SAFARI!

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It has taken me a few days to process what happened this weekend. I have gone over it and over it in my head and I cannot come up with an appropriate way to put into words all that I experienced. What follows is my inarticulate attempt to conceptualize and verbalize one of the best things I have ever done. A group of us booked a three day, two night camping safari, scheduled to take us through Serengeti and Ngorongoro. I expected to see animals and vast expanses of Tanzanian countryside, but what I did not expect was to fall in love with this unforgiving and dangerous place. It is hard to explain, but when I try to understand the immense feelings that I have for this country, I think it comes from finally SEEING where I am. I have been in Tanzania for more than a month now, but I have not really absorbed where I am. Going on a long trip like this, seeing towns, villages, Maasai boma, kids herding animals, women singing in church choirs, Maasai dressed in their colorful blankets, and animals of every imaginable variety, I feel grounded and connected to the country I am calling home for the summer and I feel more acculturated than I ever imagined possible. Really getting out into the country has given me perspective and has left me with a deep sense of happiness and also a longing to bring my family back here to experience the same thing.

DAY 1: Safari for our group was fast and frantic. With only a few days and a lot of ground to cover, we left around 8:00 am on Friday and drove until almost dark to get to our camp in Serengeti. The first day was overwhelming. After a full day in the car, surrounded by beautiful scenery that shifted from city, to rural countryside, to jungle, to the vast plains of the Serengeti, we were excited and exhausted. That first day we managed to see all manner of animal (zebras, giraffes (in Swahili: twiga), Thompson’s gazelle, Grant gazelle, and LIONS). Within only a short time of arriving in the park, there were three lionesses sleeping only a few feet from the road. The largest had a radio transmitter collar on and the entire group seemed completely unconcerned that there were three large safari trucks so close at hand.

The camp itself was...camping (the same the world over). The bathroom was a smelly porcelain hole in the ground buzzing with flies. There were two large buildings at the camp. The first was a huge kitchen which consisted only of a large tile table upon which the cooks would set their small stoves and create magical feasts out of the meager supplies they managed to bring along. While not gourmet, the food on the safari never ceased to amaze me. We actually had homemade quiche one day for lunch! The second building was just a cement slab, waist high block wall topped with fencing, and a tin roof (I am assuming this area was to serve as our escape in case any wild beasts decided that we all smelled delicious and came to investigate). This building served as our dining hall, which we shared with other safari groups who were also in the camp. We each shared two-person tents and slept on foam mats with sleeping bags. The stars that night were the brightest I have ever seen and their foreign constellations were just a further reminder of how far from home we really were. My fears about wild animals proved unfounded as I successfully survived the night without being mauled; however, there was a close call at one point when I awoke to the sound of lions purring only to find out that my tent-mate snores like a purring lion.

DAY 2: We woke at 5:30 am to get on the road when the nocturnal animals were still roaming and had what seemed to be no luck at all to start the day. We drove and drove seeing only things we had seen before (zebras, more and more zebras). After what seemed like an eternity (and after some early morning hot chocolate) I was moments from bursting and ready to ask the driver to pull over at the most convenient bush when he announced that there was a male lion in the grass not 20 feet from us. Thankfully he delivered this news before I was bare butt to the Serengeti. The male was beautiful, huge! He was sleeping in the grass and would periodically lift his head to check out all the safari trucks that had arrived there. His exhaustion was soon explained when he stood, stretched, and gave the female lion sleeping next to him the best three seconds of her life. Apparently the males will claim a female for up to two weeks, so while three seconds is not particularly impressive, if the cumulative coital interaction over those two weeks is taken into account, he is not doing too badly!

The second day was great. In addition to lions mating, we saw lions sleeping, lion cubs, another male lion, a leopard, a cheetah and her three cubs, more grazers of all types, warthogs, tiny rabbit sized deer called dik-dik (which mate for life and are the cutest little things on the planet), baboons, a crocodile, hippos, and monkeys with sky-blue testicles (which we took to calling blue balled monkeys, although they have an actual name which is much less apt). I am sure we saw other things too, but for now, that is all I remember. When the morning game drive was over we headed back to camp to eat lunch (including the aforementioned quiche), tore down our tents, and headed to Ngorongoro. Driving 60 mph down a dirt road, scattering gazelles and zebra as we went, standing up with our heads poked out of the top of the vehicle was a beautiful feeling. That beautiful feeling may have been dust, but it was energizing and exciting nonetheless.

A few hours later we had climbed several thousand feet to the night’s camp on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. From the vast beige of the Serengeti to the lush green of the crater’s mountainous surroundings, it seemed like we had been transported to another world (primeval would be the most apropos description). The camp was centered around a huge moss draped tree and a large field that was populated by a herd of zebra (and very recently elephants since evidence of their presence dotted the grass and posed serious hazards to the unwary walker’s shoes). This camp was much the same as the first except it was cold. Really cold. Where the night before I had simply covered up with a sheet, this night required two sweatshirts, a sleeping bag, and a lot of shivering. Add to the cold the fear (apparently well-founded since several armed guards patrolled the perimeter of the camp) of vicious wild animals coming into the camp to eat us while we were too sleep addled and hobbled by our sleeping bag cocoons to run away, and you can understand why I doped myself with sleeping pills. Aside from a single nighttime stroll to answer nature’s call (I am pretty sure directly in front of the armed guard sitting in a safari truck near our tent), I slept better than I have in a month.

Another 5:30 am wakeup call had us up before the sun, so the mountain was shrouded in a thick fog that only added to the otherworldly feeling that seemed to hang in the air. There was no question about it: we were in for a magical day. After such success in Serengeti I was prepared to be a bit let down by the Crater. How could anything top lion sex and blue balled monkeys? I was wrong. The crater is a beautiful world unto itself. There is a soda lake in the middle, dotted with thousands of flamingos. Verdant green patches, watered by underground springs, crop up randomly and appear as oases in the parched earth. Huge pools of hippos grunt and yawn while ox pecker birds ride happily on their backs. We saw more lions, some hunting, others sleeping in the sun. There were hyena, more zebras and wildebeest (which often stay together since the zebras have good eyes and the wildebeest have good ears), baboons, elephants, and other animals that I cannot recall to my mind at this moment.

The only thing we missed was the rhinos. We saw three, but they were so far in the distance that they could only be seen through the binoculars, and even then it was an exercise in imagination to make myself believe that the gray blob was actually a rhino and not just a big rock.

In all, the trip was fantastic. For someone who began by claiming that she had no words, I realize that I have now written more than two pages worth of words. I am happy to say that I have seen some of the fantastical creatures that Tanzania houses and I am ecstatic to report that I feel more grounded and grateful for this experience as a result.

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Comments

[Mom]

See I told you camping was good. Very good blog.

[tzintern]

No.
Camping is NOT good. Safari IS good.