Where the wild things are

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Tangire Park
What an amazing adventure the past six days has been, the safari has exceeded all of our expectations and every day held a new highlight, and each park was uniquely different from the next. The first night was our introduction to "tented" camping on Safari, and it was anything but roughing it, and even included a pool. Our rooms were as big as an apartment back at home, and the only way of knowing we were tenting was the lack of soundproofing. The first park we visited was the Tangire National Park and with it came many breath-taking elephant encounters. The herds were watering themselves by a watering hole, and as they caught wind of us, they slowly sauntered around the vehicles and away from where we were. The first night as we pulled into camp, we were greeted by a herd of zebras, and our dinner was eaten outside with view of wildebeests as the sun set. That night we were escorted back to our rooms with guards armed with bow and arrow and spears while they assured us that we were "totally safe." The next morning we started the morning ritual of guessing what animals had surrounded our tents. Curtis, Jody and Garett's tent was attacked by monkeys, while something rather large hit ours, and we all agreed that the Zebras were grazing and braying just outside our doors. Don and Debbie's cure to all the noise? Ear plugs 😊 Day 2 we went back for an early morning game drive in Tangire Park, with more elephants and a couple closer giraffe encounters. The elephant encounter from the day before was put to shame as we were totally surrounded twice more, and this time with even smaller babies. At times it was difficult to know if we should be afraid for our safety or not, having open windows and a popped up roof doesn't offer much protection should they decide that they wanted to eliminate their spectators. At one point they did get a little anxious as they called out to each other and all gathered to protect the babies. They accomplish this by completely covering up the babe's using their bodies and trunks to hide and shield them. As promised by Crazy D our driver, we deleted the pictures of the giraffe's off in the distance as today we got to see them much closer. Every bathroom stop we made we were greeted by the blue-ball monkeys, which made for lots of entertainment as we watched these trouble makers wreak havoc. They stole our cookies, peed on our benches, tore apart tea bags, made moves to attempt to steal our cameras and wrestled each other while trying to throw each other off the edges of the fence. We got to see how the mom's carry their babies on their bellies, and we're surprised to see how ugly baby monkeys are. Our big surprise of the day included a Cheetah spotting, which is very uncommon in this park. We watched her for about 20 minutes, however she was being very lazy in the shade so we moved on to find more elephants, who seem to win our favor every time. We also saw some Dic-dics, buffalo, water backs, gazelles and tons of birds. After lunch and a nap we made the long drive around the lake to the N'Gorongoro Farmhouse with the anticipation of hot showers and clean clothes!

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Photos

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Real coffee finally!!

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Sunrise at our first tented camp

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Blue balled monkeys. Seriously.

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Boabab trees (aka tree of life) they were amazing!

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What a sweet baby:)