SWEARING IN AND MORE

KWA GARI

Hurtling across the sere Serengti on a September safari, I began to wonder if travel in a Range Rover is really all that much safer than on a bus. Only a week or two had passed since I went to Dar es Salaam by chartered bus to be sworn in by the US Ambassador as a Peace Corps Volunteer. A previous bus trip had taught me several valuable lessons, so the detour to the Arusha bus terminal to sit quietly for a half hour until the official 9:00 departure time was no surprise, but the two flat tires en route, particularly the second, a blowout that nearly capsized our top-heavy British Leyland, was a bit frightening. Happily the return trip to Arusha was by train–a first-class sleeping compartment yet–and its only problems are that it takes nearly forever to reach Moshi, and then the traveler is still faced with an hour minibus ride that is sheer concentrated terror.

The day after returning from Dar I went to my school to begin teaching only to find that it was closed in honor of Mohammed's birthday. Luckily my headmaster was in his office; after greeting me warmly, he confirmed that the next week was indeed the midterm break and I was free to go ahead with my planned visit–I would have gone anyway–to the nearby Tarangire and Serengeti National Parks, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Ndutu Safari Lodge, the Olduvai Gorge, and Gibb’s Farm. So the next morning my friend and “old Africa hand,” Peter Jackson and I set out for our ten days of viewing game and birds in the most natural setting still left to them in Africa, visiting a few sites of interest for cultural and prehistoric insights, and simply enjoying several of the finest lodges and tented camps in the country.

The previous ten days in Dar provided a rather pleasant end to training and helped to erase the disappointment of our nine weeks in Arusha. To be sure, the barely adequate hotel in which we were housed, about half the time without water, electricity, and of course air conditioning, provided a sharp contrast to the well-guarded residential luxury enjoyed by the ambassador, the PC country director, and the latter's assistant. We did spend two days and nights at the luxury Bahari Beach Hotel a bit north of the city, where we were encouraged to complete our training in minimal time in order to maximize our enjoyment of the beach; we all were quite able to comply with this mandate. The armed guards patrolling the premises and the signs sternly warning against leaving the grounds were a bit distressing, but they were not there because of us; many of the hotel guests were Tanzanian. The swearing-in ceremony at the ambassador's residence was wholly appropriate, and the subsequent parties were fun. The city itself doesn't offer much by way of sightseeing beyond the large market and a very enjoyable, if one plugs one’s nostrils, seafood market; probably the best ploy is to make an early escape to nearby Zanzibar, a visit I postponed to another time. Looking back now, however, I realize that the exhibit of australopithecine remains at the National Museum there is considerably superior to the one at Olduvai; unhappily that observation amounts to little more than damning with faint praise, I fear.

On this day my thoughts were not of the Peace Corps, however, but only of survival. Peter looks like a docile man in his early sixties, which he is, except when he contrasts the Nyerere-era Tanzania with what he knew here before independence–he was born on Zanzibar of English parents–or with present-day Kenya or any one of several other nearby countries...or when driving. He explained to me several times that it was necessary to drive rapidly over these washboard roads in order to glide over the bumps and smooth the ride. He has added air bags to the vehicle's suspension system, and the result is remarkable. The physics supporting that assertion may seem credible enough, but the second principle of safari driving, which is known to all experienced tour drivers he exclaimed, that driving on the wrong side of the track and thus meeting the alternating grooves and ridges from the direction opposite their original formation, reduces the bumpiness, remains the most problematical of the three paradoxes I encountered on this trip. It also resulted once in our passing an oncoming driver with each vehicle on its driver's right, which is to say legally wrong, side of the road. Happily both drivers always slowed down when two vehicles met, and I made frequent use of my right as sole passenger to request a stop to look at some bird or animal I was convinced must be of unusual interest.

My first impression of the Serengeti as we careened over the ridge from Ngorongoro Crater–the park boundaries don't match the geomorphologic ones–was of a vast plain somehow reminiscent, in scope at least, of the prairies of Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. It seems impossibly dry to support the quantity of animal life we saw, which at this time of year is well below maximum, and it may well work out that way unless the current drought ends soon. Later that day near his favorite lodge, Ndutu, which he is helping to build and at which we spent two delightful nights, he almost cried at the sight of totally dry Lake Masek, a condition that neither he nor the authors of several prominent local guide books had ever seen before.

Farther on the flatness and seemingly even the dryness are broken by those amazing geologic oases, the stone outcroppings called “kopjes.” These are good places to see cheetahs and leopards, but we didn't look very hard; it was still much too dry to attract game in the numbers that would interest them. Farther to the north the country becomes more hilly and forested, and this year, because of some rain here a few weeks earlier, it was definitely a bit green. The animal population was decidedly greater here also; evidently they were beginning to assemble for the annual great migration.

It was at this northern limit of our safari, where we stayed two nights at the Lobo Wildlife Lodge, a magnificent structure designed by the architectural firm of Dalgliesh Marshall, that we experienced what I thought was the most exciting single day of game and bird watching. Typically we were at the dining room for breakfast at the stated opening hour of 7:00; also typically we waited quite a while to be served. I don't think it was out of spite, but Peter did fill his pocket with hard-boiled eggs to supplement our munchies at noon; we had long before given up boxed lunches from lodges as being impossibly big.

Just as we finished breakfast two young men, one of whom both Peter and I had previously met on separate occasions, approached us. The other, we soon learned, was conducting a study of gene pools of elephants in the area, and he wondered if we had seen any. Some kind of dart that collects a blood sample and then bounces out again is fired into the animal, hopefully without producing too much agitation. Since we had not, we asked them if they had seen any lions. “They're all over the place,” was their reply, and they then told us about a recently opened game-viewing road that they strongly recommended we take. So, a few moments later we set out. Barely outside the gate Peter made the day's first discovery, a paradise flycatcher. After studying that bird for maybe fifteen minutes, we continued on a few hundred meters–I should say “metres” since Peter was driving–we came upon two pairs of canaries, different species, and we spent another fifteen minutes trying to clarify their identification and that of a different canary species we had seen on another day.

In between these two observations we passed another interesting sight, a pickup truck I think it was, stopped on the crest of the hill with its hood up, a driver in place, and another man hanging onto the truck's front end and looking in at the engine. “Can we help?” Peter asked. “No,” was the reply, “we're just setting the timing.” So down the hill after us they came, the one man still perched under the hood, presumably doing just that. In a short while we reached the road of which we had been told, and we had not traveled far along it when we noticed quite a number of vultures not only circling above a common point but descending slowly, like jets over JFK, and then one by one making their landings. “There's a kill up there,” said Peter. “Do you want to drive up and see it?” Well when tough decisions are necessary I can make them quickly, so we left the road and started driving across open country. I was focusing on the vultures as we approached the kill, likely a young impala, so it was Peter who first saw the cat. When I finally managed to get it in view–binoculars are about as awkward to use as bifocals, and the combination is deadly–I exclaimed, “It's like a lynx in size and color.” I got another view, and then it disappeared into tall grass, and not even Peter's tracking skill could flush it out again. Caracal was Peter's identification, and after looking through his books on East African mammals, I could only agree. It is a very rare animal here, one that many professional guides and drivers have not seen.

Farther along the road began to follow the bank of a stream, and it was here we made our first sighting of a long-crested eagle, sitting regally atop a tree; we watched it for as long as I wished. A little later we stopped for lunch, and in addition to his pocketful of hard-boiled eggs, Peter made a most interesting discovery, a complete halo around the sun, which at noon in these latitudes is essentially overhead. The space inside the halo was decidedly gray, reminiscent of Alexander's dark space between the primary and secondary rainbows, and the phenomenon persisted for at least three hours; every time we stopped, we checked. Just across the road we found several birds along the stream: our first kingfisher, another paradise flycatcher, and our first red-cheeked cordon bleu. We also glimpsed a yellow-colored bat.

As we continued driving, it was the plethora of mammals, not birds, that attracted our main interest. Elands, the largest of the antelopes and very good tasting, Peter assured me, had always been quite skittish in my previous sightings, and the many I saw this day were no exception. They seemed always to be grouped in fours, and for a time I suspected that some law of animal optical spectroscopy was in evidence, but then at last I saw five at once and felt better. "Lion," Peter yelled, and there across the river and several hundred meters away stood one. When I foolishly opened the day for a better view, it immediately vanished. No matter, a few minutes' drive farther on I spotted another sunning itself on a kopjes close to the road; we drove nearer, stopped, and watched until, bored with two old men, it got up and ambled off.

The road then made a large, looping, U-turn in effect, and we found ourselves watching this same lion again; when we looked where it was going, we found four more. This pride of five sat atop a ridge with marvelous views in all directions of the game-filled forests and plains. The group was no less intolerant of us collectively than had been the first of its members individually, so we were soon on the road again. In all that afternoon we saw nine lions total in four separate sightings, but this group was the most interesting to watch. One had a well-developed mane, but the same color as its skin, not black. The contrast recalled the pair of lions we had watched for an hour or two a few days earlier in the Ngorongoro Crater. That male had a beautiful black mane, and he sleepily followed his mate, walking forward a few strides at a time, then stopping while she advanced stealthily through the grass, stalking the herd of zebras far ahead. Evidently some sort of impasse, or temporary nonagression pact, was reached for the male wandered around as if sleepwalking and then settled down beside the lioness for a nap; we resumed driving thinking that nothing was likely to happen soon.

In addition to the birds and mammals we saw on that drive, I also very much enjoyed the continually changing terrain and the trees and shrubs it supported. We stopped twice to look at orchids, one the beautiful leopard variety growing in trees, and again to see a ground variety; there were other flowers of interest as well. And then as the sun began to get noticeably lower–it had lost its halo by then–Peter saw Lobo Lodge well ahead on the other side of the plain, and we knew almost for certain that our road made a loop, and we wouldn't have to retrace our route in a race with darkness. I don't think I'll ever get accustomed to the absence of twilight here near the equator; the sun, and everything else of course, simply rises and sets essentially straight up and down. And so our day of driving ended, or did it? There, just outside the entrance to our lodge, stood a lovely pair of duikers. In East Africa game viewing goes on and on. What impressed me most, however, was the astonishing fact that in eight hours of driving in the world-famous Serengeti we had not seen one other person!

The list of bird sightings that I kept numbered nearly 125 at trip's end, and I didn't add up the number of mammals; there wasn't time nor mental energy available to do anything systematic with trees and other plants. (Quite often as I'm writing this in Ilboru, I glance out the window of my house at the olive sunbirds, yellow-vented bulbuls, crowned hornbills, Reichenow's weavers, and a black-backed puffback that are prowling around the area.) It is clearly impossible to describe this safari adequately in writing; even my trip notes are very sketchy. Short summaries of a few other highlights will have to suffice.

Our first stop had been in the Tarangire where we stayed at the Tarangire Safari Lodge, a very good-quality, traditional tented camp. Its greatest virtue, I think, is the marvelous view from the lodge patio of an area just below that always abounds in game. The park itself is best known for the several thousand elephants it supports; we certainly saw a few hundred. My most exciting view was of a beautiful leopard sitting in a tree with its fairly recent kill, a young impala, although viewing a group of eight lions lolling on the river bank one evening and again the next morning was also great; we spent hours at each site (and sight).

At Ngorongoro Crater we had stayed at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, the oldest of three lodges on the rim. Privately owned and in the capable hands of a new manager, it is the place to stay in Peter's opinion. Of course the view over the caldera is spectacular, and the lodge has a large and functional dining room and a capable staff, a rare combination in Tanzania. The bar is good, the wine list adequate–a 1989 Beaujolais-Villages helped us celebrate my first three months in Tanzania–and the food quite nice; it would be the proper place for a big celebratory party. And the guest cabins have huge bathtubs with instant hot water! Again, on this my second visit to the Crater, I was really impressed at the overall size of the caldera and the variety of texture and color one sees on its floor from the rim. The hunting lions mentioned earlier and a pair of black rhinoceroses were my other most impressive sights.

Ndutu Safari Lodge is a special place to Peter, and his enthusiasm had its effect on my evaluation, I'm certain. It's isolated, appropriately and well designed for its setting, and it appears to be the most remote of the lodges, thus forcing it to be self-sufficient or to go to Gibb’s Farm for fresh produce; the owner of the Farm is also part owner of the Lodge. The variety of bird life surrounding it is fantastic, and I suspect that when Lake Ndutu contains water, the aquatic bird and animal life must barely be credible. The Lodge is the place to stay when viewing the annual great migration of animals across the Serengeti, and it is famous for the genets that visit its dining room at night to be fed. They enter on a beam high overhead and descend to an elevated platform for the food set out for them, but it's at breakfast that one must fight the birds for one’s food. I like the setting, the facilities, the isolation, and the sense of space and openness, but the star here for me is the food. Nowhere in this country have I experienced locally available food more sensitively prepared. The dinner I describe was eaten by candlelight with no written menu, so my comments are based solely on gustatory evaluation. Dinner is served family style with seconds always offered, and candlelight is traditional. At this, our second dinner, the appetizer course seemed to be some type of aubergine relish on toast surrounded by grated carrots; the soup was a nicely mild coarse pureé of mchicha, a local spinach-like vegetable; the entreé of pork tenderloin au jus, not overdone–Peter immediately ordered seconds of this for both of us, and they were quickly brought–surrounded by a pureé of the local sweet potato, which is lighter in color and considerably milder in taste than ours, properly cooked and delicately flavored red cabbage, and marvelous creamed leeks; we finished with an amazingly adequate chocolate mousse–two weeks later I still can't believe that I declined seconds.

The Lobo Wildlife Lodge is one of a group of four major lodges and one Arusha hotel owned and indifferently managed by the government; I didn't need Peter's bias to help me realize the difference. Lobo, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Seronera Wildlife Lodge, designed by the same firm and located in the park headquarters town of Seronera, were planned and built to blend into the environment with as little obvious impact as possible. Both buildings do this immensely well, incorporating the existing rock into the structure of the dining and other facility rooms; in one an existing tree has been allowed to continue growing inside, and in the other next to a rock that substitutes for a wall is a sandy bed containing desert plants. Both buildings are amazing structures, each is well worth a visit, but one stays overnight at either only because there is no alternative.

There is only one way to end a safari in Northern Tanzania and that is to spend some time at Gibb’s Farm. If there were adequate transportation between Karatu, where the Farm is located, and Arusha, it would likely have become a weekend habit for me. It was a working coffee plantation when James Gibb purchased it from the British Government shortly after the Second World War. In 1972 most of the plantation was sold, and the Farm was developed into a plantation inn containing a number of guesthouses; the original home is now used primarily as the dining room for guests. The Farm is located on the outside rim of the Ngorongoro caldera and overlooks a valley filled with coffee trees and the town of Karatu. Its grounds are beautifully landscaped with gardens filled with flowers and birds, and the remaining coffee trees come right up to the edge of the grounds. Its beauty is breathtaking, particularly in contrast to the dryness on the previous day of the Serengeti. Its recently appointed new manager, Jenny Saar, is from San Diego, where she spent some time studying food and wine at UC Davis. It's not an easy decision, but I still think the food at Ndutu has the edge; under Jenny's influence Gibb’s might reverse that opinion, however. I need to visit both establishments several more times in order to make a final decision. But, now I must go back to Arusha for the beginning of the second half of the first term at Ilboru Secondary School.

As much for my own use as for your information, I simply list below the animals we sighted on the trip: olive baboon, buffalo, bushbuck, caracal, dik-dik, duiker, eland, elephant, Grant's gazelle, Thomson's gazelle, genet, giraffe, hartebeest, hippopotamus, spotted hyena, rock hyrax, impala, jackals–certainly golden and silver-backed, and possibly side-striped–leopard, lion, mongoose, vervet monkey, oribi, reedbuck, black rhinoceros, topi, warthog, waterbuck, Defassa waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra.

The Olduvai Gorge is just a short side trip off the main road from the Crater to Ndutu, and it is certainly worth the effort to see this spot where remains of early hominids have been found; we had stopped there on our way to Ndutu. The museum at the visitors' center is very modest and not in good repair, but the site does afford a clear view of the various strata of importance, and it is only a short drive to the spot where Mary Leakey in 1959 made the first Zinjanthropus discovery. I suppose this was a pilgrimage of sorts, but I had felt a much greater sense of our origins some years previously when I first experienced the exhilaration of East Africa's game parks in Kenya's Masai Mara. Actually, I was more intrigued with the shifting crescent-shaped sand dune we visited nearby; that remains the third observation about which I occasionally think.

We were in the vicinity of the Gorge on our return trip when we noticed another column of vultures spiraling down to a landing site in the Gorge itself very near the main road. After finding a caracal at the base of a similar spiral, we were not going to pass this by unvisited. We were very disappointed to discover the carcass of an elephant and shocked to conclude from the circumstances that it had been killed, “murdered,” Peter said, by poachers. We remained only long enough for me to check the identity of the vultures, and then we moved on somberly. It put me in mind of a flower that Peter had found near Lake Ndutu or Lake Masek, I forget which, the afternoon we arrived to find the area so desperately dry. It is a large scarlet ball of small flowerets that typically appears near the end of the dry season and is thus a harbinger of happier times to come. Let us hope so.

W. Vance Johnson

06 Oct 92