Africa Day 8

Today was mostly a long drive from the Serengeti National Park, back past Ngorongoro Crater National Park, then south to Tarangire National Park. The drive was mainly over dirt roads and took about 8 hrs. Because Tarangire has a year round river, it attracts wildlife during the dry season, which is now.
As always when driving we make few stops to check for birds, so even though most of the day was spent driving we still saw 105 species of birds including 17 ones not yet seen. We also saw our first Common Waterbuck and large numbers of Baobab trees. The trees are thousands of years old, despite the elephants which rip up the tree trunks to get the moist inner wood. Many Baobab trees show heavy scaring from elephants.
To enhance our safari experience tonight we are staying at Tarangire Safari Lodge, a tented camp. The camp is located on the edge of cliffs that overlook the river. Staying in the cam allows the sounds of the scrub forest to be clearly heard (just heard a monkey give an alarm call.). Before dinner I was relaxing over looking the river and saw a lion walking along the sand at the water's edge.