Tarangire National Park: Between baobabs & elephants

My arrival in the middle of the night in Tanzania, however, didn’t go as planned because the airline had managed to lose my luggage. Hakuna Matata, I told myself, after all, I just arrived in Africa, nothing could ruin my day. So after a short shopping tour at 2 am, to buy the bare necessities, like this unique t-shirt that you can see on the right, we headed to the lodge. 

After only 2 hours of sleep, we began our brief Tanzania road trip, which led us at first to the unique Ngorongoro crater. A beautiful park, especially because of its unique setting, I personally, however, find it a bit overloaded. Too many cars on very limited space, which is why I decided to present you a great alternative to the busy Crater and the Serengeti.

The Tarangire National Park in Tanzania is often overshadowed by the other two popular national parks, even though it has plenty to offer.

Elephants, elephants, elephants

First of all, it is Tanzania’s National Park with the second-highest concentration of wildlife and especially elephants you will see in plenty of numbers. The only time I saw that many elephants on a single day was in Botswana. 

In the dry season (June-October) the park has apparently the world’s highest concentration of elephants in a single national park. I didn’t count, but I guess that during the day I saw around 300 of these gentle giants. So if you are a huge fan of these magnificent animals, Tarangire National Park has to be on your bucket list. 

Nevertheless, there are also plenty of other animals to discover. There are for example more than 700 lions that you can search for or if you are a bird enthusiast you will be delighted by the 450 different species that you can find here. 

Africa scenery

Tarangire National Park has a very beautiful variety of African landscapes to offer. During the day we passed all sorts of vegetation and sceneries.

From thick thorn bushes to lush green swamps, to classical African savanna, to winding rivers.

Driving through Tarangire gives you the feeling that you drive to numerous different national parks, which is the major reason why it never gets boring on the same game drive.

However, after entering the park it took us more than an hour to spot the first animals.

The Sangaiwe Lodge is not situated at the main gate, which provides you with the opportunity to see entirely different parts of the National Park, while at the same time the great luxury of not seeing any cars.

But neither did we see some animals, due to the thick thornbush vegetation. 

You now can imagine how happy we were when we finally saw our first elephant of the day. He was standing around 10 meters away from us, but he probably sensed that we had a bad start into this game drive, so he decided to wave at us. 

Going further inside the park, we also discovered more and more birds. We managed to find numerous ostriches, grey crown cranes, hornbills, and other smaller, colorful birds.

Tarangire was indeed a paradise for bird enthusiasts. Before my first Africa trip in 2017, I was never a huge bird enthusiast, but two Australian mates that I met on the trip managed to change my perspective.

They taught me that those big mammals are definitely exciting, but that at the same time on a game drive you should also lookout for the smaller animals. 

Kind of reminded me of Mufasa’s speech from the Lion King that every animal has to play their part in the circle of life.

Anyways, on the game drive in the Tarangire National Park, I found myself being totally amazed by the entire variety of animals this park has to offer. 

After driving through some thick bushes again we spotted something small and fast running through the bushes, it was a Dik-dik.

Dik-diks are one of the smallest antelopes in the world and they only get 40cm high. Hence, it is really hard to see them in the wild and even harder to take a good picture of them. Once again we got pretty lucky.

Fun fact about them is that they are one of the animals that actually have a sort of toilet, a spot they continuously come back to, to do their business. Nature is fascinating sometimes. 

We remained on the river banks to see if we could spot some other animals as well and after driving a few minutes we found a Giraffe that was on its way to the river.

Giraffes are very vulnerable when they are drinking because they have to bend down a lot, due to the enormously long neck.

This exposed position enables predators to more easily attack the giraffe and bring it down, which is what probably happened to the poor giraffe that I once saw in Botswana, which you can read more about here.

Geoffrey slowed down the car and we passed by some neighboring trees. I continued to look down, but then Geoffrey spotted a lioness in a treetop.

I was searching the entire time on the wrong level, I thought to myself, no wonder I didn’t spot any lion earlier.

Indeed, we got pretty lucky because climbing trees is not something a lion does all the time. For me, it was the first time seeing one like this, after I guess around 40 game drives, so definitely something special.

Tarangire was truly spoiling us today. After a few minutes with the adventurous lioness, we continued on our way to the exit, it was time to leave.