The next morning we picked up our Toyota Rav4 from Roadtrip Tanzania which cost us $89.00 a day. Compared to to the Land Rover that was over twice the amount, we chose the Rav4 for our next 16 days in Tanzania. We drove it back to the Giraffe Lodge and figured out how to pack all of our gear into it.
Off we go again, but this time to Tarangire National Park. Tarangire National Park is known for it large herds of elephants and their giant baobab trees.
It took us a little over 3 hours to reach the park from Arusha. We paid $45.00 per person for entry, and $30.00 per person to camp in the public campsite. We also paid $9.00 a day for our vehicle, and a VAT tax of $57.24 for a total of $375.24 for 48 hours. We camped inside the park for two nights, but now we are using our ground tent.
At this campsite we did have an armed guard that came over in the dark and introduced himself to us. He said if we needed anything during the night let him know and he pointed across the campsite to a tent and said that was where he would be sleeping. Yeah, like we would be able to find him if we needed something! There were times that we really wished that our tent was on top of the car.
We enjoyed our safari in Tarangire National Park, but we did not enjoy the ticks and the tsetse flies. We ended up with 5 ticks between the 2 of us. Luckily we were prepared and had special tweezers to remove the ticks.
We had lots of bites from the tsetse flies that hurt and itched. It was times like this when we were glad we had the Rav4 with air conditioning, so we could keep our windows rolled up. The tsetse flies were so bad at times that it sounded like it was raining, because there were so many of them hitting our windows.
After leaving Tarangire National Park we headed south. We really needed to get fuel. Fuel was not available in the park. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere and wondering when we would find a gas station.
We were getting hungry and we had read in our Bradt guide book about a local buffet in the town of Babati that offers a “great lunchtime buffet”. We found fuel for the car, then we ate the lunch buffet at the Ango Restaurant. Ango was very easy to find, it was on the main road going through town. They were very friendly and excited when we arrived and they explained the different types of food in their buffet.
The lunch buffet for two people, and two sodas came to $9.50. The food was very good! Then we were ready for the long drive to Dodoma.
We spent the night in Dodoma at the “New Dodoma Hotel”. First of all, it is not new! We paid the most for this room, ($100.00) and out of all of our rooms in Tanzania and it was our worst room of our entire trip. The room was run down, and full of mosquitoes and lizards. When we called someone in from the office, he wanted to know if we had a stick to kill one of the lizards. We explained that we didn’t have a stick, but we wanted a different room. We did have a good breakfast with lots of Indian food.
It took us two days of driving to get to Iringa, where we would start our next safari.
You don’t drive very far, very fast. The speed limit in the cities and small towns is 50 kilometers per hour, ( about 30 mph) and 80 kilometers per hour, (about 50 mph) in the country.
After arriving in Iringa we drove over to the well known Neema Guest House to see if they had a room available. Neema is a guesthouse, cafe, workshop and craft store run by disabled people. Everything was closed, because they were at a funeral.
So we ended up staying at Zakinn. Our room was nice and it only cost about $30.50. Their food was good too!
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