Serengeti/Africa

            The red dust of Tanzania’s iron-rich soil still clings to my athletic shoes.  I’ve been loathe  to clean them, wanting in this small fashion somehow to preserve the way the country, its wildlife and people, touched my soul. 

Just as friends who were veterans of similar trips had promised, the two-week game-viewing safari was life-changing in the fresh perspective I gained, despite some potentially hair-raising moments. And, well worth the nearly 24 hours of plane travel from my home in Portland, Or., direct to Amsterdam and then another direct flight to the East African country, a convenient if exhausting journey. Also well worth overcoming all the frightening if hyped fears of ebola,  the West Africa epidemic that did not hit Tanzania, all the way on the other side of Africa, which is three times the size of the United States.

  How to tell you now what it felt like to drive in northern Tanzania out onto the Serengeti, an experience that even our seasoned guides said has to be lived to understand. The word in the language of the Maasai, a predominant tribe in the area, means “endless plain.” As far as you could see, all the way to the distant horizon where they appeared as dark dots, (the national park is the size of Connecticut), herds of animals cavorted on the flat grasslands. 

Near our jeep, two young wildebeest, so inelegant in their beards, high front haunches and horns—some say God created them out of leftover parts—kicked up their rear legs with joy at the fresh green grass. Though it was only October, the rains were a month early and the annual migration had begun of wildebeest and zebra from the woodlands where they spent the dry season back onto the Serengeti, the largest single movement of wildlife left on earth.

It was almost as though you’d come upon the Garden of Eden, a place where nature and the animals rule, not man.  The only humans allowed are tourists with guides in permitted jeeps like ours and park rangers who work to stop poachers after meat and trophies. Even the Maasai are kept out with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats.  Since man largely poses no threat, the animals seemed oblivious to us, restricted as we were to the rough gravel roads that traverse the park.

The plains were thick with strings of the moving animals, the striped flanks of the zebra jostling into the browns and greys of the wildebeest. Zablon Sunday, the head Tanzanian guide on our safari with Overseas Adventure Travel, said some park officials estimated the number of wildebeest at three million, double earlier counts, and nearly half a million zebras. Strung head to tail they would stretch all the way from New York to Hawaii.

 The two species enjoy a symbiotic relationship.  The wildebeest smell that the rains have come but they don’t have the zebra’s brain power to remember how to get there so they team up, Sunday said.  They come for the grasses which contain the minerals needed for their offspring. The zebras are due in December and January while the wildebeest give birth in February. They stay till May and June when they again move on to greener pastures.

  There was a palpable feeling of relief among the dust-covered animals, the smells of the sweat from their long journey and fresh dung everywhere. They joined the year-round resident animals like antelopes, giraffes, elephants and Cape buffalo.  Warthogs with their small tusks ran among them, their tails high in the air.

  There are over 450 different birds on the Serengeti, including exotics like the ostrich and the pink flamingo. Here in the tropics, even the lowly Superb Starling is bright with its metallic blue green upper parts and contrasting red orange belly.

But, just like our lives, this was not all paradise. The large predators were also here. We saw one rogue male, scars on his nose and blood on his teeth, with his fresh kill, a young Cape Africa buffalo, next to the gravel roadway. The leopards were in wooded sections of the park, stretching out on the limb of one of the tall thorned acacia trees, waiting for nightfall and their hunt. In the tall grass, a cheetah patiently eyed a Thomson’s gazelle, the black racing stripe on its side. We didn’t wait long enough to see if it could outrun the cat.

We encountered more than one lion sleeping off a heavy kill.   One male, his mane ruffling in the wind, lay spoon fashion with his scarred mate in a small sequestered area among rocky outcroppings.

Their ears occasionally twitched at insects but they appeared undaunted by our presence in our jeep.

The scenes stirred something in my bones, my blood, my very genes.  This sense of witnessing how the world must have been once at the very beginning.  The Serengeti is not far from the Olduvai Gorge where Mary Leakey in 1978 discovered the footprints of our earliest known ancestors, the hominids known as Australopithecenes from more than three million years ago.

No cattle drivers or farmers here.  The animals were doing quite well at maintaining nature’s balance all on their own. I felt humbled and reverent and in awe.

 But, I also recognized how raw and dangerous and right there in front of us all this was.   The camp for our group of 16 was in the Serengeti in a clearing up from the woods along a river.  We had lots of amenities, including three-course meals.  But, we stayed in tents, movable tents erected over wooden stays. Each came with a flushable toilet and a shower of sorts (solar heated water tumbled out of bucket on top of you).

But they were still tents.  That meant the thickness of cloth, between us and the wilderness.   Tents that zipped shut, top to bottom and side to side.  That first night after our meal in the dining tent, I asked one of the Tanzanians operating the camp, “You do patrols during the night, don’t you?”

  “Oh, no,” he answered.  “We don’t have any guns.  If something attacks, then we are doing something very wrong.  After we zip you in, we don’t go out.  This is the animals’ home.”

Instead, they gave us a whistle, a little silver whistle like bobbies once had in England. But, we were under orders not to blow it unless “an animal is in your tent. Or we could get killed when we come running.”

All that was in my head when the camp staff, sweeping the path with their flashlights,  walked us back to our tents in the darkness.  Right before I was zipped in, the man asked me, “Do you hear the lion?” He reminded me, just like the written instructions inside the tent, not to go out till daylight.

No worry on that part.  Foolish as it felt, I stuffed a dirty sock in the little hole left between the perpendicular zippers. I’d read about black mambas, the fastest snakes on earth. Didn’t help that the guides said the snakes don’t want to be around us. I‘d also read that 20,000 thousand people die every year in Africa from snake bites.

I had no choice but to trust my guides.  Once I turned out the weak solar powered lamp overhead, my world was totally dark.   I didn’t move the first few hours, listening and yes, heard the “hrumph , hrumph” of the lions calling to each other in the coolness of the night.  Followed by the skittish “whoop, whoop” of the hyena. The spotted version, the very kind we’d seen during our game ride, can weigh up to 180 pounds, and they eat their prey while still alive. Then parts of the tent, rolled up to create windows out of screening, flapped in the wind.

I slept only sporadically on the hard camp bed, ruing my choice of having a single on this trip.  Finally, I got up the courage to go to the toilet. I sat on the contrived seat looking out the screen, sure that the lumps I saw outside in the tall grasses were Cape buffalo. They liked to sleep between the tents, seeing them not as tents but as protection, we were told.  The animals are unpredictable and among the most dangerous of African animals to hunt. My throat tight, I scurried across the uneven floor back to my bed.

By early morning, I must have gotten some sleep. Drowsy,  I heard the gentle urging outside by a member of the camp staff, “Jambo, Jambo,” hello in Swahili. Then, a “heh, heh,” he seemed to be enjoying my early awakening.  “Jambo, jambo,” I replied or he wouldn’t stop because we needed to rise early for our game drive while it was still cool and the animals active.

The added incentive for my compliance was the warm water I knew he was pouring in a basin outside. I unzipped the tent and stuck my head outside to look.  Steam coming up in the basin.  No animals around, I emerged. With caution I turned to look around the side of the tent, to the place where I'd feared the buffalo slept.   Those humps I saw, they were nothing but bent over grass.

I don’t know if it was fatigue from the long days riding on dusty bumpy roads viewing animals or trust in the guides’ reassurances of our safety,  but by the second night of  our four in the Serengeti, I was falling asleep listening for the sounds of the animals.  It came to me later that I would not have felt as close to the animals if we hadn’t camped that way. A guest in their home.

Only later did I learn from one of the guides that at times, they had to drive in the jeeps to pick up the guests at their tents because of danger. Either because they saw a lion and then it disappeared or they saw the tell-tale droppings of the buffalo.

When I recall my trip, the animals are foremost in my mind since it was a safari. But, I need also to say a few words about the Tanzanian people. Everyone I met was kind and welcoming and generous, despite the fact the country is poor. Eighty-five percent of the people still live off subsistence farming, the life expectancy only 53.

 Safari tourism is a major factor in their economy but we must have looked ridiculous to them at times as we moved from parks to animal preserves in our jeeps, converted four-by-four trucks with pop-up roofs for game viewing, that would converge in clusters near an animal.

We followed rules to never interfere with an animal or a hunt. Still, I saw one group at a water hole pull out tables, red and white checked cloths and bottles of wine to have a party, a line of softball-sized elephant dung right before them and the big animals off not far away in a clearing. It occurred to me that we tourists, most from the United States, had probably contributed in our travels to the global warming that adds to the threats to the wild animals and that probably also contributed to the month-early return of the rains.

There was a generosity to the Tanzanians’ welcome that went deeper than money, a sincerity I found among the people I met.  To celebrate my birthday on the Serengeti, the camp staff, members of the Bantu tribe, donned silly costumes and did a dance as well as making me a birthday cake. I shall never forget it.

The 53 children in the sixth grade class at the Rhotia primary school near the main city of Arusha stood for us and sang the Tanzanian anthem, proud in their worn maroon and white uniforms. They knew how to say “hello” in English and thanked us for the school booklets we were able to provide.

Poverty is everywhere, including the open market near the main city of Arusha where all the rejected clothing and shoes that Goodwill and other charities can’t sell even by the pound in America finally land.  I saw one woman in a Michigan wolverines sweatshirt and endless children in tattered tee-shirts with designer names like Calvin Klein still visible.

The Maasai—members of one bomo where families live in the old way in mud-dung houses with thatch roofs—invited us to visit.  We watched as they milked their herds of cows, sheep and goats, their whole settlement protected only by a large circular thornbush fence.  Their diet is all from the milk, blood and meat of their animals. They are tall and quiet and elegant.

Our guide pointed out the bomo of one old man, now almost 100, who had 22 wives, so many children that the country had to build him his own elementary school..

I came back home elated but exhausted, to yet another appliance in my newly purchased condo having gone on the fritz.  Unfortunately, it was my washing machine and I’d already spot cleaned all my safari clothes in anticipation of washing them.   

At first, I was dismayed. But, then I thought of the Serengeti and the life and death struggles that go on there every day.  I looked at the red dust on my shoes and I managed to smile.