June 15, 2009... Continued

It's bedtime and we had an amazing day. As soon as we got to the Arusha National Park, there were Giraffes grazing in the bush about 20 feet away. We were all in amazement of course. I could hardly stand it because my moms favorite animal is a giraffe. It was all she talked about me photographing for her. That being the first animal we saw was special to me because of that. Once we went into the part, we saw tons of monkeys — baboons and blue tail monkeys. They were all so very wild, as they literally bark at each other. It was awesome to see how they interact with each other and how they play around so much. Literally monkey around! We also saw black and white monkeys, I believe they are called white tail monkeys. They have long white tails that hang down from the tree branches. They were much calmer. We saw zebra, worthogs, water buck, buffalo and some vultures. We went to this one lake where there were MILLIONS of flamingo. It was absolutely amazing. I wish we would have been a bit closer to them, but they were so gorgeous. I absolutely loved seeing them. Then we traveled to another lake in the park to canoe with the hippos. We got into the canoes — Bailey and I got in together. We toured around the entire lake practically. We saw some water buck up close, a male and a female and I took some great shots of them. We also saw some flamingo up close too and I caught some photos of them flying away. However, the hippos were hard to see. There were only like 4 in the lake and they really stay under water for long periods of time. I was expecting there to be this numerous amount of them and to be scared they were going to attack us. We supposedly saw one of them, but only his little nostril come up for air. I don't think I ever really saw him because he was so far away. I was a little disappointed. We left from there and headed back to the lodge. On the way out of the park, we saw our first hyena. He was hurt and I didn't even catch his picture, but he was so pretty. For dinner we had a buffet style BBQ. It was great...as you soon will find out all the food was! I had some white Pinot Grigio African wine with dinner and it was amazing as well. That's all for tonight...we move to another lodge tomorrow.