Tanzanian Safari

June 29th - July 21st 2012

The first time I saw one of them all I could do, admittedly, was stare. He was standing on the side of the road in black robes, holding a black and white spear and his face was caked with some sort of white paint which depicted some sort of strange tribal insignia. Driving down the highway, we proceeded to see dozens of them. They stared out coldly and menacingly, not making eye contact but somehow staring right through you. They seemed void of energy, their weight resting on their spears as they stood in the sweltering heat of the Tanzanian inland.

“Massai Warriors,” our guide and driver, Rabbiel, said without taking his eyes off the road. “He is to be cut as a man,” he went on, aware of the fact that I was interested in these warriors and quite perplexed as to why they were standing on the side of the road wearing face paint. I was now able to see lots of them from the window of the jeep we were driving in. We were on our way to Tangarire National Park, our first park of the trip. The drive took us through a scorched and barren land that seemed to carry on in every direction unchanging. The only presence of habitation could be seen by primitive mud and dung huts that the Massai lived in. The Massai, a forgotten people in a forsaken land, unable to adapt in a growing country, eked out existences pandering to tourists and squabbling with rival tribes. “Massai is real Tanzania,” Rabbiel followed up with as he turned the jeep off the road and we crossed the entrance into the national park.

A Massai Warrior from the road

We had arrived in Africa 2 days earlier via Cairo. The trip was long but uneventful. We arrived in Dar-Es-Salam at 7 in the morning to the onslaught of taxi cabs drivers, traffic and money changers vying for customers. We took a taxi to our hostel where we were staying for the night. We checked in and did little more than crash out for a couple of hours. Becky and I had supplemented both legs of our journey with xanax to aid in the less-than-comforable standards of Egyptair and were currently either still experiencing a euphoric high or suffering from a debilitating pill hangover, or perhaps both – slaloming back and forth in a xanax induced fog, not able to discern between the 2 but realizing that neither one of them was doing wonders for our conversation. We woke up a few hours later, energized and ready to walk the streets of Dar.

Market in Dar before our bus ride to Arusha

We ate great food at a known restaurant and met this guy that toured us around the city only to pitch us “his” paintings that he had been carrying. Though we felt no obligation to buy them, we liked them all the same so we bought them for what turned out to be twice as much as we should have but we got a tour out of it all the same. Dar was an interesting city that was trying really hard to be modern but failing in all the details. High rise cement buildings would be on a foundation of a street that was barely paved and large markets would be surrounded by an infestation of enormous, paralytic spiders and their accompanying webs. Dar would not be a city that I would find easy to live in.

We went to bed early that night, needing to wake up before sunrise to catch a bus out of town. The bus ride ended up being 5 hours longer than it was supposed to have been. We had to stop to wait for an accident to be cleared and no traffic could pass in the meantime. Apparently, road accidents are the leading cause of death in the country, blind take-overs and displays of attention deficiency were in no short supply while we were on the bus.

We arrived in Arusha, the safari hub in the northern part of the country, and were greeted by a warm and friendly representative for the company that we had signed up with. He took us to our hotel and was easy to forgive us for any niceties we were unable to exhibit after being on a bus for 14 hours. He told us that we would be picked up early the next day by our guide and would then commence our week long safari.

The next morning we met our guide, Rabbiel. Rabbiel was a middle aged man born in a village on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He had an imperfect smile that seemed to somehow radiate authenticity and spoke to us with the diction that must have been learned from a thesaurus. Instead of referring to animals aging, he would comment on their morphology. Cliffs were sheer embankments, pregnancies were incubation periods and somehow, without ever understanding the errant etymological path he used to get here, going to the bathroom was finishing your expression.

Thanks for everything!

The trip would last 6 days and would take us through 4 national parks over about 500 kilometers. Becky and I were the only tourists on this safari and the only other people who were with us were our driver, Rabbiel and our private cook, Kitoi. The trip that we had paid for had us staying in local campgrounds for the entire time but somehow on the first night, with serendipitous fortune, we arrived at a lush campground with comfortable twin beds placed in over-sized tents down hill from a plush dining room setup.

Shhh...free upgrade

No reasons were given nor inquiries begged as to the grounds of our upgrade. A meddling of that nature would only seem to end in disadvantageous rectification. Either we would be rerouted to the campsite we belonged in or we would be asked to pay what was sure to be a lot more than what we had previously paid for. We simply drank our free coffee and lounged in complimentary sofas and tried our very hardest to fit in to this place that we obviously had no business being in.

The first park we went to was Tangarire National Park. A beautiful park with enormous Bao Bao trees, rolling plains and more elephants than I had ever seen in my life. We saw zebras, wildebeests, leopards, and, of course, lions. Very early in the trip through the national park, while Becky and I were standing in the backseat of the Land Cruiser, peering through binoculars from the canopy of the jeep, a bolt had come loose on the side of the jeep (made aware by the incessant rattling) that warranted Rabbiel's immediate attention. Innocuously, he pulled over to the side of the road in front of a herd of Zebra and wildebeest and proceeded to get out to assault the problem. Becky and I were taking pictures and watching the herd through the binoculars when we noticed the herd get up quite hastily and proceed to flee in every which direction. I'm not sure if Rabbiel heard us talking about this or if he heard the herd himself but with impressive agility and spryness he abandoned the bolt dilemma, scrambled to the other side of the jeep and plunged himself headlong into the driver side. Bewildered, Becky and I came down from the canopy to find an out of breath, panting and obviously stricken Rabbiel. “Lions” he finally muttered before he told us that he would fix the problem further down the trail.

We never saw the lions chasing after the herd but he said that nothing else would have made them move like that and that if they caught a scent of him and gave chase he would be dead. Rabbiel had a very candid way of discussing such things.

“Ah yes, you are flying to Zanzibar by the airplane. Do not worry, the planes are better than before. Before, the planes could be destroyed by the winds and everyone would die.”

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“So Rabbiel, how dangerous are the boa snakes in the park?” one of us would ask after seeing an enormous snake in the grass.

“Oh yes, very dangerous. The boa constrictors will break your body until you are dead and then they will eat you.” Rabbiel replied matter of factly.

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“We must be very careful of the lions in the parks. They show extreme docility to the ones in the jeeps but the ones outside of the jeeps are prone to be attacked and killed with their mouths.”

I guess it wasn't until just then that I understood the gravity of where we were. Often times I would forget where I was and notice a place that I would like to climb down from the jeep and explore before I awoke to the reality that if I did, my demise would probably be met by some rather large incisors attached to a rather large carnivorous African animal.

For the next few days, we continued to drive around national parks in Northern Tanzania. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever done. Day in and day out, we would chance upon giraffes, rhinos, hippos, lions, cheetahs and hundreds of types of birds. Thousands of pictures were taken and hundreds of questions were asked to which Rabbiel always seemed to know the answer. Whether it was gestation periods of giraffes, elephants' death rituals, lion mating habits or the exact make-up of rhino tusks, Rabbiel was able to give me a in-depth answer. (By the way, as some sort of self-reflection at the time of writing this I wonder, with questions like these, how was I ever able to find people to hang out with me of the female persuasion.)

It must be the hat and scarf!

We spent a few nights camping in the Serengeti with Rabbiel and Kitoi. Serengeti comes from an old Massai word meaning “endless plain”. We spent 2 days traversing all parts of the Serengeti and it continued to leave me awe-struck by the length and breadth of the park. It was enormously beautiful. On our first night in the camp, we were told, with stern seriousness, under no circumstances were we allowed to leave the confines of the camp. We were either in the jeep viewing animals in the park or in the campground trying to find a safe-haven from the potentially malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

In the weeks before the trip, Becky and I had gone around to different clinics getting vaccinations and immunizations for things we might encounter in Africa. We received Typhoid, Yellow Fever and Tetanus shots and aquired pills to stave off Malaria. Although appropriately-measured precautions were taken in the attempt to avoid the contraction of African afflictions and die a cold-sweated death, you couldn't help thinking about the inherit danger of getting bit by hundreds of blood sucking and potentially dangerous mosquitoes.

A precaution that we did not know needed to be taken was against the Tsetse fly. Tsetse flies ran rampant in the Serengeti while we were there. Big, ugly gray bastards whose pestilence not only hurt a surprising amount but could also be dangerous. If you get bit by too many flies you can suffer from Sleeping Sickness where you nod off to sleep and could possibly slip into a coma. So when Rabbiel told us that we weren't going to be viewing in the park from 12 to 3pm, he heard little opposition from Becky or myself. I guess a good thing about the Tsetse flies was that lions also needed to take refuge from the flies. When we re-entered the park in the late afternoon, it was easy to spot lions sleeping and hanging out on branches of trees. Because the Tsetse flies were so big and heavy they couldn't fly very high so lions didn't have to work very hard to get out of their range of their nasty, welt-forming bites which made for perfect places to be seen by Becky and I with our binoculars.

The last park we went to was the Ngorongoro National Park. The part of the park that we were visiting was actually within an enormous crater high up in the mountains. This is the only park where we could see rhinos roaming the grasslands. Since the 70's, Northern Tanzania has been restoring the rhino population that was driven to near extinction due to poaching them for their “aphrodisiac” tusks that fetched quite the price in Asia. In the 70's, only 7 rhinos were left and now they are up to 25 which, apparently, was a huge success.

Our campsite

The national park also has strong evidence of being the site of the earliest ancestors of humans. It is considered to be the seat of humanity, the place in which the earliest known specimens of the human genus originated from. There has been a book I have been reading on and off for the last five months and I remembered a quote that really stuck with me and I was reminded of it while standing in the place of the inception of human evolution.

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you.” ---Bill Bryson – A Brief History of Nearly Everything.  

 

 

Whether we were postulating the genus of humans or peering at the endless plain of the Serengeti, our Tanzanian safari experience was nothing short of remarkable. It left us with an awe-inspired wonderment of this enormous continent that spawned such beautiful landscape, thousands of species or extraordinary animals and of course, the epicenter of Becky and I's ancient ancestry. The men, women and children that spent hundreds of thousands of years perpetuating their DNA down through the lines of heredity to allow the two of us to meet, come together, and make a trip back to where it all started. In a strange way it was a rather spiritual experience and one that I will carry with me for years to come.  

Where it all began: Ngorongoro Cater National Park

After the crater, we drove back to Arusha, bid Rabbeil and Kitoi and heartfelt goodbye accompanied with an large wad of cash as a tip that was well deserved and will mean more to them than we will ever be able to contemplate and made our way to the airport. Phase 1 of our Tanzanian trip was ending and we were entering phase 2: Zanzibar. 

 

 

Books Read:

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson 

 

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The Lycian Way

June 15th - June 23rd 2012

So with 2 weeks off that Becky had to work, I thought it would be a perfect time to take a trip that I knew she had absolutely zero interest in doing and was something I had wanted to do ever since I had heard about it in early 2009. I would walk a section of the Lycian Way. The Lycian Way is a through-hike stretching 510 kilometers between Fethiye and Antalya. I had it all planned out. I'd fly into Dalaman and then bus it to Kas. From Kas, I would spend the next 2 weeks hiking through ruins, passing beautiful coastlines and walking through Turkish villages. I had my sleeping bag, bought a tent and found my compass.

I had spent the previous 2 weeks studying a guide book of the hike and making notations of trail updates I found online. I learned the Turkish words I would need to know on the trail that I had absolutely no use for in the city like “way-makers”, “foot path” and “potable”. I bought a sun hat, found sunscreen and checked weather reports. Not only did I check weather reports for the next 2 weeks but I checked the previous 5 years of weather reports for the same 2 weeks in June I was planning to walk. June isn't the best time to walk the trail but it is in no way out of the question. I counted on it being about 32 degrees for most of the trip which was, with the amount of water I was going to be carrying and the times of day I was planning on walking, incredibly doable.

When I finished work, I flew down to Dalaman and jumped on a bus south to Kas. I bought 6 liters of water, grabbed some trail food and started walking outside of the city heading in the direction of the trail head and eventually, Olympos. My total trip had me walking about 175 kilometers and ending up on the beaches of Olympos where I would spend the last few days of the trip sitting on the beach, reading a book and allowing my feet to recover.

A view of the coastline from the trail

The onset of the hike was great. I had a bounce in my step and I marveled at everything I encountered. I was very happy to be hiking and out in the open. I spent the first day walking along beautiful coastlines with views of the sea that were bluer than any other water I had ever seen and speckled with dozens of jagged islands that looked both undiscovered and uninhabitable. These beautifully formidable islands added greatly to the beauty of the walk. With every break, I observed a beautiful, serene stillness that seemed to be all around me. At the end of the first day, I trudged into this village looking for a flat place to pitch a tent and refill my 6 liters of water that had been quickly disposed of and surprisingly insufficient. I found that along the way all the places I was told I could fill up with water were bone dry. But I, undeterred and exhibiting worrisome indifference to this dilemma, simply figured I was not rationing my water well enough and scaled back my intake.

I bought some food from the villagers and they allowed me to stay on their land and refill my bottles. I spent the first night talking with some villagers who told me that they hadn't seen anyone walking the trail in 10 days and that they figured the season to be over due to the onslaught of atypical heat. It hadn't registered to me until that moment that it might have been hotter than what I thought it was supposed to be. She told me that the last 3 weeks had been right around 42 degrees with little variation accounting for: 1. Little to no water in local wells or my water bottles 2. No people on the trail doing the same thing as me and 3. A pounding headache that I was now attributing to my serious dehydration.

Again, undeterred to such compromising trifles, I adapted my plan and forged ahead. I would wake up earlier, walk until midday, find a tree to sit under until the heat subsided at around 4pm-ish and then continue on to my next destination. Bam. Problem solved and headache sure to be vanquished.

Well, the heat reprieve I was banking on left something to be desired. I got up and hit the trail at 6am but it might as well have been 9am. It was balls hot as soon as the sun was up except today was different as I was conscious of it. I was walking about the same amount as I did yesterday. Yesterday was 18 kilometers and today would be 21. 12 miles. Piece of cake. Up and over 3 ridges and then a descent to the village. The way-markers were good, the trail was negotiable and although more tired than the day before, I still retained a bounce in my step and an unwavering determination to keep walking. I had every intention of making it to Olympos no matter how hot it was.

Well, it turned out I needed to stop and run for cover a lot earlier than expected. It was 10:30 am when I was crawling under a tree, escaping the scorching hot sun and trying to conserve energy expended during my cool morning walk. I read, wrote notes and observed donkey-carts being lead by villagers that seemed utterly perplexed by my presence on the side of the road in this heat. 4 pm-ish ended up being about 6 pm-ish when I rose from my marginal provider of coolness and soldiered on. I made my way the remainder of the 21 kilometers to this beautiful valley floor, unable to recall the last 4 hours of my walk and also unable to disregard the fact that I still had not see any other hikers.

I slept horribly; Constant cramping in my legs and oscillating between seeking refuge in my sauna-like tent and the mosquito-laden open air. Sleep did not come easily and 5:30 am came far too quickly but with the added addition of hundreds of mosquito bites (apparently the mosquito repellent I bought in Turkey was less repellent, more sugar water). The heat was not what I planned it would be and it was causing slight discomforts but I pushed on nonetheless.

I filled up my water at a local mosque and hit the trail early. To get to where I wanted to be this evening (a water source) I would not be afforded the opportunity to post up under a tree for an entire work day and wait for the heat to subside. Water, shade or not – I had 23 kilometers to walk to get to my next reliable water source and village. I could not be certain, but today definitely felt hotter than yesterday, and yesterday was surely hotter than the first day which was 42 degrees. The serene stillness I observed 2 days ago now left me acutely aware of the absence of any wind or cross-breeze.

I set off up and over the pass that would then saddle back to the coastline and carry on inundulatingly for hours winding in and out of views of the coastline and the islands that seemed to follow me everywhere I went. I actually remember very little of this part of the day. Whatever my body was forced to do to conserve energy, water and allow me to put one foot in front of the other left no allowance for day dreaming, note taking or, as I would later realize, photography. I guess even though I was consciously making bad decisions, walking into mind-boggling heat, subconsciously I was making necessary arrangements to get me to my village...up until about 4 pm.

Day 2 campsite

I stumbled to a stop to have a drink of water that seemed to be depleting with accelerated sieve-leeking speed when I felt a creeping suspicion of impending projectile vomit washing over me. I bent over, realized this was actually happening, assumed the position and watched as I regurgitated precious water and bits of lunch like a shotgun blast -  cascading all over the surrounding rocks and dirt. And just as I had finished voiding my body of the very substance that seemed to be preventing me from keeling over, my backpack, reaching an inertic tipping point as I stood bent over retching, propelled itself forward and forced me downwards on an unalterable trajectory into my newly formed puddle of excreta.

I lay there, ascertaining and quantifying my situation, wondering A) How much water I had left in my pack and B) If, just by chance, maybe I had turned the tide of my wayward leaning luck train and somehow didn't just plummet into my own vomit?

The answers were little and no, respectively.

Tapping into an unknown resource, I picked myself up off the vomit-muddied earth and assessed that I had about an hour more of walking to do, waning sunlight and a puny amount of water. None of which were being helped by my woozy stagnation in this spot. I got my bearings, found my path and plotted onward in a daze of dehydration and confusion. I finally reached the village that had a potable drinking source, filled up my water and proceeded to curl up in a ball on my mat, drinking thimble sized cups of water and waited for the nausea and blinding headache to dissipate.

Lycian sarcophagi along the trail

My brain was turned to mush, I wasn't thinking clearly, and I was quite confused as to where I was. Too much water would cause me to throw up but not enough would somehow cause me and my mat to spin around in circles in the most annoying way. I spent the rest of the evening curled up on my mat too deprived of energy to even swat the mosquitoes off of my face. Sunstroke is no joke.

I woke up late the next day after another sleepless night, nursing myself back to acceptable hydration standards and contemplating the future of this trip. I had read that the water sources were few and far between for about the next week and that its not advisable in hot temperatures. I walked into town to buy some food and inquire about the trail. My brain, not operating on all its cylinders, was definitely affected in the foreign language department which made communication slow at first, but I eventually conveyed what was going on and they were very surprised that I was walking and also very adamant that I stop immediately. They told me that there was no water on the trail and absolutely no shade to take refuge in. I would need at least 12 liters in this heat. It ended up being 45 degrees yesterday with expectations to rise in the next few days and the wind, which I never felt in the first place, was expected to die down completely.

So that was it, I left the trail. It was too stupid to continue no matter how much I wanted to and it was supposed to get worse in the next few days. Not happening. Super pissed off and disappointed, I took a boat taxi to the nearest bus station and boarded it heading south. I had no idea of what to do but decided to go to the place that I was supposed to end up at, Olympos. I talked to Becky who made me a reservation at a hostel (and who was also very pleased that I had tabled the hike) and I made a plan to go sit on a beach for a day or 2 and then sort things out from there. Since I still had 10 days before I flew back to Istanbul, I figured that would be as good of a place as any to waste some time at. Becky told me how to get there and I made my way in that direction.

Driving into Olympos was not what I expected. I expected sandy beaches, umbrellas and open air cabanas but we were driving through forested roads, winding our way through dry river beds and past tacky buildings dressed up as tree houses. Whatever the allure of this place was, it was still alluding me and I'm sure my sunny disposition wasn't helping. I still carried around with me an air of pissed-offness that I couldn't seem to shake and so far, Olympos wasn't helping.

Olympos Beach

I checked in, surveyed the place, marveled at the wonder of the air-conditioned room I was staying in and then did a double take when they told me that both breakfast and dinner would be included in the very cheap price that I had been quoted for the room. The hostel was laid out with several open-air, ottoman style sofas on stilts where people were hanging out, reading books and drinking beers. They told me that I could run a tab on the room and just pay when I left-eerily tantalizing words that sound so attractive and yet are never a good idea.

I made myself at home, hung out on the ottoman couches and read my book for awhile. I later made my way down to the beach that was unlike anything I had ever seen. As soon as you walk down, through the old ruins of the ancient Lycian town, the remnants of the city gave way to a beautiful beach, a cliff face and old defensive towers and fortifications perched up above the beach, overlooking the pristine water. The place instantly thrusted me back hundreds of years and gave me a strong appreciation of this place and its obvious significance in history.

I had planned to stay in Olympos for a day and I ended up staying for 9. I loved it there. I met interesting people, had great discussions, read books, drank beers, ate great food and got a sunburn. I walked the ruins, went cliff diving, took a night hike to the eternal flame and stayed up late talking about random things. It was hard for me to remember why I was so upset when I first got there. Although I didn't get to complete my 175 km hike this time, I will revisit the Lycian Way sometime in the future for sure. It will not be done anytime later than April or before September but I will somehow find a way to do it. I have to. In the end, this trip was anything but a disappointment. Well, everything except the check out I suppose...

I had begun thinking about this moment a few days earlier. The check out. The moment you realize that you must stand at the cashier on the day of your bar-tab reckoning and atone for your gluttonous sins and your hedonistic alcoholic purchases.  Almost as if there would not be an inevitable, monetary responsibility for services and libations rendered. I pushed the thought out of my head, willing it to never come. Hoping for some sort of clerical error that would wipe out everything, eliminating any evidence that I had ever sauntered over to the bar to obtain something, down to the very last unnecessary chocolate bar. This day, sadly, did not come.

On the day of my departure, I stood there at the desk, backpack donned and wallet out, searching the desk attendant's face for any clue as to the damage I was about to incur but found only indifference. Surely it could not be that bad could it? 9 days of lunches, waters, drinks and incidentals? How much could that have gotten to, honestly? He tallied it up, punched the calculator, scribbled some numbers and pushed the docket to my side of the window from where he sat. I picked it up, unfolded it and quietly quivered as I internally railed against this ridiculous number. “How could this be?!?” “There must be some mistake!” I formed the words to speak but first made hasty calculations in my head. Frantically carrying ones, doing long division and solving for X in a banal attempt to show an apparent mistake. I finished my calculations, sighed and handed over my credit card. When all was said and done I realized that if anything, they probably forgot to tally a beer here and a chicken sandwich there. I was deflated and downtrodden. That piece of paper stared at me with a big, disgusting number :(

So yes, I almost died of heat stroke. If a couple of things had gone differently on this trip, I could still be out there at the time of writing this, like a dried up piece of bacon, melting in the sun and being picked a part by vultures. Luckily, the only real bad thing that happened was I had to pay a rather large bar tab. Like I said, the Lycian Way will one day be revisited. At a time when I do not have to carry more weight in water than in everything else combined and when I won't be constantly plagued with headaches and bouts of neasuea. The trail will not take the best of me, that, I promise you.

So I made it to Antalya and hopped on a flight back to Istanbul to meet Becky. Although I was 2 weeks into my 5 week holiday I felt that it was about to start in some strange way. Becky was getting off work that night for her summer and the next day we were jumping on a plane to Africa.

To be continued.

Books Read:

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak 

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