Our Blog - Safari 2023 - Arusha National Park, Tanzania

I don't normally do hotel pictures, but I thought we would do it this time. Since Tanzania is somewhat of a 3rd world country, we decided to go with hotels in the "Luxury" category. In most cases, we probably could have been totally fine in a hotel in the next level down. This first one is called the Shamba Lodge, which is a VERY small lodge with 3 private cabins located on the top of a sloping hill. Inside, the living room and bathroom is on the ground floor, with a circular staircase going to the mezzanine bedroom. The bed was surrounded by a mosquito netting although we didn't seem to think it was necessary as we didn't see that many bugs. There is a restaurant with a lounge upstairs and a little picnic area as well.

The views were really nice, with Mount Meru in the distance. The first one is literally the view from our bedroom out the top window of the cabin.

Our first game drive was through the Arusha National Park. It is relatively small at only 53 square miles and, looking back on it, was probably my least favorite park based on animal viewing. We saw giraffes and warthogs but only at a distance so no pictures of them yet.

The first animals that we came across were Zebras. We saw a few here, and lots in Ndutu and the Ngorongoro crater.

We saw quite a few Baboons in the park although we saw more in other parks.

This is a Blue Monkey, and while we only saw 2 of them during our game drive, this one seemed to give me a great pose for the picture.

We saw quite a few Grey crowned cranes, which are the National birds of Ugandan, at a small pond. They are fairly large birds, 3 feet tall and weighting around 8 lbs. The main way to pick out this bird is the crown of still old feathers that resembles a crown.

In one of the other ponds, we saw a set of Flamingos. There are both Greater flamingo's and Lesser flamingo's here, with the lesser flamingo being more white than pink.

I didn't show very many pictures here because many of the animals were pretty far away from us and they are really hard to see. I have better pictures in the other parks, so I'll leave the explanations to those parks.