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Published: October 5th 2006
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It was one year ago that martin died. How do you adjust to that? I don’t know. What I do know is that you have to remember the good times. The smiles. The explosion of sudden laughter.
What I also know is that he would have hated being in a dusty dirty truck for five days. He might have ruined his leather jacket for one.
But he, like anyone who knows my luck, wouldn't have been surprised that BOTH the safaris I’d booked (one as a back up) fell through the day before I was due to leave. So it was a mad rush to reorganize another trip and I ended up having to leave from Arusha (two hours away) rather than Moshi as planned. My route also changed at the last minute as I had to fit in with what the others on the tour wanted. So I sacrificed a visit to the flamingo-occupied Lake Manyara for more time in the plains of the Serengeti. My traveling companions turned out to be Yolita and Emil - a Dutch couple from Amsterdam. Two of the most beautiful people I’ve met and damned intelligent too - she a molecular biologist
elephants in the bush
next time i go on safari i will have a bigger lense. i will i will i will and he an airline pilot. I’d been worried about who’d I’d end up on safari with, but as soon as they suggested stopping off to buy some beers I knew we’d get on.
Our first stop was Tarangire - known for it’s baobab trees and elephants. And it was indeed full of baobab trees and elephants. Baby elephants just cutting their first tusks, big elephants, small elephants, medium-sized elephants. These pachyderms are never small. A 1 month baby weighs 90 kg, a mama 5000kg and a full grown bull up to 7000kg. They are often responsible for the destruction of land areas merely by trudging their way through them decimating trees as they go. Elephant families range in size from just two (mama and baby) to as many as 30, each with their distinct personalities. Sometimes families travel together forming groups of over 100. I guess kind of like small villages. Young male elephants take off from their mother’s families at a certain age, keeping themselves to themselves, not unlike British teenage boys.
I don’t know how many of you have seen baobab trees (I know a few of you have) but they are mind-boggling. Huge and sprawling
say jambo to the jumbo
one of the guys at tarangire - with trunks of up to 10 meters wide they look just like they’ve been uprooted and turned upside down with their ungainly roots splaying across the sky. Which I guess is how the legend derived that the spirits of these trees used to wander around the globe until one day god got fed up of them and turned them on their heads to literally keep them in their place.
We also spotted ostriches, oversized comical birds with redundant feathers. I’ve only seen one before in the wild - on a wide open stretch of Zimbabwean road, but up close they’re much bigger than I ‘d thought with long goofy feet, though I just kept thinking about how good they taste.
Giraffes are another incongruous looking animal. They seem to move in slow motion and always look contented. We saw 2 juveniles so watchful that I started to think they were statues. The reminded me of sentinels guarding a tree and when they move they are like huge wavering flowers.
That night, I stayed in the basic but very comfortable Fiji lodge over looking Lake Manyara. The bed was large. In fact most beds in Tanzania seem
to be large. And comfortable. They are made from big solid wooden frames and are all often as big as my own king size at home. I think it has something to do with the abundance of teenage carpenters financed by ngos… there certainly is a plethora of mattresses to be bought on many a street corner.
Zanzibari semadari beds are even more luxurious (I thought to myself as I clambered into my four poster last night). They are indestructible, often inlaid with painted panels and silk edged mozzie nets. As you stretch out on clean linen sheets, you can’t help but feel like Princess Salme - the 19th century sultan’s daughter who taught herself to write and notoriously ran off with a Hamburg trader.
The night at the hotel was to be the only decent night’s sleep I got.
The next day we headed to the vast plains of the Serengeti. When you’re surrounded by just grassland and sky, you are indeed tiny. And then, hidden behind a rocky coppice you spy something even tinier. A curled up lion cub, barely ready to take on the world, it’s mother off hunting. Judging from the lion hunts
masai bottle
one way to carry your booze we saw though, this little guy was going to have a long time to wait for his supper.
Unlike cheetahs with their 120mph speed limit, lions are slow are lazy and only make successful kills 50% of the time. More so than any of the other big cats, lions improvise while hunting.
Though it does seem that lions know something intrinsically that I am only just learning. When you take on a big project you need all the help you can get. One lion will not tackle a buffalo, but a group will, with one going for the throat, another holding it down and another suffocating it. We watched a buffalo hunt. 4 lionesses staking out in the grass and 2 lazy old mustafas watching. But one girl sprang too early and the ambush was foiled.
So it was 2 days of long dusty and bumpy game drives followed by nights of dusty hard ground. I didn’t know if it was warthogs or bushpigs we heard in the night but there was no way I was getting out of my tent for a pee, particularly after we had all sat round telling each other about the mankillers of
Tsavo - the true tale of 2 lions made famous by the Michael Douglas film ‘Ghost in the Darkness’’. They gradually picked off over 20 people as the railway line was being built through Kenya and Tanzania. Each night the Indian workers would wake to the screams as another of the team was mauled to death and each dawn his half eaten remains would be mourned.
As it happens we saw our own mauling as a mama cheetah and her 3 babies tucked into lunch. For our own meals, Mudi the chef, who kept his knitted woollen hat on most of the time, rustled up some of the best food I’ve had in Tanzania. It’s amazing to have the tastiest, flakiest, crumbliest quiche in the middle of the bush. What I didn’t enjoy so much was camping on the rim of the Ngorogoro crater. Having been told by John, our self professed playboy guide (‘’I like women, but they are expensive’. He said. ‘’you have to hit and run’) that it wouldn’t be cold, I only just about kept warm. And that was only thanks to 2 sleeping bags, 2 masai blankets, a bottle of - Kognagi - the
best Tanzanian rot gut available and talking a lot of hot air about british and tanzanian politics with the cooks. Meanwhile John and the rest of the group sensibly went off to a lodge for the night though they missed the entertainment of the elephants raiding the camp’s water supply.
After 5 days in the bush, part of me was glad to get back to an empty house, a hammock and a glass of red wine. The scenery, the animals, the space and the light were all breathtaking. But I will never ever camp at the Ngorogoro crater again.
Rachel : let me know how kickboxing goes
Bekka : good luck with the rest of the house project
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Mandy
non-member comment
Brilliant
Hi Suzie so pleased I joined your blog. This was very touching and funny at the same time I love your sense of humour. Take Care Lots of Love and xxxxx