Safari!

Tulikwenda safari njema! We went on a great safari!

What really rounded out the experience were the nights we spent camping in the parks. On our first afternoon in Ngorongoro park, we trundled down yet another lumpy dirt path (the navigation skills of our driver where quite amazing. Basically zero signage anywhere in the park, crisscrossing and branching dirt tire tracks, and no geological markers with which to differentiate one path from another. Seriously impressive.) and into our campsite just as the sun was setting. A beautiful spot to camp. Stars shining brightly overhead and on all sides stretched the endless Serengeti (which means ‘endless plain’ in Swahili so that‘s rather redundant) with no wall, or any separation of any kind between us and the nocturnal animals of the park. Sleeping in the wild. Emily and I drifted to sleep listening to the crickets chirp around our tent.

About 3:15am I was jolted awake. For a few hazy, sleep disoriented seconds, I tried to gather my bearings. And then I heard the growling. A deep, guttural, predator sounding growling. Suddenly all my senses were on red alert, sleep forgotten, my eyes wide and staring into the darkness of the tent.

“Rachel. Rachel?” I hear a strained whisper from next to me. “Can I hold your hand?” I groped out into the dark, reaching for some comforting connection to a human. Clutching Emily’s hand, we lay there in the dark, listening to the growling. It seemed to be coming from not more than four meters away from our tent and, just saying, the animal gave me plenty of time and noise to use my echolocation skills. As the seconds crawled by, I tried to decide whether I’d rather hear the growling or hear nothing. On the one hand, I’d hear the deep threatening noise and know for certain the creature was still out there, bidding its time, but I’d also be assured of its location and that the distance between my head and the creature wasn’t decreasing. On the other hand, if the growling stopped, I could convince myself that the creature had wandered away. Or that it had stopped growling in order to start a sneak attack on our tent. Really, I’d just rather the sun came up. Then at least I could snap a picture like any good tourist.

For any of you who have read A Walk in the Woods, you might remember a scene where Bryson describes hearing a rustling outside his tent and getting up to investigate. He writes about the terror and subsequent adrenaline rush that he feels when confronted with the two reflective eyes he sees in the bushes. Bryson is an excellent writer and he describes the feeling of being alone in the wilderness with only a thin layer of canvas separating you from a mouth full of, most probably, very pointy teeth quite aptly. But until I lay in the dark, listening to the guttural growling of a very pissed-off sounding animal, I realized that mere words are completely insufficient to grok the feeling of lying on the ground in the blackness of night, completely vulnerable to the will of an angry creature. (Indecently, I am currently reading Stranger in a Strange Land so I’m also starting to grok, grok. A very useful word.) I will say that is an utterly blood chilling experience and I invite you to try it some time so that we might compare notes.

As I lay there, the growling stopping and starting intermittently, I mentally tried to decide what the animal could be. Nope, not a lion. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure lions don’t growl like that. And anyway, I’d rather it wasn’t a lion so let’s not make it a lion. Ok could it be a fox? Yes, let’s go with that because I’d really rather not contemplate the rest of a long list of animals I don’t want to encounter in my tent in the dark. A fox I can deal with. A fox is small. A fox is—oh. A fox is small enough to hop right into our tent through the zippered door that I had thoughtfully left open along the bottom when I zipped it up last night. Well shit. Ok, ok, what’s the plan? What defenses do we have? Apparently not a sealed wall. A sharp implement of any sort? Besides nail clippers, nope. Light? My head lamp is around…somewhere. Right, if the fox sticks his head in through the open flap, I’ll grab my aluminum water bottle and whack it on the nose. Hopefully it goes for Emily first so I have more room to swing my bottle.

These are my frantic thoughts as the growling continues and my heart pounds on and on. Somewhere in the region of 3:45am I drift back to sleep. Next thing I hear is the trill of my alarm. I turn it off and listen intently. (Get it? In-TENT-ly?) Nothing besides the crickets. My chest unknots and relief floods my body. Against all odds, we survived!

Over a pre-dawn breakfast, we discuss the nighttime noise. Not surprisingly, we had all heard it. Molle, our guide, places the creature right away. Oh yes, he says, that growling last night was an Impala. One of those herbivore gazelles not even a meter tall. You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m still glad I had my water bottle ready. Just in case.

That was the most exciting moment of the safari. The rest is better summed up in pictures. We spent four days and three nights in the parks. First we drove in to Ngorongoro which isn’t actually a national park, only a conservation area. Basically the difference between Ngorongoro and Serengeti National Park is the Maasai are allowed to live and graze their cattle in Ngorongoro whereas they aren’t allowed to in Serengeti. As a consequence of this, the first day we saw mostly cows and goats and not many other animals. There were a lot of cows. Then we spent a day and a half in Serengeti followed by a day in Ngorongoro Crater. Stunning landscape and up close encounters with animal after animal. We even completed the big five! Several herds of elephants, a black rhino (there are less than 20 in the whole park!), herds of buffalo (their horns and their rather blank eyes reminded me of the vogons from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for some reason) seven lions, and three leopards munching on a Thompson gazelle up in a tree. Wow. Long-necked giraffes were the most graceful animals and hyenas, looping around with eyes that stared pure death, were by far the least graceful. Wildebeests look ridiculous just as everyone says and hippos look way too adorable to be dangerous. Our personal Big Five, as in the five animals we saw the most often, would be cows, superb starlings (a twitchy blue and orange bird who like to hang around tourists waiting to be fed), Thompson’s gazelles, impala (which I’ve had quite enough of), and ostriches.

Highlight of the safari for Emily and I: watching animals poop. I spotted a pooping zebra and a pooping buffalo but missed the pooping lion until Tucker showed us a picture. (All completely as cool as a pooping cow, Liana.) We’re totally mature.

It was a wonderful safari and a good vacation. Still, nice to be back at our house with a chance to scrub out the layer of dust we accumulated. Now back to (a lot of) work. We have three, possibly four, sessions with groups scheduled for the next four days which we haven’t totally stated preparing for yet (yep, still functioning college students) and a trip out to Kigoma in western Tanzania scheduled for Thursday to Sunday to talk to the Jane Goodall Institute about working with them next winter and summer with briquetting. After returning from Kigoma, we’ll only have a week and a half to finish up our work in Arusha before heading out. Time is flying so way fast but I suppose that’s a good sign. Ninapenda Tanzania. I like Tanzania.

And now some pictures.

Dennis and Tucker, our two finalists for the beer tasting challenge.

Emily and I at a lookout over Ngorongoro crater. The far ridge is 10 km away.

Our wonderful truck at our first campsite in the dawn light. It only failed us
once when the brakes gave way. Luckily our diver was able to fix the brake
cable with some electrical tape. Not sketchy at all.

Emily and I at a lookout over the Serengeti.

And then we jump over the Serengeti!

Commence sequence of animals:

A black rhino. The truck next to it follows the rhino around all the time to protect it from poachers who want its horn.

A lioness with her cub not three meters outside our car. When she walked past us, I could have reached out and petted her.
But I didn't as I rather value my hand. She was beautiful and very regal. We spotted her just as the sun peaked out over the
Serengeti to begin another day.

An early morning yawn.

Another cub trotting down the road after his mother.

In total we saw 7 lions within ten minutes, all of the same pride. So close to us too!

A leopard, on of three, chilling in a trill with a snack dangling next to him.

Posing for the tourists.

Tembo! We were close enough to hear the crunch of the elephant's snack. The
sound of crunching branches sounded just like a human crunching granola. What
strong teeth elephants must have.

Twiga!

Tembo family!

A raft of hippos. What a nice way to spend the hot day.

The group and the Serengeti.

We were fans of jumping pictures.

The whole group.

Driving down a very steep road into Ngorongoro crater through a thick cloud.
This was after the brakes had broken and been fixed.

Wildebeest! 

Zebra butts!

Very itchy zebra.

Ah, and here we see the tourist in its natural habitat. We even got to watch them feeding.