Today was one gigantic adventure, pretty much like every day here really. We had our second game drive at Tarangirie National Park. We were supposed to be calculating population densities using techniques learned in our Wildlife Management class this past week. We split into 4 cars like usual and all went our separate ways to count animals. My group had a wonderful morning. We counted 250 elephants but probably saw closer to 350-400 over the course of the day. We saw several giraffe, ostrich, impala and warthog as well. We ended the morning at the tourist lodge where we had the opportunity to relax, eat some food and swim in the pool. The view from the lodge was absolutely incredible and we were able to sit on the back deck watched several herds of elephants move through the park. All four trucks were supposed to meet there for lunch but one never showed up… We had horrible cell service and the radios weren’t working really well so we had no idea what happened to them. We waited around the lodge for four hours and they still didn’t show up. We went to the main gate and waited there for 3 hours. They STILL didn’t show up. Erica and Kioko  (our Wildlife Ecology teacher) were getting really stressed and nervous. We had minimal contact with them and they said “we’re close” for about 6 hours. Finally around 6pm (the time we were supposed to be back at the camp) they pulled into the front gate parking lot. Every single person in the truck was covered with mud. They had been stuck in the mud for 10 hours! They got stuck within the first hour of their game drive and everytime they pushed the car out of the mud they got stuck again. The tale was pretty epic and they were swarmed with people wanting to hear how they were. They actually showed up in one of our trucks because their specific truck was stills stuck in the mud! Once we got a ranger truck to pull it out we were finally able to head home. The drive home was about 2 hours and we didn’t make it back to camp until 8:30pm (2.5 hours behind schedule). Needless to say, everyone is exhausted and we have been given an extremely gracious extension on the 3 papers that were supposed to be due tomorrow. The 8 that were pushing through the mud all day are currently soaking their feet in hot antiseptic water or taking showers and the rest of us are heading to bed very soon.

Life is never dull in East Africa 🙂

Location: babati, tanzania