Tanzania

Ain’t no Rwanda

Driving into Moshi from Kilimanjaro Airport, I nudged Marnie and pointed to my right. Peeking out above a belt of gray clouds, there it was- the proverbial snows of Kilimanjaro. A mere five minutes later we had approached close enough for the clouds to obscure the peek. No problem, we thought, surely it will clear up later so we can take some pics.

Yeah, not so much. Kilimanjaro is the opposite of the elephant in the room, in that everyone talks about it but nobody can see it. I pity the poor fools who climb for five days only to take in an exhilarating view of- cloud soup.

Having spent much of the previous week getting up early for trekking/ transport purposes, we crashed out at the hotel. Venturing out several hours later to obtain some Tanzanian cash, we were not impressed. Spoiled by our time in Rwanda, we were taken aback by the aggressive hawkers urging us into their craft shops and guides wanting to arrange mountain trips, who continued following down the street long after we explained we’d already booked a safari. After exchanging our money, we quickly scampered back to the safe haven of our hotel room.

Wazungu

In college, I took a year of Swahili, mostly on the recommendation that it was easy, and not with the expectation I would ever use it. More than ten years on, here we are in Tanzania, and I’m waiting for Marnie to say, in that charming way of hers, “You know, Dan speaks Swahili…” As they say, if you don’t use it you lose it, and as Tanzanians say, pole pole (literally, slowly, slowly, but also sorry, as well as shit happens).

I often bristle at news stories that use pictures of Masai warriors as a representative of a “typical” African, so it was weird seeing them everywhere in Tanzania. However, whatever cultural appreciation we had quickly evaporated any time our van stopped, when a dozen Masaii and others would rush us, trinkets in hand. Two for five seems to be the popular asking price for anything (You like necklace? Two for five. AK-47? Two for five). To them, we are wazungu, white people, and might as well have dollar bills stapled to our forehead. If you fancy a photograph, have a dollar in hand, because it’s not wise to anger someone who carries a spear.

Safari experiences can vary greatly depending on the quality of your fellow travellers, and we lucked out with our crew. Erieola is an Albanian-Canadian re-evaluating her former life as a Microsoft corporate lackey by travelling around the world. Alistair is a Kiwi re-evaluating his former life as a political journalist in New Zealand by travelling around Africa. Noella, a French-Canadian, isn’t re-evaluating anything; she was just visiting her daughter who volunteers in Moshi, but whose previous experiences in Australia, China and Japan solidify her world traveller credentials.

Lake Manyara

Lake Manyara is a game reserve along the edge of the Rift Valley, the long mountain chain that runs the length of the continent and the accompanying plain at its base. The lake itself is several miles across but only a few feet deep, though its high alkalinity keeps most animals from using it apart from large flocks of flamingos. The park is famous for its tree climbing lions (rarely seen, unless it’s the last thing you see) and elephants. I was particularly happy to run into many dik-dik, the worlds smallest deer, who I had previously encountered in South Africa as a brown blur. On our itinerary it said we planned to stop and swim in the lake, but our guide said we couldn’t. Boo.

The Serengeti

A good part of my formative years was spent watching nature documentaries on PBS detailing the life and death struggle on the plains of the Serengeti. The real life version is exactly the same, with a caveat; those epic chases captured on film, the mad dash inevitably culminating in a gory feast - somebody sat for hours, more likely days, to shoot that. Mostly, large herds of gazelles, zebra, buffalo, etc graze peacefully during the day while the big predators sleep. That’s not to say these massive herds aren’t an impressive spectacle, but somewhere around day two a serious bloodlust sets in.

As an example, our cheetah sighting played out thusly:

(Narrated in high brow snooty English accent) A lone female cheetah eyes a herd of Thompson’s Gazelle two hundred yards away from the cover of long grass. The cheetah rears up, ready to pounce- then lays back down. Rears up! Then back down. The cheetah yawns. Marnie yawns. Someone sneezes, etc.

The timing of our trip was in part to coincide with the wildebeest migration, and we were told that with three days in the park, we could devote an entire day to finding them. This information was apparently not relayed to our driver, who decided the herd was too far north to pursue. Double boo. We were able to witness the smaller but nonetheless impressive zebra migration, which totals 300,000 animals to the wildebeests’ 2 million. My thought at the sight of such a spectacle: Damn, that’s sure a lot of zebras.

Ngorongoro Crater

We spent our last night on safari high on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, a former volcano whose collapsed center houses one of the highest densities of predators in the world. It gets a little frosty up there at night- temperatures hovering around freezing had us shivering in our tents.

We headed out early the next morning to descend the wall of the crater. In the bottom is a large lake which draws in the large number of herd animals the predators munch on. The highlights of our visit included huge bull elephants (females and calves don’t go in the crater), a scrap between two black back jackals, and numerous hyenas- two of which saw fit to harass a huge Cape buffalo.

The incident was too far away the road to get close to, but in the distance you could see the buffalo turning circles frantically as the hyenas nipped at it from either side. The show down seemed to have reached a stalemate, but hyenas tend to hunt by dogged (pun intended) determination, running their prey to exhaustion.

About that elephant…
We returned to civilization for two nights, staying at a lodge on a tea plantation, decidedly tired and smelly from sleeping in tents. I braved the chilly weather on principle (or in stupidity) to take a dip in the pool. Sipping on our Kilimanjaro lagers before dinner, an American fella asks us if we’ve seen the mountain yet. He waved us around the corner, and there she was, finally, at last.