Safari Day 1

At this very moment I am sitting outside of my tented camp at Tarangire Safari Lodge overlooking the most incredible lanscape! Blue sky with minimal clouds, crisp breeze, greenery everywhere! Everything looks so lush and in the distance a herd of about 20 elephants with babies!!! Am in awe of everything. This all feels like so surreal to me. I keep having images of The Lion King pop in my head.

Flight to Arusha was right on schedule, got picked up at the airport by our safari guide and then had dinner at The African Tulip! A combination of kuku choma (plain fried chicken with boiled veg). Irfan and i didn't really care for it all that much, but we also had a side of masala fries which were delicius. Somewhere between our flight to Toronto arrival to Arusha, i manged to completely lose my voice. I sound like an 80 year old woman on oxygen with severe COPD. Called it a night soon after, we were exhausted! Oh and right at this moment, i sound like a combination of an old woman and Kermit the Frog! Wish I was joking.

Our safari started the following day, drove from Arusha to Tarangire and en route stopped at the Olaciti primary school where we had a chance to drop books, toys, pencils for the kids! The school was packed with children between 6-12 and each teacher had roughly 90 students in their classroom! The headmaster Miminini took us to a grade 1 classroom where the children stood up to greet us, all dressed in uniform! They stole my heart! We left the donations for the teacher to distribute as she saw fit! They were all so excited! I wish we could have stayed to explore the entire school and play with the kids but we needed to let the kids continue with their learning! They had just had a break prior to our arrival.

The drive to Tarangire was roughly 2.5 hours and when we arrived we stopped to have a picnic lunch, apparently the monkeys thought it was their lunch time as well and they would follow us and try to steal our food! They were the cutest monkeys I have ever seen. We also saw dick dick's (small antelopes only weighing 5ibs and that's when they are full size), giraffes, warthogs, impalas, mongooses, baboons, jackels, a sleeping lion under a tree and lots of different birds! I just heard an elephant trumpet in the distance! So awesome!

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Okay now storytime, and yes it has to do with bugs! Just got back from dinner and very freaked out! Just prior to dinner, went to freshen up, was in the bathroom minding my own business and saw this freaking massive beetle on the curtain! Obviously, I freaked but not out loud because I was terrified that it would start crawling and then Irfan wouln't be able to kill it! I calmy went outside and told him that there was a massive bug! Off course he thought I was exaggerating because he did not go into the back very prepared and then he freaked out. It took both him and Hafiz to kill that mother$&@@!$ Now I'm terrified! sprayed the entire room with raid.

Still not adjusted to this time difference so going to call it a night! Apparently they have. a guide walk us back to our tents at night because it's not a fenced site. I wonder what they would do if a lion showed up?? We could definitely hear lions early evening. Anyways, don't know how well I'm going to sleep tonight!!!! Amped for another game drive early morning!

xo