Saturday morning we woke up - albeit not very early - gobbled down some breakfast, threw together some sandwiches and jumped into Greg’s land rover. We drove out to Arusha National Park, which isn’t far from here. On the way we passed women carrying massive piles of green bananas on their heads, kids running around and waving to us, men pushing giant carts up the road, and of course, lots of dalla-dallas.
Not far from the park gate we encountered our first giraffes, four of them not far from the road. Greg has lived here for more than seven years, so this was no great shakes to him, but Sean and I were craning our necks out the window and taking photographs excitedly like any other ugly American tourist. It was so cool to see them in the wild, eating trees and walking and running in their own special crazy graceful way.
We drove on through the park, bumping along the dirt roads through thick forest and up to views across open plains, where we could see Cape Buffalo, baboons, zebras, warthogs and waterbuck grazing and idling about. Everywhere we went there were white moths flying, all through the sky and around us, like leaves in fall, or white pieces of paper in the wind.
In the denser forest we saw Colobus monkeys, which are black and white and have long white fuzzy tails. They stay way up high in the canopy of the trees and leap from tree to tree as if it’s nothing.
We had lunch at a table overlooking a lake with hippos in it. We could hear the hippos snorting and grunting, but they only put their noses and eyes out of the water. Considering they are one of the most dangerous animals around, that was OK.
Arusha National Park is one of the only parks where you can do walking safaris, where you can actually get out of your car and walk around, although you have to take a ranger as a guide. After lunch we arranged for a ranger to walk with us, I’ve forgotten his name already, but he had a great grin and knew all about the local flora and fauna and carried a brand new machine gun - just in case.
We had just walked by some Cape Buffalo and visited a waterfall when the sky started to rumble and grumble and pour rain down on us. However, we weren’t to be deterred by a little thing like drenching rain so we continued on up the trail. Little Mt. Meru peeked out of the clouds above us as we walked carefully, avoiding some fresh presents left by the buffalo.
It soon stopped raining and as we were walking back down through a meadow overlooking the park we were rewarded by a rainbow that appeared, stretched all the way across one end of the park to the other.
“It’s a shame Mt. Kilimanjaro is behind the clouds, otherwise that rainbow would arch right over it,” Greg said.
The sun began to dry us out and the white moths began to fly again, fluttering by us as we walked softly through the grass.
As we were driving out of the park just before sunset, we came across a bunch more giraffe, some walking along in front of us. One giant one stood just on the side of the road and stared at us as we quietly pulled up beside it.
Then we could dilly-dally no longer so we sped off to Greg’s, changed our clothes and went to a dinner party with some of his friends that lasted until the wee hours of morning.
All in all, our time here in Arusha has been really great. I was telling Greg as we walked through the park, “You know, it’s so funny that normally I only see you on holidays like Christmas, sitting around and eating at my house, and here we are in Tanzania - tip-toeing by a herd of buffalo!”
