Backdate: East Africa trip Aug 2015 Day 8 - 17th Aug - Tarangire Park + Twiga Campsite

17/8/15: Snap the photo above aft waking up~ felt like I was in some rural village area haha. 7 of us took all our luggages and brought it down to the lobby to meet the person IC from Potete Safari to pay our full costs for the package. The breakfast at the hotel was awful anyway. Peace came to fetch us at about 9am, and so off we go for our road trip!

It's gonna be a 4hrs' trip, so we stopped by at a petrol kiosk nearby for some of them to pee. We saw some locals filming an MV too~ interesting.

The weather was awesome; the road seemed endless, and freedom felt like it could have easily been mine. Halfway thru, Peace let us stop at Arusha supermart to get some necessities. We bought champagne, drinks and tidbits!

Yes we passed by Arusha airport too, a small runway for plane landings... I guess mostly for tourists who comes to the Safari? It was 1pm and we reached Tarangire park entrance, where we had our packed lunch, while Peace settled the entrance tickets for us. *The weather was super hot!*

Breakfast and lunch packs were mostly offered by Potete company during our trips in the Safaris. Hmm, there were little changes to the variety of food inside, but hey we're in Africa~ we shld cherish anything that can save our stomachs, right? *Yes eventually we got pretty sick of the food, and so saved the food up along the way and gave it to the local kids that look like they need it more than us.* Oh yeah, we saw pretty Starlings ard the lunch area~ they belong to the same species as Mynas you see in SG but hav so much prettier fur colours!

Drove into Tarangire aft lunch, and yeah let's raise the roof! *LOL-ed at our "Safari fashion" that pales whatever K-pop star fashion la~* 

The huge baobab tree common in Africa~ the fat trunks store loads of water that's needed for animals in times of extreme heat! And also, the Ubuyu comes from here too. And the first animal we saw for the day was... giraffes! *It was my fav animal when I was young... juz cos it's yellow in colour lol.* Oh well, my digital compact camera can't be compared to Alex's professional DSLR cam, so the quality of pictures can't be as gd. But gosh, these and more upcoming photos are gonna be memories for me for a lifetime.

Peace would stop his car whenever we wanted to take photos, or when he spots some new species of animals we'd never come across before during our trip. He has been a driver in East Africa for 7 or 8yrs if I did not rmb wrongly, and he gave decent explanations when we threw questions. 

Pictured above: Wildebeest, elephants, zebras, impalas (males are the ones with horns) and baboons. I loved the shot I took of the two male impalas fighting to show their masculinity and strength. And while we saw a herd of elephant drinking by a baobab tree, we also caught a "R21 act" by a pair of ostriches too! LOL~ I didn't manage to catch that on camera though~ too fast and too far haha. 

It was cute seeing zebras lay their heads on top of each other too~ like they were resting and looking out for each other at the same time. *Seeing too much of such温馨scenes can make us forgot at times that this is the wild. There were juz too many unseen danger lurking ard.*

While our car was on the main road, there were times animals hav to cross the paths too... and besides wildebeest, we literally had "zebra crossing" keke!

The animals were pretty shy, like the Waterbuck above, but they seemed to be used to seeing vehicles driving ard the park. *And we did see/catch a glimpse of warthog, cheetah, lion and antelope for the day too!*

3+, 4 hrs passed in the blink of an eye in Tarangire park. All the parks here are closed in the evenings for safety issue, and all the safari cars have to be out before then. *It's the WILD. I wonder if animals ever ran out of these "huge zoos" and posed a danger in the towns whr ppl lived? Or the Maasai ppl?* While otw to Twiga campsite, we saw the Maasai tribes and their cattles. We stop at one pt, and one of the kids gave us "raw" baobab seeds~ it tasted utterly sour!

Local staffs helped us set up our 3 tents at Twiga campsite while we unloaded our luggages. The night was pretty chilly, and we could hear dogs outside the gates howling omg~ stupid thoughts like "could they crash in and eat us all up?" ran in my mind at times LOL. Anyway, Dinner was at 7 or 8pm, and we decided to go out of the gate, to their local "mama shop" to look for drinks.

Peace apparently went eslewhr nearby to slp for the night, while the rest of us were told that the local chef would serve us food. *We played "Truth of Dare" while waiting for our food~ and "dug" out so many r/s "secrets" of each and everyone's haha!* I honestly cannot rmb what we ate but it was nth worth raving about. *Worse thing was that while we tipped the chef, he was unhappy with the amt, and even "reminded" us that he would be "the one serving our breakfast the nex day too" ALAMAK~* Oh well, we might nt be as generous as those angmohs ard us, but the quality of food wasn't worth that much tip either. 

We headed to shower using the public toilet at night. There were like 3 cubicles each for male and female, but for the ladies, only one had HOT water shower in working condition. Now when I say HOT, I mean HOT! The hygiene condition looked poor enough inside the small rectangular shower cubicle, and worse thing was there were so many mozzies flying ard in the shower! To a大近视like me, it's pretty worrisome when I can't see the mozzies clearly due to both my myopia and the heavy mist caused by the hot air rising. *Like I said, female mozzies bite at night~ I wouldn't want malaria, despite alrdy taking anti-malarial pills daily.* 
Aft an uncomfortable shower and cleaning up, I hung my towels outside the cold air, in hope that it would pretty much be dry the next morning. YJ and I shared a tent, and we made sure mozzies inside were smacked before we slpt. It was so cold I had a runny nose, but thks to YJ's Zyrtec pills, they were gone by the nex morning.