for one of the original tribes in this area. Later these large hollows were used by poachers to either store their illegal ivory, or to hide themselves from rangers. Now the only things hiding in them are lions, pythons or bees!

Baobob Trees on the shoreline of a waterhole

A peek inside the huge opening. Definitely as large as the Maasai homes in their villages.

Here’s a tree that has been recently eaten away by elephants. These trees are incredibly resilient and will heal themselves even after this kind of damage.

We stopped to explore the smaller parts of nature that seemed to pass us by on the previous days… the running chicken or guinea fowl, a number of birds including a long tailed shrike, Lilac breasted roller and an Egyptian buzzard. We also saw a Nile monitor lizard, about 2 feet long, and as its description says, it can run like the wind. It was on the road that we were on, and took off down the middle for a while and then escaped into the long grass before I could get a good shot.

We also took an interesting drive along the Tarangire river. First with a quick pit stop at a lovely picnic ground on one side of the river. Here we almost licked up a hitchhiker! We were no sooner heading out of the car, than a blackfaced monkey hopped onto the roof, in through our opening and down on the back seat beside the cooler. Our guide quickly chased it out and closed up the roof so we could leave the vehicle in peace!

Our bold hitchhiker jumped up on the roof and was in the truck in a matter of seconds!

Lovely picnic area complete with clean washrooms

View from the picnic area over the Tarangire River. The name comes from the Maasai words Taran – river, and Gire – Warthogs. Clearly an important hunting ground for them.

A couple of our hitchhiker’s friends lounging with a view!

Once back on our way we crossed the river and went down the other side. We saw some small rock hyrax here… a bit like a gofer. Further down the views a crossed the Savanah were stunning and we caught site of a herd of elephants on the other side of the river. They call this park “elephants’ paradise” and it’s no wonder. The luscious landscape would serve them well!

The rest of the herd reaching for some delicious acacia leaves

A view of the entire herd. What a paradise for the elephants indeed!

Further down the river we spotted a far away Egyptian Buzzard lounging on a sandbank.

As we traveled through the countryside I had some opportunity to take photos of some of the wild flowers that add touches of beauty to the landscape.

Wild morning glory amount other wild flowers

While these look like morning glory flowers, the thicker stalk and clusters of flowers has me confused. Please let me know if you can identify!

While not after big game today, we saw incredible beauty that we could savour after days of always scanning the horizon for animals. We did see a number of gazelle and even added a water buck to our list as we drove back to camp for lunch.

Today they set us up under a beautiful Acacia tree in front of the reception area for our lunch. Chilled cucumber soup followed by spaghetti and Tanzanian tomato sauce, beef skews and avocado stuffed tomato. For desert we had a puréed papaya, mango and bananas…lovely! I’ll tell you, sitting on game drives and eating like we’re running a marathon is not doing our waistline any benefits, but we are enjoying ourselves!

This afternoon, we took is easy. Dan getting caught up on reading, and me writing blogs and editing pictures while listening to the incredible sounds of nature in our open air reception lounge.

Tonight is our last night in the park. We headed over to the bush fire at 6:30 and had a drink while watching bush TV! We had the entire camp to ourselves, and were waited on hand and foot by the many friendly staff.