Living It

Tompkins Square Park is closed, and there is a big tree down in the middle of one of the paths. Pigeons, squirrels, and a disgusting number of rats are running around together eating whatever was tossed up by the winds.

Saw a smaller tree fallen on 1st and 13th that knocked down an awning. I first learned about that one from the New York Times website, where a picture of it was on the home page earlier this morning.

At least half the stores that would be open on a Sunday are opened, which is surprisingly much better than Bushwick, where about 80% was closed. I expected more closures in the E.V., assuming that many of the people that worked in the East Village lived in other boroughs and wouldn't be able to come in.

Some places like 7A are really bustling as people are so over Irene.

Oh, and there was a leak in my new apartment through the ceiling. Fortunately I don't have any furniture yet, but damn annoying and I need to get that fixed.

Did a little walkabout in Bushwick, and this is the worst damage I saw. I called 311 to report it and waited 10 minutes on hold before they answered. My civic deed for the month. Hurricane Irene was a non-event for me. Hardly rained yesterday and it had passed by morning. Any action occurred while I was sleeping, and I never heard high winds. Last year’s tornado had much bigger impact, tearing down many trees.

http://animusart.com/current-projects/flaming-cactus/

The most South-Western point on the continent of Africa. Beautiful coastline.

Took us 1.5 hours to hike up.

On safari, the most common objective is to see what’s known as the Big Five: elephants, giraffes, lions, hippos, and rhinos. We saw the first two of these animals on our first day and every day. The first lion sighting came on the second day at Lake Manyara. Hippos, a prime objective of mine, appeared the third day in the Serengeti. This was our sixth and final day, and the question was whether we would see a black rhino. Arib, rhino today, right?

A world heritage site, the Ngorongoro crater is the world’s largest caldera, formed by an extinct volcano. From the rim of the crater, it’s a steep 600 meter drop to the flat open floor that extends into the distance. It is one of two homes in Tanzania to the rare and elusive black rhino. We were duly warned that we’d be lucky to see one, or, if we did, it probably would be far away.

The crater rim was shrouded in a thick, San Francisco-style fog when we set out in the morning, which I took to be an inauspicious start, but we descended out of it and there was good visibility on the crater floor.

Turns out it’s not that hard to see lions in Tanzania, as we found them five out of six days. The crater was a gold mine of them, and we saw seven lions, alone or in pairs, throughout the day. The two lionesses pictured here were sprawled right next to the road, oblivious to the gathered safari trucks and a dozen cameras snapping.

I surprisingly spotted the rhinos first, two dark mounds in the distance, fairly close to a herd of wildebeest. They were lying deep in the grass, barely moving. With the binoculars, I caught a flash of horn as one briefly raised its head, but it quickly settled down and it was out of range of my telephoto lens. Not a good sighting, but a sighting nonetheless, and I was satisfied.

I was ready to leave at that point, but we continued trawling for sights. A birder would have had a field day with myriad species flying around, and I shot many without any hope of remembering their names. We stopped for lunch in a public area where we could get out of the car and have our box lunches which, as usual, included a dried-out piece of fried chicken, a hard boiled egg, a banana, a sweet, and a fruit juice.

Arib has been a guide/driver for seven years and knows a number of other guides. He frequently stopped other trucks as we passed them to compare notes or chatted with guides at our rest stops. As we were finishing our lunches, Arib ran over and animatedly told us to pack up and get moving. He had a hot tip.

What? What? He didn’t want to say and wanted to get on the road before word spread. Usually we sauntered along at 25 kms/hr to better see our surroundings and not startle anything, but now we sped at a fast clip and passed a number of vehicles. After a while we were back on a road we had been on earlier that morning. “Stand up, stand up – there to the right!” Looking out from the roof of the Land Cruiser, we saw them. A black rhino and her adolescent child, unobstructed and walking in an open field. Full profile and in range of camera and vision. Snap, snap, snap x 20. That formidable, tusked animal is bad ass.

Now we’re done. Off to Arusha, a late night at Babylon bar, and tomorrow to Cape Town.

Check it out. A hundred or so hippos seeking relief from the Serengeti sun in a muddy pool. Tails flicking and splashing, honking on the off beat, a barrel roll here and there – it was mesmerizing. Seeing hippos was one of the things I was looking forward to most, and it didn’t disappoint. They are just massive and yet they have a certain grace.

We started the day with a dawn drive, but we came up empty. A certain animal fatigue sets in. Where on the first day every elephant and giraffe merited a stop and a photo, after a few days no one comments on or points them out.

I took a couple of hundred photos on the first day using the digital SLR camera with invaluable telephoto lens I borrowed from a friend (thanks, Tom!), and I was worried I was going to run out of memory at the rate I was going. You soon realize there are only so many elephant photos you need. Ok, there’s one in the bushes as opposed to the plain, that’s a really cute calf, look at the size of the horns on that one, and… you’re done.

So when you get a 6 am start to the day, you’re hoping to see something new or different. Eyes sweeping the ground, you’re on the look out for shadows, changes in color, or a flicker of movement. Is that a lion? No, it’s a tan rock. What’s that over there? A stump of a tree. Get the binocs, that might be a rhino at the treeline! Nope, buffalo. Of course he’s the guide and has been doing this for years but it was impressive the things Arib spotted that we would have driven by if we’d been on our own. We spent so many hours driving around that, in fact, a good amount of time we’d just sit and read and wait until he pointed something out.

We scored in the afternoon. Once you’ve gotten past the standard set of animals, you hope to see something more exotic. We teased Arib, “Leopard today, right?” It was pretty unlikely, but, boom, there it was. Up in a tree. Taking a (cat)nap.

We left the Serengeti and it was a long drive to the Rhino Lodge next to the Ngorongoro crater. It was pretty basic, almost like military housing, but they served a good dinner. Tanzanian food isn’t that exciting. At breakfast, there will be hot dogs. At dinner, count on beef with gravy. They don’t know how to cook potatoes or they just like them super dry and bland. But Tanzanians make mighty fine soups.

There is always soup at dinner, and several soups I had were best in class. Parsley soup, carrot soup, cucumber soup – all perfectly seasoned and with sumptuous flavor. I always had seconds and could have made my meal of soup alone. I told our cook the first couple nights that he should make a soup cookbook.

The Serengeti is an ocean of earth, and the plain stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s an impressive landscape.

Shortly after we left the lodge in the morning, we saw a lioness sunning herself in a wide open space. Best view of a lion so far. Turned out to be a cat day, and later we found a cheetah (photo attached – my phone doesn’t have much zoom) having a small impala for lunch. It was contentedly munching away. At the end of the day we saw a serval, which is a cat that looks like a lynx. It was small, with a beautiful spotted pelt and a bushy tail.

The great migration of wildebeests had already moved up to Kenya, but we still saw big herds with hundreds of them scattered around. In the distance they’d look like a lake of black against the pale grass.

There hasn’t been any moon the past few days, and when the sun sets it is pitch black on the ground. Looking out from the lodge into the inky night, I wondered about the life that was stirring then. We debated what would be the best tactic for surviving if you were stuck out there.