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| June 29th - July 21st 2012 |
“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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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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