This is Tarangire. It is a park about 2-3 hours from Arusha (a large city, the site of Mount Kilimanjaro). We drove from Planet Lodge to this park, so we had about 3-4 hours to drive around before park closing time. This was the first time we opened the
rooftop, which was really cool. Sarah and I broke out the hats too!

As you can see, there were abundant amazing animals. We saw a cheetah AND a lion, which we were told was extremely rare, especially for this somewhat smaller park. The cheetah had essentially run from the lion. Tarangire is also home to the Baobob tree. You can see a very small one in the second elephant photo. These trees weren’t found elsewhere on our trip. I loved Tarangire. There were so many interesting landscapes, and obviously the animals were the real draw.

It’s funny thinking about how excited we were on this drive, as you’ll see shortly we soon escalated the animal sightings/frequency/proximity. But that makes sense; Tarangire was the first dose. I would go back to Tarangire for another few days, even though it isn’t the major park in this area. We barely saw any of it, and yet, we saw this…