Duda travels to Tanzania for summer vacation

Hazy blue mountains in the distance rose up over the acacia trees, beneath which I sat in our open game vehicle, staring out the side. We rolled down the hill from our camp with the morning sun above us, uncovered by clouds, but the high altitude gave the air a cool feel to it. The Serengeti loomed in front of us, the clearings in the acacias dotted with roaming zebra and buffalo. Our driver, Erasto, gave a quick glance to the side as we passed the place we had spotted a few young elephants the previous night, although the area now lay empty. The tracker, sitting in a chair on the hood of the vehicle, motioned for Erasto to stop. A quick glance through his binoculars towards the bottom of the hill confirmed his find- lions.

That sighting took place on my second full day in Tanzania, and my first in the bush. The trip over was uneventful, but long and grueling. We had spent our 

first night in a lodge outside of Arusha, the primary commercial center of northern Tanzania, which was pleasant, but hardly a destination. The first morning we caught a flight on a small, 12-seat plane to our first camp on the outskirts of the Serengeti from the Arusha airport. The flight was maybe an hour long, but enjoyable, as we flew low and were able to take in the landscape. As we approached the landing strip I started to feel as if we weren’t descending fast enough and would hit the strip too late. However, the pilot flew past the landing strip, turned around, and after some maneuvering landed us safely. On the ground, my sister was the first to ask why he hadn’t landed the first time.

He responded, “Oh, we get buffalo on the landing strip sometimes, so we have to scare them off.”
Welcome to Africa, I guess.

We met Erasto with the game vehicle at the landing strip, and drove through the savanna for a while until we came to the entrance of the Serengeti. Unlike in America, where the only requirement for getting in a national park is a fee, the Tanzanian parks, particularly the Serengeti, are extremely regulated. Erasto spent ten or fifteen minutes filling out paperwork even though he passed through the gate several times per week. The rest of that day was spent on a game drive, and featured our first spotting of most of the local animals. Since the camp we stayed at was on a private concession within the park we were allowed to stay on the roads past dark and drive off the roads, both strictly off limits in the park.

The next day or two were filled with game drives, and the first lion spotting (and seven or eight more after that), and were far too extensive to describe all the sights and sounds. However, on our third day or so at that camp we had the opportunity to visit a local Maasai village, a tribe that was allowed to live on certain swathes of land within the Serengeti. The Maasai, to give some perspective, are a culture in which the basis of one’s worth as a human stems from one skill- how high he can jump. That, and how many cows and wives he has (at one point, later in our trip, we learned of a man with so many wives and children that a school had been built just for them). Physically speaking, the village wasn’t much to look at. It sat on top of a hill with the cows and goats down below, and the buildings were huddled around the holding pens for the animals. Although the villagers were friendly, especially the children, I couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable. The village was obviously authentic, as were the villagers, but they were also a little bit too accustomed to having guests of the camp we were staying at come to visit.

The Maasai village, although very tribal and rural, did not live in abject poverty, like another village we visited a few days later. We had moved on to our second camp, this one south and west of our first, located near the Grumeti River. The camp was mobile and followed the wildebeest migration, one of the primary draws of the Serengeti. The camp also happened to be an hour or so drive from Lake Victoria, and our guide at the mobile camp, Cyst (pronounced Cyst-ee) offered to take us. Not knowing what we’d gotten ourselves into, we agreed. Cyst drove us to a village on Lake Victoria, with us expecting it to be somewhat like the Maasai village. The fishing village, however, turned out to be much more like those melodramatic aid for orphans commercials rather than the National Geographic-esque Maasai village. Our guide though the fishing village was the local schoolteacher, a local woman in her lower 20’s named Suzie. We walked along the shore of the lake, around the edge of the huts, to the main drag of town. We entered through the fish market where the women vended dried fish, the main sustenance of the village. The unbelievably patriarchal culture didn’t allow women to fish, and the men were not prone to sharing their hoard with the women, especially considering how many wives most of them had. So, the women faced the choice of selling fish bought from the men in the market or prostituting themselves. Discarded packets of ‘local brew’ lined the streets, the primary source of the rampant alcoholism plaguing the village.
The tragedy of the village, I think, was that with some social reform it could solve a lot of it’s problems. Lake Victoria is brimming with fish, and the traps they use to capture them are very effective. The preservation techniques there are advanced enough that they should be able to trade with other villages (which they do now, a bit, but the money only reaches the elder men.) The Tanzanian government, to their credit, does do a lot to support social mobility, like offering scholarships to high-performing students, but it’s difficult to teach students that are fifty to a room and sitting on dirt floors.

Anyway, we left the Serengeti a day or two later for Lake Manyara, at the base of the Great Rift Valley. The Tanzanians, it seems, don’t have quite the preoccupation Americans do with safety, or at least assuring themselves that they are safe, but even knowing that the Manyara airstrip still surprised me. The Lake Manyara airport, for whatever reason, is built right at the top of the Great Rift Valley. Not only is it built at the top of the Valley, but the landing strip is actually pointed in the direction of the drop-off, so that if a plane were to badly underestimate the runway it would go right off the edge. Fortunately, we landed safely, met up with our guide, and started our descent into the valley. We stopped for lunch at an overlook where we could stare down the valley to where the ridge met the lake, while yellow-spotted barbets stole our scraps off the ground. Our drive to our lodge in the heart of the national park around Lake Manyara was delayed on occasion by headstrong baboons who didn’t feel like getting out of our way, although we were more than happy to wait and watch them, mind you.

We only spent one night in Lake Manyara, in contrast to the private concession and mobile camp where we had been for a week combined. While the Serengeti had been somewhat arid, the area around Manyara was heavily forested, which made it perfect for monkey watching. Monkeys, unlike pretty much every other animal we came near, were not timid at all, and I watched vervet and blue monkeys play in the trees through the screen walls of our room.

The next day we left for our last safari camp, this one in Tarangire National Park, and our easiest travel day, as it was only an hour drive from Lake Manyara. We met with our guide, Mosanga, halfway between the camps. Mosanga, as it turned out, was actually from the Maasai village we had visited the week before, and worked in Taragire to support his village. He was also our source of insight into the Maasai culture, describing to us the time he killed a lion or the intricacies of tribal warfare. “We kill each other all the time,” he once told us. We drove by elephants wallowing in the marsh and a herd of cape buffalo several thousand strong roaming the hillsides. Our first and only sighting of a cheetah was on that drive, although the experience would have been more exciting had less vehicles been around (when a big cat is seen cars tend to conglomerate).

One day on a walking safari in Tarangire we came across a few bones and a baby elephant skull. Elephants actually pay respect to their dead by stomping on the ground where their family died, and, even more remarkably, will move bones back to their original resting place if they are moved. The elephant, however remarkably human, was not the most memorable animal from Tarangire.

Drifting off to sleep one night, exhausted from a long hike, I heard a whisper from across the room. “Mark, come look at this,” my sister said.
“Shut up and go to sleep, Maddie.”
I didn’t hear any more about it until the next morning at breakfast. The lodge manager came by to ask if we had heard lions the night before. We had, as we had most nights. Maddie described to him what she had seen the night before- two animals that resembled skunks but were much larger, rolling around outside of our canvas room.

“Oh, you saw honey badgers! Those are a pretty rare sight, that’s lucky.”

Honey badgers, he explained to us, are extraordinarily fearless animals that are nearly impossible to kill, and have been known to tear through wooden houses to get to meat inside. Honey badgers are also one of the few animals that can use tools. Oh, and when they attack people, they go for the crotch.

The final stop on our tour of Africa was Zanzibar, part of the spice islands off the coast of Tanzania. At the Zanzibar airport we met up with my sister’s friend Weston, who, having already spent some time on the island, acted as our guide. Zanzibar is deceptively long, and our ride to our lodge took about an hour. On the way we passed several secondhand clothing vendors. Anyone who watches sports knows that during a large event the team that wins will usually be given hats and shirts with their team’s name on it, but have you ever wondered what happens to the losing team’s? Well, they get sent to Africa, apparently, because American tourists will patron the secondhand clothing vendors for novelty shirts (the Africans must think the Buffalo Bills are amazing.)

When we arrived at the lodge my sister, Weston and I left the checking in to my parents and headed out to the beach. Ditching our shoes at the edge of the bright white sand, we waded out to a cabana that had been built in the water. Zanzibar’s shore is unlike any other I’ve ever been to, because the water stays consistently about three or four feet deep all the way out to the breakers, maybe 150 yards out. We spent the rest of that day lounging around on the beach, and exploring our lodge, which was a nice break from the isolation out in the bush. The next two days after that were not much different, our only breaks from laying in the sun being sea kayaking and snorkeling.

Our last full day in Africa we ventured to the southern part of the island, to Stone Town, the historic section of Zanzibar City. Zanzibar was formerly a major slave trading port while under Arab rule, so our first stop was the slave market. We were given a brief, tourist- friendly overview of the history of Zanzibar by a tour guide who insisted he looked like Morgan Freeman, the Tanzanian’s second favorite American after Barack Obama (I heard America referred to as Obamaland on more than one occasion). The market had been transformed into a church after the slave trade was ended, and the altar was located at the former whipping post, where slaves would be lashed with a dried stingray tail before being sold (the stronger ones, they believed, wouldn’t cry). From the former slave market we walked through a series of narrow, winding alleys past white Arabian buildings and cast iron Indian doors, odes to the eclectic influences on the island. We emerged at a modern market, this one more vibrant and bustling with shoppers. We spent some time sampling spices from the different vendors, smelling cloves, cinnamon, pepper, vanilla, and countless others. Past the spices were the fruit, where vendors bargained with shoppers over fruits both exotic and familiar (it seems that nothing in Tanzania has a set price). We stopped to buy an orange, costing three cents for the fruit pre-peeled. My last evening in Africa was spent bickering with a man selling paintings beneath the steps of the former Sultan of Zanzibar’s house. After arguing about a difference of seven dollars (1000 shillings) for at least an hour, I got the painting for a little over ten dollars. Ironically, it will cost several times that to frame.

The next day our flight didn’t leave until the afternoon, so we spent some more time on the beach. We said goodbye to Weston, who was headed off to Rwanda, and started the long journey home. We caught a short flight from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam, the capital and largest city of Tanzania, and then had to be transported between the domestic and international airport. Some thirty hours later, we were home.