Living It

(Out of cell phone / data range for a couple of days. This is for Sunday, July 31st)
We stayed in a so called campsite the night before, but it was more like a lodge for tents with pool and restaurant and large tourist groups. Disappointing, particularly because it wasn’t inside a park but rather on the edge of a town.

The only benefit was being able to go into town for a drink. The power was out in the town of a couple of thousand, but we found a bar with generator power. After a drink there, we found a place with a pool table and played doubles against some locals. They had a definite home court advantage because the table had narrow holes for snooker and the balls were smaller than usual. However, we came back after falling far behind and almost won.

In the morning, after the standard Tanzanian breakfast of super thin omelet, crepe aka pancake, and hot dogs, we head out for a long, bumpy drive to the Serengeti. We passed many towns and Masai villages along the way. It’s a poor area, and the Masai and the locals try to make the most of the tourist dollar. It’s $50 to visit a Masai village, and money is expected if you take anyone’s photo. I know it’d be annoying for strangers to be sticking their cameras at you all the time, so good for them, but I’m abstaining, which means I hardly have any photos of people. The Masai usually are dressed in red with ornate jewelry, and we saw some adolescent boys along the road all in black with white face paint. I was dying to take a photo but didn’t.

Pens are coveted items in this part of the country. One man wanted to barter jewelry for a pen, and in another town a boy straight out asked me for one. Apparently a good, working pen is hard to come by. I can’t deny children who just want to be able to write at school, and all my pens were soon gone. I’ll be bringing a box of Bics if I return.

We stopped at the Olduvai Gorge along the way, where footprints of precursors to homo sapiens had been found preserved in volcanic ash.

We entered the Serengeti around 1. We were going to the North of the park and had several hours to go, but at least this part of the journey was like a fast game drive. The highlight for me was a river fillled with at least 30 hippos flapping their tails and occasionally honking. Also saw 3 lions relaxing in the grass.

We made it to the Lobo lodge around 5:30. It was a spectacular setting on a small rocky hill. There was a baby giraffe, zebras, and Thomson gazelles in view of our room – awesome. The main lodge building was made of a lovely warm wood, and there was a pool and view area overlooking the plains of the Serengeti. Especially after a couple nights in a tent, it was very luxurious.

Today we went to Lake Manyara national park, which was a bit of a let down after Tangire. Whereas Tangire was open plain, Manyara was forested, making the roads and spaces tighter. I couldn’t escape the feeling we were on a Disney Land ride because you’re not allowed to step outside of your car, and each corner we took in our Land Rover might reveal an elephant in the bushes, a field of baboons eating grass, or hippos basking in the sun in the distance.

There much fewer animals than in Tarangire, but we were very fortunate to see the remains of a lion kill. First we came upon a male lion relaxing in the shade at the bottom of a large bush about 200 feet from the road. He had his head up and surveyed the gathered safari trucks with detachment.

Down the road from him was a lion cub up in a tree. Lake Manyara is the only place in Tanzania where lions climb trees, due to the forest, and we lucked out to catch a glimpse of one. The cub was a bit off the road and obscured by branches, but we could make him out with binoculars.

On the other side of the road from the cub were the remains of a water buffalo the lions had killed within the past couple of days, and there was a frenzy of vultures upon it. So far most of the wildlife we’d seen was pretty placid, so it was exciting to see nature at work. The lions had had their fill, and now vultures were fighting over scraps and we could catch glimpses of the stripped jaw bone.

There may have been 10 vultures going at the carcass and another 10 arrayed around waiting there turn or staking out the area. I don’t know if they were startled or some vulture gave a sign, but suddenly they all jumped away from the carcass and gave it some room.

Wait, what’s that? A little animal scurried from a nearby bush towards the carcass. What looked like a giant rat was a mongoose, and it went for a nibble. And then came another, and another, and I’m amazed to see a swarm of them move out and surround the fallen body. I’m half expecting the voice of a National Geographic narrator to chime in about the food chain at work.

The vultures then realize they’re about to lose out, and, slowly, they returned to the carcass. I was secretly hoping for a mongoose/vulture showdown, but they just jostled for position at the table.

It was something to see.

Sitting by the campfire with milky way overhead in the middle of a huge plain amongst acacia and baobab trees with zebras and impalas a mere 50 yards away when we settled in, and somehow I have cell service. We saw so many great things, it became almost overwhelming. Wildebeests, elephants, zebras, impalas, giraffes, warthogs, dikdiks, birds, lioness, baboons, ostriches, and a few other things I forgot the name of. It was amazing to see them all mixed together in wide open spaces, something a camera just can’t capture. While the elephants were the most entrancing to watch, bathing themselves and digging in the ground for cool water, the ostriches and the warthogs were fascinating in their own right. How did that huge, solitary, flightless bird evolve?

Relaxed here for a couple of hours.