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Lunch is a picnic - 4 fruits, cheese sandwich,
fried chicken, chips, dessert muffin. More than plenty. The wind
is good, but we sweat and tire under the relentless equatorial sun.
Out on the lakes we see ducks, teal, Egyptian geese, and flamingos
way out in the middle in a strange pink cluster. There are more
bird species than I can remember. We see the broad backs of hippos
in one lake, looking like whale.
With
the ability to stay underwater for five minutes at a time, we don't
see much of their faces. Cattle egrets stand on the backs of buffalos,
picking off bugs. More giraffes, munching away at anything they
can reach, which can be 18 feet. It's hard to believe that their
long necks contain only seven vertebrae, same as humans. Their height
gives them a distinct advantage, as does the fact that they can
digest 100 species of plants - a good thing, since they must consume
75 lbs of food a day to maintain their 4000 lb bodies.
Near the end, a small herd
of zebra round out the list of animals seen. Their sharply outlined
black and white bodies seem painted. One wonders at first why they
were not designed to blend better with the landscape - you can spot
them a mile away. But most feeding by the big cats takes place in
the early morning and late afternoon. When the sun is low, and the
zebras stand together, the stripes tend to blend from one animal
into another, making it very difficult to visually separate a potential
victim from the herd.
All in all, not bad for a first day! We
return to the hotel at 4:30, exhausted.
October 9, 2:30 pm:
Up at 7 am this morning. Breakfast, checkout, and on the road by
8:30. Tobias headed us towards Tarangire National Park. A nice drive
on a rare paved road. Saw lots of Maasai tending cattle. The boys
may tend cattle solo at age six. Quite a vision - endless savanna
plain, scrub grasses from yellows to browns and some rust red, a
few cattle here and there, and a lone Maasai boy in bright red garb
standing starkly against the earth-toned landscape. In the distance,
the Ngorongoro Highlands are visible, the mountains stretching along
the western border of the Rift Valley. Below the Rift wall, the
alkaline Lake Manyara sits, mostly evaporated in the dry season.
Above the lake it looks like rain streaming down from the cumulous
clouds, but the scene is reversed - the salts have been kicked up
the strong savanna winds, blowing curtains of white a thousand feet
or more towards the sky.
We spot our first baobab tree, the trunk
monumental in stature. The gnarled limbs are leafless in this dry
season, but it is not dead. The beasts store incredible amounts
of water, which explains why elephants attack their trunks and the
bark is often scarred. It is a testament to their endurance that
these trees live 300 years or more. In the savanna of Tarangire,
the baobabs stand as the biggest sentinels on the landscape, joined
by umbrella acacias and the occasional palms near sources of water.
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