01 Apr Tarangire: The Essence of Tanzania
“Elephants!”
I don’t recall who shouted it first but it was a cry that I would get used to in the coming days. Maybe the six of us in the safari vehicle shouted at once, but it really didn’t matter, since we all seemed to see the pachyderms at the same time and get equally excited. For me, this near constant excitement was the essence of traveling through Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania.
Image courtesy of Natural Habitat Adventures.
As a newbie on safari, I did not know quite what to expect. I certainly hadn’t expected that ten minutes after beginning a morning drive, we would turn a bend in the road and ahead of us would be a dozen elephants sauntering down the road. We stopped and watched as they slowly meandered off into the bush about 50 yards ahead of us. It was a good opportunity to pop up through the vehicle’s open roof and begin to shoot photos.
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That’s when I caught sight of more elephants out of the corner of my eye, emerging from the bush. It was a family of elephants. Well, make that two families. Or maybe three (or even four) families, all crossing the road, but now no more than 20 yards from our vehicle. Then I stopped counting.
The elephants kept coming and coming, some trotting, some swaying slowly, all of them intent upon crossing the road ahead of us, behind us, around us, giving our vehicle about a 20 foot berth. Their size and their numbers and their unexpected grace stunned us into almost total silence, broken only by our frequent camera clicks and deep exhalations. It was all about their marching footsteps and the dust they raised and their occasional trumpets and snorts.
Elephants by Sha Sha Chu is licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Of all the places that one can see tremendous concentrations of wildlife in Tanzania, from Serengeti National Park to Lake Manyara National Park to Ngorongoro Crater, there is something rather special about Tarangire, which is less known but spectacular in its own way. We had entered Tarangire National Park the day before, around 4PM, which seemed late in the day to me. I thought it would simply be a beautiful drive as we edged towards sunset. Instead, during the next 90 minutes, it was a living encyclopedia of an African safari. We spotted two cheetahs in the tall, wind-blown grass, looking over their shoulders as a pair of lionesses and their cubs climbed an anthill to scan the savannah for game. Fortunately, they failed to spot these young cats. Minutes later we located a leopard snoozing in an enormous baobab tree. We passed small herds of impalas and came across a pair of them locking horns, the repeated clacking noises of the horns clearly audible 50 yards away. We spied two black-backed jackals eating figs under a sprawling fig tree, watched skittish packs of zebra and paused besides a trio of ground hornbills, enormous birds that reminded me of the now extinct dodo. We lingered to observe a crèche of half a dozen baby giraffes, attended to by watchful, loping parents. As the sun headed to the horizon, we came across a dozen elephants, blocking the road in the brilliant light. In 90 minutes, we had seen a week’s worth African wildlife. I doubt that Sir David Attenborough could have orchestrated the hour and a half any better.
Image courtesy of Natural Habitat Adventures.
And now, the next morning, we were sated with elephants. For nearly an hour, we watched them. We could observe them up close as they sauntered past our vehicle. Their heads, their tusks, their skin that resembled thick parchment or perhaps old truck tires. They trumpeted and snorted and the little ones trotted by and the big ones swayed and moved with the gentle confidence of enormous beasts who know just how big they are. By my rough count, we saw considerably more than 200 elephants move past us and gather in a field below, a social mixer out of a Babar book that I might have read to my daughter.
Of course, those were only the elephants I could see. There were trumpeting elephants out of sight, behind the trees. Occasionally a pack of them would emerge, heading in the same general direction as the rest. The African earth was alive with elephants.
African Safari by Ed Yourdon is licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Tarangire, it turns out, is home to about 1,000 elephants. If there was anything disheartening about this dramatic elephant floorshow we were witnessing, it’s that it can lull you into a false sense of pachyderm abundance. The African elephant is endangered, still hunted down for its valuable tusks. But if there’s a sight to make you aware of just how special these animals are, and embolden you into taking some form of supportive action, you’ll find it here, in Tarangire, where the wild things are in Tanzania.
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