Tanzania, at last

I first thought of traveling to Tanzania in 2001, when I was at Princeton and interested in African politics. I wasn’t interested in Tanzanian politics per se, but I was interested in the country’s magnificent wildlife preserves, and, with my graduation looming on the horizon, hit up my parents with the idea of a Tanzania trip as a graduation present.

My parents agreed, and we booked a trip of about two-and-a-half weeks for June 2002. First, my dad and I planned to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro, a glacier-covered extinct volcano, Africa’s highest peak, and a great inspiration for Hemingway. As had we planned it, my mother, Charity, and sister, Constance, would fly in about a week later, as dad and I came down off the summit, to join us for a safari.

We cancelled the trip on short notice, just days before my May 2002 graduation, because my mother was diagnosed with cancer, since treated, and I spent June and July of that year at home in Atlanta supporting her and scrambling to find gainful employment. But the trip lingered in both my dad’s and my imagination, and last year we decided to rebook it following my sister’s college graduation in May 2005. Our itinerary was similar: Dad, Constance and I climbed Kilimanjaro, and were joined by my mother and Meryl for a safari.

We booked the trip through Tanzania Serengeti Adventures, a reputable outfit based out of Arusha, and hired as our private guide Feroz, a Tanzanian-born naturalist of Indian descent. My mother had met Feroz in 1999, on a trip with my grandmother and two of my dad’s sisters to Uganda, that narrowly avoided being attacked by a group Rwandan rebels who massacred several western tourists. (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/africa/9903/02/uganda.deaths.06/) I admire the fact that her close call never deterred my mother’s interest in revisiting Africa.

What follows in a description of the safari part of our trip. For my description of the Kilimanjaro climb, see below. I’ve done my best in each day’s description to include the wildlife highlights, but my memory has faded a bit in the months since we left Tanzania. If you want to see a complete list of the wildlife, collected by my father during the trip, scroll down.

June 21: Meryl, who flew in about 12 hours earlier than my mother, came along in the car that met my sister, dad and me after our climb down from the top of Kilimanjaro, a pleasant and unexpected treat to end the climb. Our afternoon back in Arusha was lazy; showers, and a walk into town to do some email before Constance and my dad headed to the airport to meet my mother. They all arrived back at the guest house sometime after nine, we had dinner, chatted with Feroz and the two owners of TSA, and wend to bed.

June 22: Our first destination was Tarangire National Park, a place I’d never heard of either. On the outskirts of Arusha we stopped at the Arusha Cultural Village, a mecca of overpriced souvenirs that caters to western tourists – they had greeters dressed in Masai garb to sing and dance as tourists walked from the parking lot to the main entrance. None of us particularly enjoyed our time there, though Feroz explained to us the meaning of some of the more elaborate carvings offered for sale. Both Feroz and Martin recommended the store for its tanzanite, promising that while prices were high ($600 per carat for a perfect stone), they could vouch for its authenticity. We all took a wait-and-see approach towards any purchases with the idea that we could stop by again at the end of our trip if we wanted things to take home.

The road from Arusha to Tarangire passed through miles of land that had been denuded by agricultural development and by the controlled burning that the Masai carry out to clear land for cattle. Both Meryl and I were surprised at the huge number of Masai cattle herders, many under twelve years old, driving cattle just off the road. I’d always assumed that Masai communities remained more remote. Feroz and Martin said that twenty years ago, when the development was much less pronounced, herds of wildlife could be seen beginning just a couple of miles outside Arusha.

We drove across several, long low ridges, which Feroz identified as the outliers of the geologic rifting process responsible for Africa’s great rift valley. The continent is actually being pushed apart by a line of geological activity that runs from Mozambique to Syria. For me, the rift’s archaeological finds are its greatest interest: Many evolutionary biologists argue that early man evolved in the rift over the last several million years.

We arrived in Tarangire before lunch and popped into the park entrance visitor center, which was built a couple of years ago with American assistance. There was a short, five hundred foot nature trail to an observation deck, that, on inspection, was closed. But just as we were about to head back to the car I spotted, over the tall grass, our first zebra. I called to the rest of my family to come over, and we spent the next twenty minutes or more watching the zebra and a couple of wildebeest off in the distance.

Feroz and Martin had been manifestly unimpressed with my zebra spotting, and, five minutes after we got back in the car, I understood why: We drive through a herd of dozens of zebra, began seeing wildebeest and giraffe, and various sorts of antelope. We drove amazingly slowly – the excitement of seeing all the animals was still so fresh – and Feroz and Martin humored our requests for long photographic stops.

June 23: I’m torn about whether I’ll go on safari again. I loved the animals – we saw a superb variety of wildlife – and the African vistas. But the parks, at least the major parks in Tanzania, tightly restrict tourist movement. Tourists are generally not allowed outside of their cars except at their lodges, and none of the lodges we stayed at offered anywhere to walk or run. By the end of the trip, I had pretty well gone stir crazy, and, if I take another trip to Africa, I will shop around to find a park, or something just short of a park, that let me do much of my travel on foot.

Incidentally, I’m sure that areas like that exist in Tanzania, which, in addition to its national parks, has a large network of game preserves. The biggest difference, aside from the level of development allowed, is that tourists are allowed to hunt in the preserves. I had no idea before I arrived in Tanzania that the right price, on the order of $15,000, will purchase a permit legally to hunt not only gazelle, wildebeest, impala and the like, but elephants and the major cats. Apparently the numbers are such in Tanzania, tens of thousands when it comes to elephants, that the government believes it can afford to sell off licenses to hunt a few to the likes of former U.S. Secretary of State Jim Baker.

On reflection, I’ve decided that I do not oppose hunting great African game as long as the populations are protected. But I don’t really understand it: I’d love to learn to hunt ducks, and, in Africa, I can see the appeal of hunting a buffalo or some other edible animal. I fail to see the appeal of sport hunting for an elephant or cat that you can simply hang on the wall.

All of that is a long, round about way of saying that we spent the overwhelming majority of June 23 in the back of our Landcruiser. Feroz was trying to cram in as much as possible before Constance had to leave us on June 25 to return to the U.S. for a Fulbright orientation, and took us through Ngorongoro carter, Olduvai gorge and into the Serengeti, all in a day’s game drive. The day, however, got off to a wonderful start: We spotted two lions right off the road as we drove from our lodge back to the Tarangire park entrance.

Ngorongoro is one of the great attractions of Africa, a 200 square mile extinct volcanic crater that has year-round water and is home to some of the most approachable wildlife on earth. In our first drive across it (we spent much more time on the crater floor toward the end of our trip) we spotted baboons, a hyena, jackals, elephants, giraffe and hundreds of antelope. But the highlight was spotting, way off in the distance and only visible with a good pair of binoculars, a mother rhinoceros with her baby. Poaching in recent years has cut the number living in the crater from several hundred to 13, and spotting the pair was a real treat.

After Ngorongoro we headed up to the crater rim and drove out into the plains to see Olduvai gorge, where Mary and Louis Leaky unearthed three million year old hominid fossils. The gorge itself is unspectacular, no more than a few hundred feet deep, and arid. And our pre-human ancestors did not actually live in the gorge: Three million years ago the entire area consisted of low-lying plains, which were later buried under hundreds of feet of ash spewed out by volcanic activity. The gorge, carved out over the last quarter-million years by a seasonal river, cuts through the ash to provide archeologists with access to fossils embedded in lower layers. We didn’t actually see much during our visit, just a couple of ancient stone tools and a site where the Leakey’s unearthed one of their major finds. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the sense of staring out across the plains where some distant ancestor wandered.

We left Ngorongoro after 5:30, and had to drive illegally in the dark to make it to our lodge, which lay just outside the Serengeti national park.

June 24: “Serengeti” is the Swahili word for “plains” and the after-breakfast drive from Ndutu Lodge to the main entrance of Serengeti National Park passed through classic African vistas: Endless, dusty planes punctuated by low hills and occasional acacia trees. The government has done a superb job of protecting the park, and, while there is certainly no absence of tourist Land Cruisers, we drove for hours with virtually no sign of human settlement.

The park entrance is marked by a low hill. Though the hill rises no more than three or four hundred feet, the elevation is enough to trap additional rainfall that nourishes a layer of dense brush unlike any vegetation that manages to eke out an existence on the plains below. The hill also appeared to delineate some sort of line in the vegetation in the plains, with the park-side ever so slightly greener than the land we’d passed through.

We got our first taste of Serengeti wildlife within a half hour of leaving the park entrance. Martin and Feroz spotted something off to the left of the road and simply veered the car off the track, speeding through the bush to find a lion devouring a zebra carcass. After watching and photographing for a half-hour, we pushed on, and, during the course of our day, spotted three cheetah, lion cubs, elephant, a leopard in a tree, a crocodile (a smallish one), and countless birds. My dad, an increasingly avid birder, included birds in the list of wildlife that he prepared and which I’ve posted below.

June 25: We had an early morning game drive, and then it was off to the Serengeti airstrip to say farewell to Constance, who was starting a long trip back to the States so that she could make her Fulbright orientation program in Washington, D.C. The strip itself is grass, but was surprisingly busy. My sister was on a plane that must have seated fifteen, and three other planes were preparing to board passengers at about the same time.

After seeing Constance off we left for another day of game drives, the highlight of which was catching sight of our first treed lion. The lion and the leopard, but especially the lion, a much larger, more powerful looking animal, were good reminders that one should not climb trees in Africa.

June 26: The wildlife spotting in Tanzania so far exceeded any of our expectations that, by our fifth day, we, along with most of the other tourists, were content to drive by zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants and other common mammals in pursuit of cats, hyenas and other predators. We began to understand a bit Feroz’ desire to seek out particular types of predators, or a particularly good photographic shot of one, while passing by herds of animals that must excite Tanzanians about as much as American suburbanites are excited by deer eating in their backyards. And today, a day that Feroz staked out for spotting lions, was successful by that measure. We saw three of them in trees, getting some wonderful shots for our digital albums.

We were getting burned out of the driving by this point, and lobbied for a lazy afternoon. We did leave to hotel to drive over to a “hippo pool,” a singularly vile, stagnant pool in a river that drew upwards of a hundred hippos to wallow in their own filth. The stench notwithstanding, it was fascinating to watch them bob their heads up and down, gronk at each other, tussle, and yawn, showing off some of the most amazingly enormous teeth Meryl or I had ever seen.

The hippos in the pool were actually a second hippo sighting of the day for my mother and father. They’d been woken up in the middle of the night by a hippo grazing just outside their hotel window.

June 27: Martin drove us off into some remote corner of the park where we were permitted to take our car off the road, allowing us to drive to within feet of any animal we wanted. We could sense from the animals’ behavior that they were not as accustomed to tourists. Many shied away from the car, and even those that let the vehicle approach looked leery of any sudden movement by those of us riding in it. We did, however, succeed in approaching a pride of lions, including two males, camped out under a bush. There were at least a half-dozen of the cats in the bush, all within 15 feet of our car, one of the best animal sightings of the entire safari.

For lunch, Martin pulled under an acacia tree and set up a blanket in the shade. We got to eat al fresco, listening to the honks of the wildebeest and barks of the zebras that numbered thousands within our sight. I got just a whiff of the magic of a safari a century ago, dining under the sun and sleeping under the stars. On the way back we stopped to walk out part way across a decrepit footbridge over the crocodile-infested Grumeti river, spotting a dozen or so of the reptiles below waiting for one of us to slip.

On the way back we passed a family of giraffe, including one that was the smallest of the animals we’d seen. Martin and Feroz conferred and agreed that it was probably no more than three months old – and no more than a couple of inches taller than Meryl.

June 28: Our last day in the Serengeti. More game drives, and more spotting of the usual animals (in addition to the major finds I’ve mentioned throughout the blog, we saw nearly a dozen different types of antelope, numerous buffalo, warthogs, and sundry other animals that I never thought I’d see outside of a zoo). We also got our only chance to see vultures feasting on the carcass of a wildebeest.

June 29: We returned to Ngorongoro for the final day of our safari, hoping to see cats. We weren’t disappointed: Soon after we got to the crater floor Martin spotted a pair of cheetah, which we watched unsuccessfully stalk three gazelle. They managed to sneak fairly close, within a couple of hundred feet, before one moved too quickly and startled the gazelle. At lunch, by a lake that the park authority designated as one of the park’s few picnic areas, we got quite close to enormous bull elephant with two of the most beautiful tusks we saw on the entire trip. On a different scale, but much closer at hand, we saw a yellow-billed stork catch a fish just a few feet from where we were picnicking. Martin pointed out the stork’s strategy. It stuck its open beak in the water and used its right foot to drive fish towards it.

We got back to the hotel before five, giving dad and me time for a run and all of us some time for a few drinks together to celebrate the end of the trip. Dad and I ended up running around the hotel staff’s soccer field, joined by a waiter who took the job because the tourist industry pays much better than the accounting jobs he had studied for in college.

June 30: Park authorities sell access to the parks in 24 hour blocks, and are quite strict about ensuring that tourists leave before their time expires. Consequently, we had to get up early to make the park gate by eleven, though Martin’s driving got us there with an hour or more to spare. We headed back the towards Arusha on the same roads that we’d used at the beginning of our trip, arriving at the Arusha Cultural Village at about noon for a few hours of shopping. Mom picked up a few items but passed on more expensive carvings because we thought we might find better prices in town.

We stopped in town to have a late lunch at a little café-restaurant that I’d discovered on my first day in Tanzania, before I climbed Kilimanjaro, and then Meryl, Dad and I checked email while my mother shopped. Eventually all of us ended up at a lovely, no-pressure shop that succeeded in selling my mother a beautiful little carving. Meryl and I picked up some carved bookends for ourselves as well as a couple of presents for others. I also walked out with a tanzanite, which, at some point in the distant future, I’ll need to turn into a gift for my fiancée.