Zion Campsite in the village of Olasiti was our home for four weeks while we were in the field. We had a tent village of our own, and a mess hall where we played a lot of euchre and other card games to pass the time. Anthropology students usually went to interview every day for a couple of hours. Biology students could only visit the park every other day because we had to share a car, so we had a lot of down time. We spent a good portion of our free time hanging in the Olasiti Transit Bar, which made a small fortune on the volume of sodas we bought. When I was stuck at camp I was usually pretty bummed about not being in the park, but the days when I could go were so extraordinary!
I completely changed my research project idea once I got to the park, to better accommodate working with the rest of the group and the limited access we had. I studied elephant herbivory of baobab trees near the river and far from the river. Basically I was measuring how fat each baobab tree was and then counting up the damage from elephants. The biggest tree I measured was 20m! Several times elephants interrupted our data collection and we had to hurry back to the safety of the land rover. We became each other’s “research assistants”. I feel so lucky to have been able to experience Tarangire by exploring on foot and spending many days there to the point where I didn’t need a map to orient myself.
Some of the cooler experiences from Tarangire were seeing a group of cheetahs kill an impala, having our vehicle rammed by a buffalo, finding hippos in the river, the staggering amount of elephants, and a BIG elephant skeleton.
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