I start writing this at around 8.30 am on Sunday morning, sitting in Amsterdam airport directly facing the Rolex store. The store has a steady stream of visitors, only a few of whom put on a credible show of being potentially serious buyers, and has made one sale in the last hour. Perhaps this is about the same ratio you’d observe in any Rolex store, but it’s tempting to think the fact of being in an airport, of being open at such an hour on such a day, encourages an unusual volume of substanceless engagement. We’re particularly attuned to such a state, perhaps, because of the rather unfriendly timing of our flights – leaving Toronto at 5.15 pm, arriving at Amsterdam at 6 am local time, leaving for Kilimanjaro some four hours later. Landing in Amsterdam, we’re up late and up early at the same time; the airport is quiet (but rapidly gets busier) and yet studded with patches of dazzling mercantile light in which you can spend thousands of dollars on things you don’t need. Like all airports, it’s a rather stunning event space, even if the real event for everyone here will always be elsewhere, at the end of the departing flight, or the connecting flight after that. Anyway, the flight from Toronto was fine enough, although we would have chosen to sleep for more of it, or else for better sound quality on the earphones (neither of us ended up watching a movie – I gave up after two minutes, Ally persevered a little longer). In Amsterdam we eat a little and then sit here facing the Rolex store, which I keep thinking may seem suspicious to the store employees, whom I feel are attuned to notice small if essentially meaningless things (and, once in a while, to sell small and essentially meaningless items for $10,000). I read the news for what I expect to be the last time for quite a while, actually the longest while since the internet became an actual everyday Thing. We are both calm and serene, because this isn’t yet the event.
I pick it up again in the final
third of our nine-hour flight to Kilimanjaro. This time we’ve both slept fairly
well. I watched the recent French film L’amant
double (even in the era of personal video screens, I was amused that such a
sex- and nudity-ridden movie could make it onto an airplane menu) and Ally
watched the scandal-free Canadian film Maudie.
We have lots of legroom (economy comfort class!) and no real complaints – like
the flight to Amsterdam, we’re not just on-time but in fact scheduled to arrive
early. I think there are fewer black faces on the flight to Kilimanjaro than
there were on the flight from Toronto to Amsterdam (except for a slightly
higher incidence of “safari” pants on board, and an absence of cowboy hats, you
couldn’t tell from surveying the passengers whether we’re headed for Tanzania
or Texas). This seems wrong, but perhaps it’s an instant reminder that this is
to be, from most perspectives, an exercise in experiencing an imagined Africa
more than a real one…
At the airport, arriving at around
7.30 pm, the passengers divide into those with and without visas. The former
sounds like the best group to be in, but in fact both groups seem to move at
much the same speed – that is, hardly at all. This is another respect in which
being in premium economy seriously pays off though – if row 14 takes 45
minutes, what of row 48? The process involves being photographed and
electronically fingerprinted, although it’s hard not to think this is largely
theatre to make you feel better about paying $100 to get in. It also involves a
large, somewhat randomly choreographed cast of officials. As we’ve experienced
in China and elsewhere, Tanzania seems from the outset to create
multi-participant chains out of activities which elsewhere would be done by one
person, if not automated. When we arrive at the inn for the first night, the
process of getting our bags to the room seems to require three or four
changeovers. That was after being met at the airport and then driven along a
very dimly lit road for 35 minutes or so. Apparently during the day we could
have seen Mount Kilimanjaro. As it was, we only caught passing glimpses into
small, square rooms, while hoping not to knock over the people walking to and
from them (at first glance, foreign traffic always seems impossibly perilous).
We spent the first night in the
Rivertrees Inn, a pretty collection of bungalows on 10 acres, ably conveying a
sense of privileged, serene separation. Our room had a church-like roof and a
small library which included a 2002 guide to restaurants in Spain and Portugal.
We ate dinner around 9.15 pm – everyone else in the restaurant was probably
like us, starting a trip or ending one. We got up early the next day and left
around 6 am, continuing along the same road toward the town of Arusha. For most
of the way it looks like a torrent of small-scale capitalism – countless
“supermarkets” and “pubs” and car washes and the occasional more esoteric
enterprise like the “Shalom Israel Stationary” store. We passed mini buses
elaborately decorated in praise of Jesus, or of the Los Angeles Lakers, kids
walking to school in green uniforms, overladen motor scooters, cluster after
cluster of early morning negotiating and settling; and then in the middle of
this the occasional astounding assertion of modernity – a shiny office tower,
or a huge cultural centre of such striking design that we were still trying to
figure out which way was up when we left it in the rear view mirror.
We arrived at the town airport –
another example of extreme distribution of labour, seeming fairly chaotic in
its approach to organization and to carrying out basic tasks, with more small
business – coffee stands, gift shops - dotted everywhere. And yet it worked
because we were plucked out of the twenty or so waiting passengers (again, all
evidently tourists like us) and efficiently directed to the right plane, with
our bags already on it. It was a twelve-seater aircraft, with an Australian
pilot, and except for brief periods above the clouds, we were able to observe
the ground throughout the hour and a half journey (which included two stops) –
over the Ngorongoro crater, over stretches that look entirely dead and burned
out and others that support sparse but thriving-looking trees and bushes,
always with the feeling of pushing deeper and deeper into the Serengeti. One
young woman on the flight spent almost the whole time playing games on her
phone, seldom looking outside.
But again, everything involves more
infrastructure than you’d at first imagine – when we finally touched down, we
found a cluster of some twenty vehicles and a small crowd of guides and
visitors. We spent almost an hour there while the guy who picked us up (I think
his name was Pinda or Penda) put another departing couple on a plane and then
organized our permits. Based on that hour, small planes come and go every five
or ten minutes, and once we got under way, we encountered something close to
traffic congestion. But. of course, it is a big desert and this rapidly thinned
out. On the way to our lodge at Lamai Serengeti – in the far north of the
desert, just a few miles from the Kenyan border - we saw giraffes, hippos,
crocodiles, warthogs, mongooses, numerous kinds of deer, zebras and hundreds of
wildebeest, so it doesn’t seem animal-spotting will ever be a problem. Pinda/Penda
seemed masterful at glimpsing such creatures out of the corner of his eye; Ally
would usually tune in a second later; and then I’d be straining to focus and
catch up to what they were talking about.
It's actually not so funny because
we’d forgotten to pack my contact lens solution, and I was worried about suffering
through the whole trip with impeded vision. But on arrival I mentioned it to
the co-manager Helen who said she’d email and get some sent over on the next
day’s plane. If this sounds rather decadent, it’s as nothing against the grandeur
of the Lamai camp. This is a series of stone-walled, thatched-roofed buildings,
joined by winding pathways and steps, constructed on the side of a granite
“kopje” – it’s absurd to think anyone ever thought of building a high-end
vacation location on such a remote and inhospitable mass of boulders, but since
they did think of it, and even actually managed to do it, it means that every room
(really a stand-alone cottage) has a vast, soaring view of the Serengeti (over
the course of our stay, we would see buffalo, elephants, wildebeest and baboons
merely from our window). It also has solar-heated showers, enormous canopy
beds, a full power supply, and basically anything you want. It has wi-fi in the
communal areas, but for the first time on vacation since wi-fi became a thing,
I’m not planning to seek it out, as I can’t think of any way in which knowing
what’s going on elsewhere would enhance anything we do here (and many ways in
which it wouldn’t).
We had lunch (a fresh and varied
buffet, already speaking to the efficiency of the supply chain), we both slept
a bit, I wrote this diary. In the afternoon it started thundering and we
wondered whether the evening drive might be in jeopardy, but it never delivered
more than light rain. In the main area at around 4 they served coffee and cake,
and then we set out with our permanent guide Lazaro (I checked this spelling
with him – he says it would also be fine to use Lazaru, or Lazarus, or about
ten other variants) and a couple from Switzerland who’d arrived the previous
day. The next few hours unfolded almost as if governed by a software program
that ensures a new wonderment at ten- or fifteen-minute intervals. The guides
are all constantly in radio contact, so when one of them spots something
especially good, it’s never a long time before other trucks trundle up as well.
The prime example on Monday evening was a leopard, whose relaxation was
undermined by one batch of camera-wielding gawkers after another. I think he or
she took it remarkably well under the circumstances. I’ll write much more about
our experiences with Lazaro and his vehicle (an open-sided heavy-duty Toyota
something with a canvas roof that seats six people in two rows of three, and
which is more comfortable than you’d think, if only because comfort is the last
thing on your mind).
To leap ahead momentarily, I woke
up in the middle of Monday night, hearing heavy footsteps trampling in the
undergrowth around our room. Initially I thought it was one of the guards on
patrol, but it soon became obvious this was implausible, and I came to think it
was an elephant. I woke up Ally so she could share in it, but as we felt we
should heed the instructions not to go outside, and as we had no way of
illuminating what was out there, we didn’t see more than a dark shape moving
beneath our window. The following morning though they confirmed that elephants
had moving around the lodge, so that was seemingly it (later information
suggested it may also have been a buffalo).
I couldn’t get back to sleep for a
long time afterwards, and among the things to ponder was “Dennis,” a “retired
marine lawyer” who sat across from us at dinner, and who seemed physically,
verbally and attitudinally to be in fact Albert Brooks, the
actor/comedian/director. When I put this to him, he said that no one had ever
previously remarked on the resemblance, which seemed like too extreme a denial
to be true, and therefore to prove he was indeed Brooks. Further, among other
things, he said he lives in Malibu with a second house in Aspen, which he
conceded is very likely where Albert Brooks lives too. Anyway, we had a fine
and extended conversation, and if he was indeed Albert Brooks, I’m content that
I was able to entertain him in the manner in which he deserves (as I write this
real-time journal, I can’t go online in search of further evidence to prove or
disprove the theory, but I’ll return to the topic once I’ve done that).
On Tuesday morning our drive lasted
approximately six hours, and didn’t feel anything like it. This is exactly what
we experienced ten years ago in South Africa and had wanted to revisit, but the
Serengeti is already proving a richer experience. In part, that’s just sheer
plenitude – the abundance of animals here almost seems falsified, or to
disprove your own senses, given what we know of endangerment, environmental
recession and so forth. Wildebeest in particular are so dense here that they
feel like the plasma between blood cells, often mixing with zebra in
particular, with smatterings of deer or antelope (our stay was not long enough
for me to reliably distinguish between steenboks, topi, waterbucks and the rest,
although I think I could pick an impala out of any line-up). There’s something
so pure and satisfying about seeing different animals mixing peacefully
together, even if one realizes the simplicity of looking to the animal kingdom
for symbols of constructive harmony. During the six hours we saw as many as
forty hippos in an extended group, perhaps ten of them squeezed together like
sleeping puppies against a sandbank, others in various stages of submersion or
activity; we saw elephants clumsily exiting the water and clambering up a bank,
trying things out on land for a while, and then just as clumsily changing their
minds and heading back; we saw a lion mating with another (we came the right
time of year for this it seems, especially as they apparently mate every
fifteen minutes and therefore sightings of the act, and of the preceding
proposal/acceptance, aren’t particularly rare at present); we saw ostriches and
hyena and baboons. Only one giraffe though, and we did not succeed in seeing a
rhinoceros, which are scarce in these parts.
But the highlight of the morning
drive was the crossing of the Mara river by a huge herd of wildebeest. There
must have been thirty vehicles positioned near the river, watching the herd
prepare to cross – several times it seemed ready to enter the water before
succumbing either to fear or indecision and running off again (in this as in so
many things, it often seems that nature is merely toying with us, that what
we’re observing here is too perfectly scenic or dramatic to actually be “real,”
however that might be measured). But in the end the decision was made and they
went, and then all the trucks rushed forward to claim the best available
vantage point – we came out of this extremely well. With uncanny precision, the
wildebeest – surely well over a thousand of them – followed the same
single-file route down the bank into the water, across the river and out the
other side, and the same pattern of deceleration through the water and
acceleration when back on dry land, and our guide seemed genuinely elated when
every single one of them made it unharmed to the other side, because he said
he’s seen a hundred of them die, through misjudgment or bad luck or predatory
intervention. This was an incredible,
stirring sight, although it was also satisfying later in the drive to leave the
other trucks behind and to feel alone in our small piece of the desert.
As I mentioned, wildebeest would
recur over and over as the connective tissue of the whole experience – the
creature who overwhelms you in vast numbers while you wait for the other
scarcer sightings. You can’t help but assume they’re among the dimmer desert
inhabitants, surviving by breeding prowess rather than by guile, and if they
ever do anything distinctive, it’s generally only to become possessed by sudden
spasms, as if electrically stimulated from the head down. But the river
crossing, and subsequent sightings of the vast herds majestically sweeping
across open plains, will stand among our most amazing memories. At such times
we’re watching aspects of the great migration, the slow formation of what will
turn into a complete abandonment of this area – in a month, we’re told, there
won’t be a single wildebeest to be seen. They’ll leave the grass of this area
behind to be replenished and recovered, returning perhaps in the middle of next
year, and the cycle will continue for as long as it’s allowed to (here like
everywhere else, people tell us that the pattern has shifted, presumably due to
climate change (unless you’re a Republican)).
It thundered again on Tuesday
afternoon, again without delivering on its threats. One of the staff woke us
from our nap when he comes to turn down the canvas window protectors; he didn’t
knock but rather stood outside saying hello until receiving a response – we
would come to know this as the African way. It’s the same way they bring us our
early morning coffee and tea, which is passed to us from outside through a
hatch. Again, the lodge seems to be staffed by a vast number of people with
carefully delineated functions. At night it’s guarded by local tribesmen with
spears – we’re not allowed to go outside after dark unless accompanied by one
of them (and on the first night, in addition to the elephant, we could hear
what sounded like roaring lions, sounding not far away, so we don’t need further
convincing). The laundry is handwashed every day by men, but since they’re Muslim,
they won’t do female underwear (it wasn’t explained why women couldn’t have
stepped in for the sorting and for that one subsection of the task – instead
the room has washing powder and a clothes line so that the likes of Ally can do
it herself). There’s a large complement of waiting staff, and then of course
the no doubt constant churn of arrivals and departures. It’s hard to imagine
Nomad, the owner/operator of both the camps we’re visiting, and organizer of
everything in between, often trips up significantly on any of this. My contact
lens solution, by the way, was waiting for us when we arrived back from the
Tuesday morning drive, less than a day after I’d mentioned it.
On Tuesday, given the six-hour
morning drive, lunch and a necessary nap, we have barely an hour’s downtime
until the next outing, or just enough to update this (so when would I have been
able to go online anyway, even to check on Albert Brooks?) In the afternoon we
do a walking safari – four of us start out from the lodge, accompanied by Lazaro
and not one but two other men with guns. We don’t cover a great distance in our
hour and a half to two hours of slow walking, but we still manage to see
wildebeest (of course!), zebras, eland, warthog, all of which seem far more
nervous about people on foot than they do about (the perhaps boringly familiar)
trucks. We also hear a lion roar not so far away (apparently though they wouldn’t
have viewed lions as a gun-necessary risk, compared to potentially charging
elephants and buffalo). The grounds (and again, this is just steps from our
lodge) are a virtual killing field of remains from wildebeest, zebra etc., some
of them recent enough that the hair is still attached even if the flesh was
long wiped clean, others of them years old (but I guess there’s no bone removal
service in these parts). No doubt relishing the opportunity to communicate more
detailed knowledge, Lazaro regularly stopped to analyze the age and origin of
droppings (and even to identify how, for instance, monkeys had been digging
around inside the droppings to extract beetles) and to identify flowers and
trees. We finished as the sun was going down, and to our surprise (although
perhaps we should have seen it coming) someone from the camp had driven out
with drinks and snacks, which we enjoyed on a rock overlooking the sunset, and
apparently with a lion lying on a rock beneath the setting sun (although
neither of us was able to see it). So, truly, what a day.
I tested on our Swiss friends my
theory that “Dennis” was Albert Brooks, but I think they found it (while
certainly amusing) too complicated to take too seriously (to which I might say,
the more sophisticated the joke, the more likely he must have been its author).
We ate dinner alone on a plateau above the main dining room, if only to prevent
me from accusing one of the guests of being, say, Woody Allen. Our sleep was
again interrupted, and from the tracks they identified it the next morning as a
buffalo. I again had trouble getting back to sleep and felt the toll of it a
bit the following morning.
But who can succumb to fatigue when
there’s so much to see? We had Lazaro to ourselves for the morning drive (the
brochure states you pay a premium for avoiding shared drives, but the occupancy
appears to have declined compared to the last two days so it seems we got
lucky). One might imagine the Serengeti as a rather uniform, parched expanse,
but even within our little chunk of it, there’s quite considerable variation,
reflecting differences in rock formation, tree density (often we pass as many
dead trees as live ones, apparently due in large part to the efforts of the
elephants), closeness to water and so on: boulders and termite mounds add their
own crude landscaping. It’s all in shades of green and yellow and grey though –
if you see a splash of bright colour, it’s more likely to be a lizard or bird
than a flower. Today we spent most of our time on the wide-open plains, under
the largest, most cloud-filled sky on earth. The wildlife was a little sparser
than yesterday, although that’s entirely a relative assessment – we again saw
everything I already listed, absent the hippos, and we made a crucial addition
– the cheetah. There are not that many in the vicinity, and sometimes they
cross over into Kenya and so are inaccessible to Tanzanian groups. We caught up
with two of them as they were serenely doing just that, strolling together
through the desert as if well-aware of their celebrity. We very briefly crossed
to the wrong side of the border (marked by stone pillars at kilometer
intervals) so we can say we have technically been to Kenya. Then we hung around
there for a while to greet a series of Kenyan safari trucks and taunt them
about having better wildlife than they do.
This started at 6.15 am, and it was much chillier than yesterday, and remained overcast for most of the morning – I spent a few hours huddling under a blanket. The safari experience is full of rituals, and breakfast is another, requiring that the guide meticulously set up a folding table and chairs, and lay out a spread of eggs, cereal, yoghurt, coffee, tea, and more. We ate it in the middle of the plain, with elephants in the distance, but no other trucks. At the very end of our drive, we saw two lions together in the shade, the female walking over to a nearby watering hole – their exclusive property of course – for a drink, the male trying to interest her in other things. Once again, you worry only that your memory will become too full.
After lunch we slept – me for
longer than Ally, leaving little time to write this diary, virtually none for
anything else. We have been taking our shower in the afternoon because that’s
when the solar-heated water is available – if you want one in the morning they
need advance notice to heat the water electrically – but today the solar-heated
water ran out after a few seconds. Never mind. For the first time in my adult
life, I have gone three whole days without even a shred of news. It seems that
many or most other guests spend a chunk of their time in the wi-fi area, but it
seems like the plush equivalent of cramming into a foul airport smoking zone.
There currently appear to be two guests – both middle-aged women – who are traveling
alone; we always vacillate on whether this is poignant, or impressively
pragmatic. Of course we are at fault – what would be the term,
couple-normative? - in thinking we need
to assess it as being anything at all. The lodge is managed by Helen and her
husband Clyde, a 30-ish couple from the UK and South Africa respectively. She
told us they met while working on cruise ships, and that she often finds it
lonely here, spending much time on Skype and so forth, but that it has many
advantages, which of course she didn’t need to expand on. Based on how quickly
the contact lens solution turned up, the supply chain may be capable of
addressing almost anything, or anything physical anyway. It’s interesting to
speculate on the process behind the super-fresh, varied salads they prepare at
lunch (but one suspects it may not always reflect the sustainability concepts
that Nomad emphasizes in its marketing).
For the third successive day, it
thundered and poured, requiring one of the men to again rush over and tie down
the covers. Today though, unlike Monday and Tuesday, it didn’t really stop. We
set out anyway at around 4.30 pm, the wheels displacing walls of water from the
start; the radio usually crackles with the sharing of information (or maybe in
part with gossip and dirt about the guests, who knows) but now was almost
quiet, most guides from most camps not having ventured out (and apparently one of
those who did, managed to get his vehicle stuck). We started heading between
the one thin, bright break in the grim sky, but it would have involved crossing
a creek, and we couldn’t make it. So we waited for a while, watching perhaps
seventy or eighty zebra move rather indecisively across the plain, and a few
buffalo waiting it out under the trees. We decided to head back, and despite
everything, we would have ticked off a pretty good chunk of the mammal spotting
checklist provided in our room, if we hadn’t done it already. The highlight, as
it so often is, was a family of elephants, huddling together and swaying with
heavy grace to the gentle music in their heads, before deciding to move on and
crossing the path in front of us, on the way to their next happy exercise in
tree destruction (Lazaro said however that rain such as this does a great job
of helping the trees to recover from their encounters with elephants).
When we left the camp, two of the
guys were catching a puff adder which had wandered into the area outside the
dining room, and manipulating it into a basket; when we arrived back, a group
of hyraxes which live in the surrounding rocks had moved into the same area and
were huddling together out of the rain, largely oblivious to the comings and
goings. We did some shopping in the little gift shop, where it appears a young
woman called Vicki sits alone for large chunks of the day. Despite the curtailed
evening drive, we still had little time to spend in our room before dinner. In
addition to writing this diary, I want to write a short story about a man who
goes on safari, and becomes obsessed with a (false) idea about another guest,
to the extent that he completely fails to appreciate anything before him. I’d
like to write it while I’m here, but I doubt I’ll even get started on it. You
will appreciate that only the tiniest germ inside this concept can in any way
be taken as personal testimony.
We ate dinner with the group – a
traditional Tanzanian buffet, all excellent; our dinner companions included a
couple of Los Angeles lawyers and a retired Texas judge, one of the two solo
women I mentioned. We walked back to our room at the same time as a young
couple from Manila, and I conceded that my knowledge of the Philippines is largely
confined to what I’ve gleaned from the (excellent but very long) films of the
director Lav Diaz. He’d seen none of these himself, but he recognized the name
and seemed impressed. “Lav Diaz,” I heard him explain to his partner as we
closed the door, “National artist!”
I did ask Lazaro at one point whether he’d
driven any famous people, and he showed us a photo of himself with a famous
American actor that neither one us could identify from the name nor the
appearance (apparently the guy is best known for some kids’ show, so we may be
the wrong demographic). He also said he’d driven someone from the US Supreme Court,
but could only remember the man was called John. Based on this, and the general
description, it seemed it might have been Chief Justice Roberts. If so, one
only hopes any liberal guests in attendance at the same time found it not too
hard to remain civil. Lazaro opined that well-known guests might often not
volunteer their identities, which I found no difficulty in agreeing with…
On our last day, in anticipation of
further evening rain, we extended our morning safari, and ended up staying out
for some nine hours. In a way, this might be the ultimate testimonial – I can’t
think of another circumstance under which one could drive around for that long
and not regret a second of it. We ate breakfast for the first time at the lodge
rather than taking it with us, and got to watch the daily routine of the
monkeys trying to raid the buffet (we saw one of them swoop in, grab a muffin,
and gleefully shove it down his throat). Our main objective after we set out was
to find a rhinoceros, and we drove far into the area where Lazaro (whom we
again had to ourselves) thought that might be achieved – we saw far fewer trucks
today, and many of those were just the same recurring ones on a similar quest.
We were often very close to the Kenyan border again, able to watch animals on
the other side, and at times Lazaro was unsure whether or not we’d strayed
across it. After some four and a half or five hours we stopped for lunch and
then started to reverse our steps. At some point – and again, the radio chatter
is an ever-present background to the journey – he got word of a rhino spotting
and started speeding off, displacing vast herds of wildebeest, and all but dismissing
a not-exactly-negligible view of two lions watching a passing family of
elephants (no doubt wishing they could just get one of the calves alone) to reach
the location. By the time we (and several other trucks) got there, they’d
vanished again (the area had plenty of dense clumps of trees where they could
hide indefinitely). We waited and waited, and then left for a while to see the
lions after all (by then the elephants had moved on) with a side visit to see a
lounging cheetah. Based on Lazaro’s analysis of a nearby fresh carcass and of
the vultures and storks (who knew storks were that way?) picking on it, the
cheetah had killed a gazelle in the last few minutes, already eaten its fill,
and left the rest for the other scavengers. I guess in these parts, a cheetah
can afford to be complacent about finishing up his meal.
Lazaro then seemed to indicate we’d have to give up on the rhino given the approaching rain, and then a few minutes later we saw two magnificent rhinoceroses after all, completely out in the open, walking majestically along (I am really not sure to what extent our guide orchestrated this apparent disappointment followed by last-minute triumph). We watched them until they disappeared again, and then he headed back, moving quickly enough that he had to take precautions against his cushions and blankets flying out of the vehicle, and got us back to the lodge some five minutes before the rain (just as we always knew he would).
I mentioned before that the land is
much more varied than you might escape – today it seemed to have breathed in
the rain from yesterday and then to have exhaled in a richer shade of green.
Some bleaker areas look like the aftermath of battles or fires – sometimes
that’s the work of elephants laying waste to trees (as carelessly as cheetahs,
but with less benefit for other animals – we saw some giraffes standing in a
particularly wretched-looking spot as if trying to remember what had happened
to the lush trees of their memories), or of various tree parasites (sometimes,
plants invade others and break them open from the inside). But on the whole,
it’s lusher, and water is more plentiful, than we’d expected. It’s hot of
course – even spending so much time in the vehicle, you burn rapidly. But it’s
a different kind of heat compared to Toronto’s summer – I covered up today with
a long-sleeved thing we bought in New Zealand, and never felt overheated from
it. Another aspect of plentitude is the abundance of new-born animals – we’ve
seen baby monkeys, elephants, lion cubs, zebras, giraffes, and so on. You
wouldn’t usually expect warthogs to constitute a highlight, but it was so
joyous one day to see a family of warthogs just running around, apparently
simply playing, just because they’re alive, and they can. We saw numerous other
examples of play too, including unserious competitions between male buffalo and
giraffes. Of course, such showdowns often involve real stakes. Lazaro keeps up
a steady commentary of analysis on the structure of what we’re observing,
pointing out the males versus the females (the latter usually outnumbering the
former, sometimes by a ridiculous ratio), males who are plotting to displace
other males, and so forth – I only wish I had time to document it all here.
Sometimes he indicates that particular creatures are on alert because of the
proximity of predators – such as a deer calmly eating while its mate stands
guard like a sentinel, knowing a leopard is on the other side of the rocks. On
the other hand, he sometimes assessed various animals as being oblivious to the
danger they were in. This of course would be bad news for them.
We learned that Lazaro actually
owns his vehicle and receives a daily rental fee from Nomad for it, contrary to
what we’d assumed; apparently this is under some Nomad micro-finance loan program
(which he said will take several years to pay back though). This and other
aspects of the company seem very progressive, but inevitably it’s possible to
have reservations here and there. Most obviously, there’s the basic structure
of two white managers overseeing what appears to be an entirely black staff,
which might suggest rather unfortunate colonial parallels (the primary owner of
Nomad is, we’re told, a wealthy Scotsman who has extensive business interests
in Tanzania – this somewhat explains why, months ago when I was transferring
money to pay for all this, the business address was listed as a tiny village in
Scotland). The staff quarters are hidden away behind some rocks but it doesn’t
sound like they are anything to brag about – tin-sided buildings occupied two
to a room, with little or no view, et cetera. The hours are self-evidently
grueling – you see people late at night serving dinner or tending the bar, and
then again serving breakfast (albeit they get some downtime during the day).
And of course there’s the isolation of the whole place and the consequent
separation from family, although that’s inherent in the premise. Anyway, it is
no surprise to hear that the life is not for everyone, but I must say that the
staff we encountered are all astoundingly pleasant and amiable-seeming.
It’s possible to explore the desert on a self-drive basis, although between the difficulty of navigation and not having access to the radio intelligence network, it’s hard to see how you’d locate most of the natural wonders. We came across one guy stuck in the mud – a supply truck had stopped to help, and Lazaro joined in as well (the guy’s wife stayed in the vehicle throughout). I was happy the guy gave Lazaro some money for his help once he was finally out. He came up to apologize to us also and said he hoped it would be the only farce we’d witness today (it was). I did advise Lazaro to get away from the guy quickly before he got stuck again. Regarding the radio chatter – we were told that while Swahili is common to everyone, Tanzania also has 126 individual languages, all of which thrive within their distinct tribes or subcultures. Of course, it would take much more time and investigation to get a real sense of the country. Apparently it’s recently become mandatory for children to go to school; however, the best schools are private and beyond the reach of ordinary people (one staff member, telling us about this, hinted very politely about his hope of finding a foreign benefactor to fund this for his sons). Family structures are evolving toward something more recognizably Western (as in Lazaro’s one wife versus his father’s five; we heard another story like this too) but at the cost of well-established traditional structures. I suppose everything is always a tumble of steps forward and accompanying (hopefully smaller) ones backward.
At dinner we talked to a neurotic
American from Portland and yet another Swiss guy – as often happens, we didn’t
necessarily start off strong with the group conversation, but ended up still
being at the table after everyone else had moved on. (Whenever I tell people
I’ve been completely off my phone, they usually start by claiming to be doing
much the same thing, a claim which then rapidly falls apart on further
questioning – it’s similar to how people like to claim they hardly eat meat,
again regardless of their actual habits). The lodge is much fuller than it was
yesterday, in part because one of the mobile camps was washed away by the storm
and so people had to be relocated. The buffalo were yet again moving around the
lodge during the night, but we didn’t hear them (the nights are far from quiet,
with a complex symphony of chirps and hums and rustles and even the occasional
roar, but we didn’t find any of this kept us awake). We had breakfast for the
last time here. We filled in our comment card and did not have a single
criticism.
Pinda/Penda drove us to the
airstrip, just as he’d picked us up. He said his great ambition is to be a full
guide – currently he is more of an assistant guide/jack of all trades (his duties
include doing the laundry). If nothing else, the tips are much much greater for
a guide as they are customarily the only ones who are tipped separately (I have
to admit we gave more to Lazaro individually than to all the others combined,
although this is not out of line with what the lodge recommends). We felt bad
for Pinda/Penda though because it seems he has a long way to go in overall
fluency. For instance, we passed a very freshly killed zebra, with the
victorious lion on a rock nearby, having eaten no more than a few mouthfuls out
of the underbelly. This surprised us, but it was only when we mentioned it in
Selous that we were given the likely narrative, that lions are often exhausted
after their kills and frequently take such respites before settling in to enjoy
their handiwork.
Anyway, it is funny that the
Serengeti’s Kokatende airstrip requests that passengers arrive forty-five
minutes early, as the normal airport process is entirely absent – you just walk
up to the plane with your (entirely unchecked) bags, and if your name is on the
list, you get on the plane. The plane was a ten-seater, and that includes the
seat next to the pilot, which I expect would be a big thrill for some
passengers. We stopped in one airport to refuel – it seems there is a Four
Seasons Serengeti near there (must be quite something). Some ninety minutes
later we touched down in Zanzibar, so we got to see it from the air at least –
ranging from what looks from above like vast areas of tin boxes on one side of
the island, to (presumably) hotels with as much space to themselves as a
hundred such boxes, and then large areas on the other side of the island where
it was hard to make out much population density at all. Overall, it looked
smaller than we’d expected – we’d toyed when planning the trip with the idea of
spending a few nights there, but our impression from above was that there was
no reason to regret our decision to skip it. We took off again, and fifteen
minutes later arrived in Dar Es Salaam, a much bigger city, which at least from
our narrow entry angle seemed to allow its inhabitants a little more breathing
room. Our bags did get scanned there, and ten minutes later we were in the
departure area, where we spent a couple of hours (naturally, Nomad had supplied
us with lunch to take with us). We went on wi-fi for the first time since
arriving in Tanzania, but it wasn’t a particularly uplifting experience, so
we’ll revert to silence now for the next five days. I must admit that my
confidence in my Albert Brooks theory has now somewhat diminished, although I
could not research the matter enough to reach a definitive conclusion one way
or the other.
Then we caught another small plane,
another ten-seater I think, to Selous, flying over dazzlingly mysterious
patterns of water and forest and sand. It took about half an hour to the Kiba
airstrip, which is literally just that, without even the tiny facilities of the
Serengeti strip. Another guy got off there, and it turned out he was the
manager of the place, Eric, returning from a brief leave. It’s instantly
apparent that we will be even more isolated here than we were in Lamai (where,
as I mentioned, we were always running into trucks from other safaris – we may
have registered as many as thirty different safari brand/logos there). The
drive to the lodge didn’t take long, and then we met the acting managers, Fabio
and Barbara - another young imported couple, this time from Germany – and we
got an introductory pep talk which was much like the one in Lamai, except that
the European accents make things sound more like commands than enticements. One
thing that’s different is that here the laundry excludes all underwear, not
just female underwear – this is a recent change they say they made for
egalitarian purposes (they acknowledged Eric may change it back).
The lodge has a main “mess area”
with a library and a bar on the left, and a dining area on the right. Beyond
the bar is a swimming pool, and from there you can walk down to a beach (which
however you’re not meant to do without staff accompaniment, mainly to avoid
getting between a hippo and the water – more on this later). Our room is
similar to Lamai in terms of size (i.e. embarrassingly huge) and general
opulence – however, the walls are of wood rather than stone, and the front is
completely open, so that only a mosquito net separates us from, uh, all of
Africa. They say there is no risk of dangerous animals entering our room, but
monkeys or bush babies may come in and steal anything that seems edible, or
sweet-smelling, or otherwise appealing – various boxes are provided to lock
things up. We may have taken this too much to heart because as I write this – a
day or so later – I can never find anything because we’ve so meticulously
hidden it. Directly beneath our window there is a clearing, and some brush
beyond that, and then interwoven stretches of sand and water, with more trees
and mountains beyond. It’s very dark at night, but during the day there is
every chance of seeing hippos, and they may come up very close to the units as
well, even directly below. But I think the “bush music” overall is a little
quieter than it was in Lamai.
At dinner we met two older couples,
one British and one Italian. Overall the lodge is more dimly lit than it was in
Lamai and the staff are either more evasive or else fewer in number, giving
things the constant sense of being on the verge of slipping away altogether
into the night. But again, the Nomad brand rapidly comes across in the
structure and tone of the day. The staff vary in their command of English, but
the one phrase they all know is “You’re welcome.” I think some of them grab
onto it as an all-purpose substitute for “Hello,” or “Please” or “Enjoy your
meal” or whatever else evades them; it’s very endearing. The conversation at
dinner though was a bit monotonous, focusing almost entirely on past safari
experiences (both the other couples were double-digit veterans) and on great
photographs of their past or of their imagined futures (I had no idea that wild
dogs were such an evasive target). I imagine our little camera looks silly to
such heavy-duty people, but we would much rather rely on our senses and
memories than on photographs (I rather like the idea of coming here and not
taking a single picture, but everyone would think us crazy, and besides in the
absence of any photographic evidence might suspect us of having invented the
whole trip). We took two glasses of wine back to our room to end the night – we
never did this in Lamai because, as mentioned, we wouldn’t have been allowed to
drink them outside). We both fell asleep quickly, but I woke up at some point
and couldn’t get back to sleep, which made the following morning difficult at
times. I ended up sleeping through lunch the following day, so Ally had to go and
eat alone like a sad solo traveler.
But there was nothing sad about the
morning drive, unless you adopt the perspective of the numerous dead animals we
encountered. We had heard two things about Selous – that it’s hotter than
Lamai, and that the animals are less plentiful. The first is entirely true – we
left at 7 am, and by around 11 am the heat was uncomfortable even in the shade
of the vehicle; we arrived back at 12.15 pm, which by that measure didn’t seem
like a moment too soon. They avoid scheduling anything during the afternoon,
which seems wise (even though our room avoids technology with regard to such
things as televisions and mini-bars, it does have an enormous electric fan
above the bed). The second is also true – we saw an almost comically small
number of wildebeest compared to what we’ve come to expect, and there were
often longer waits between sightings, especially again toward the end of the
drive when the animals had all scurried into various patches of shade. But
there were wonderful compensating benefits. We certainly saw giraffes in
greater numbers than in Lamai. We saw amazing sweeping panoramas, in which by
turning your head you moved from hippos to drinking giraffes to a herd of
buffalo to a lioness and her eight cubs, feasting on one of those very buffalo.
We drove closer to the latter sight and ended up watching it for well over half
an hour – various cubs deciding they’d had enough, then changing their minds
and coming back, fighting over the best shreds of remaining flesh; the mother
dragging the carcass deeper into the shade, over the objection of two cubs; and
for most of the time, the wretched hollow stare of the dead creature pointed in
our direction. Later we saw an even more ghoulish sight – a hyena tearing at
the neck of a fallen giraffe, long after the lions had moved on; we saw the
hyena move on too, just suddenly deciding enough was enough and trotting away
without a backward glance, at which the vultures moved in, plunging their beaks
deep into the little that remained. It’s an entirely efficient distribution of
spoils, as if constituting the bleakest possible ad for a project management
enterprise. We also saw various antelopes, eland, warthogs, birds (I’ve been
delinquent in saying much about the birds – I guess they’re more for connoisseurs
– but this is certainly some kind of birdwatching paradise I imagine) and so
on.
We drove up to a river bed that
seemed entirely dead, of interest only to baboons, but for a group of elephants
in the distance extracting with their trunks the little water that remained in
some subterranean reservoir and spraying it into their mouths (not quite as
efficiently as the events I just described). But during the rainy season (still
a few months away), it appears the river will be entirely replenished, to a
depth of what looked like over ten feet; likewise we drove through a “lake”
which couldn’t possibly be identified as such now, but will reappear when the
rain starts. There are a few more durably defined roadways which will be the
only supply lines during that season. For now the ground is mostly much
drier-looking than in the Serengeti, a study in yellows more than in greens,
although there are certainly exceptions, and few areas are completely devoid of
trees or bushes (I believe these are often acacias). The sense of reduced
plentitude also applies to other humans – we saw only a few trucks from other
lodges (even the nearest of them lies 35km away from us), a few self-drive
cars, and a guy driving a tractor who had gotten lost on his way to the
airstrip. I realize this can happen to anyone, but of all places to be
imprecise in one’s navigation… (he seemed to have retained his cheerfulness
though).
Our guide now is Deo, and we shared
most of the morning drive with a British guy called Nick who we picked up after
a night of fly camping (see later comments) and who was laden down with
cameras, although in his case it’s actually part of his job (providing new
visual content for an Africa-centric website, or something like that). Overall,
still writing this on the first afternoon, I think we may have designed the trip
perfectly – the bountifulness of the Serengeti provides an instant surfeit of
safari bliss, and then the Selous follows it up with something a little more
refined. It’s impossible as of now to say which of the two will be stronger in
our memories, not that it is an important matter to resolve. As I write, more
than halfway through the trip, we’re both surprised how little time we spend on
anything other than pure safari experience – we’re both still on the same books
we were reading back in Toronto for instance. This is of course exactly how it
should be. We can read any time!
The rituals continue – here too
they serve tea and cake at 4 pm at which time you meet your guide and discuss
the evening’s activities; he meets you again before dinner to plan the next morning,
and so on. A lot of it is scheduling – what time to leave, what time to have
breakfast, what time to have a wake-up call (and the early morning delivery of
tea/coffee, delivered here in the anti-monkey box, rather than through a hatch
as in Lamai). It could seem like being tied down too much, but on the other
hand, when will the time spent on activities ever be as precious? For the
evening drive, Nick dropped out and it was just us and Deo (they charge a
supplement if you want to guarantee your drives won’t be shared, but we were
lucky in that the great majority of our drives worked out that way regardless).
It was relatively low-key by some measures – only a smattering of significant
animal sightings (which is just as well as I’d forgotten to reload my camera
battery after recharging it) – but had one great incident which summed up how
you get drawn here into great narratives. Deo heard some baboon sounds which he
identified as a possible reaction to a leopard; then by watching the movement
of the baboons he deduced the possible location of the leopard, and then he
drove a little further and there it was! I expect it’s largely down to
experience, but it still seemed pretty masterful. The leopard only spent a
little time in the open though before disappearing into the bush, where we and
another vehicle were reduced to grabbing at shadows and faint flickers of
movement, with both Ally and I straining to catch even the faintest glimpse (it
helped when it moved its tail). We left for a while to look at other things,
and when we arrived back the leopard had relocated to a sturdy tree branch,
where it lay with all its legs hanging down, as if lacking a care in the world.
By this time it was getting dark, although on the way back we still got a kick
out of a group of hyenas rolling around in a mud puddle and refusing to move
for us (I guess they feel much ballsier at night).
Deo says the leopards do come into
the lodge area sometimes, but that the total lack of protection in our room
isn’t a problem because they avoid humans. We accepted this, but it’s not hard
to see how some might be concerned. He told us he started as a waiter here and
rapidly became a guide. Another employee with aspirations to be a guide was
sitting in the back of one of the other trucks tonight, monitoring events and
exchanges as they drove around. His challenge, we’re told, will be fluency in
English rather than technical knowledge; this seems to be a common thing given
the similar situation we described in Lamai. But it’s a sad necessity – the
guides aren’t just here to point out animals (although that’s hardly a
negligible skill) but also to hold you captive through the spaces in between.
Anyway, observing the rituals at the lodge continues to be interesting in
itself. We perceive now some slight disorganization because the regular manager
Eric has returned, but the relief managers are still here trying to do their
thing, so that (for example) we were asked twice about our plans for the night.
This hardly matters. Eric seems to be born to the task by the way – a white
Tanzanian who has the host thing utterly down while also speaking fluent
Swahili (he co-manages the place with his girlfriend Natasha, who has also
returned now after being away). Fabio is also trying to learn Swahili, and gave
us several facts about the language, but some of these were subsequently
contradicted by others. Whether in management or lower down within the labour
force, I guess there are always challenges….
We ate dinner at a table set far
away from the main group table, and again took some wine back to the room
afterwards. So far we’ve seen but one lonely monkey in the vicinity of our
room, and there was no real indication he was planning on stealing (funnily
enough, as soon as I wrote that I went to check on some rustling sounds, and
about ten or twelve at least have now arrived, but their intentions remain
unclear). In general, the animals here are clearly more cautious than in Lamai.
Most prominently, the elephants up there didn’t seem too worried about all the
trucks and the gawkers, but the elephants keep a severe distance here – Deo
says this is learned behaviour flowing from the local history of poaching. It’s
a bit sad to be told that parts of the Selous national park are set aside for
hunting, and that one can obtain a licence (albeit only very very expensively,
unless you bribe a crooked ranger or something) to kill just about any animal (the
giraffe is one exception, being Tanzania’s national animal, and so is the
elephant). It’s hard not to feel contempt for someone who would see, say, a
lion, and want only the experience of killing it, but perhaps they are more to
be pitied than scorned.
We both slept well on Saturday night, and then on 7 am on Sunday morning we set out for a boat trip on the river. We only saw two other boats during the subsequent five hours or so. We saw – and I’m truly not exaggerating – perhaps a thousand hippos though. Time and again, we saw them from a distance, partially out of the water; then as we approached they submerged themselves up to their eyes and ears, leaving us under scrutiny by ten or fifteen suspicious hippo craniums, then as we drew even closer they submerged completely (an underwater camera would have yielded some astounding mass hippo groupings). Obviously they are very reticent about humans, which is just as well, because plenty of Tanzanians have been killed by stumbling upon a grazing hippo and inadvertently blocking its path back to the water. The other main feature was crocodiles – for all their fearsome reputation, apparently as skittish as the hippos; we had the recurring sight of a crocodile basking on its little patch of sand, and then sliding into the water as we approached.
Throughout the trip, we passed by
what would be stunning, soft-sanded, secluded beaches, if one had a way of
getting to them, and of being sure they were not areas of interest to
crocodiles (at this time of year, there are many unhatched eggs secreted in
that sand). Other creatures made guest appearances on the banks – a solo
drinking giraffe, elephants (but to prove the earlier point, they disappeared
as soon as they registered our presence, even in a boat), impala (in terms of
guaranteed sightings on any particular outing, impala are to Selous what
wildebeest were to Lamai), baboons, fish eagles, kingfishers. After about two
hours, we stopped at a spot within a towering gorge (plainly they often stop at
the same spot, indicated by the evidence of a discarded flip-flop sole). Deo
set out breakfast there on a table-sized rock, and we ate overlooking the
water. We headed back, with the heat rising again for the last hour or so, and
arrived back just before noon. Fabio and Barbara have departed now and Eric is
back in control. Perhaps this is why the gift shop, which they’d told us was
open for us to wander into twenty-four hours a day, was securely locked up when
we tried to check it out. No doubt the original laundry directive is already back
in place!
If we were people who tanned, we’d
be impressively brown by now; as it is, we must settle for avoiding the worst
potential for sunburn (which I think we’ve achieved adequately). The monkeys
chose to move on without invading our room, which might be viewed as a bit of
an insult. The only regular visitors are ants – I think the staff sprays for
them every evening. We ate lunch (carrot baklava – hard to fault the menus
here) with hippos in the distance, and then spent a few quiet hours in the room.
In the afternoon we had a very peaceful drive, with the animals mostly seeming
very mellow. I have not even tried to write down all the insight into animal
structures and behavior. You try to resist viewing animals as broader versions
of humans, and yet time and again they seem to invite that kind of parallel. We
learned for example that when you see buffalo by themselves, it’s usually
because keeping up with the ever-moving herd has become too much for them with
age, and so they choose a smaller area in which to spend their remaining days.
Today we saw three such old male buffalo, all ambling along the side of the
lake together, then collectively venturing into the water; Deo says that as
long as the three survive and stick together, they’ll be safe from lions and
leopards. In the upcoming movie version, they’ll of course be played by Michael
Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin. Also very entertaining is the forward
movement of the baboon troop, always with a lookout in the trees scanning
diligently for leopards, ready to shriek when they do (which is bad news for
them, but as previously documented, good news for tourists with alert guides).
We arrived at the “fly camp” as the
sun went down. This is a mobile camp, allowing visitors an even more rarified
and separated existence – it only accommodates one group a night. They had set
up a tent for us to sleep in, overlooking the lake; a tent behind that in which
to change; a bucket shower, which we didn’t end up using; a drop toilet (with a
proper seat and everything though); a fully set table for our dinner; a bar
area; and a bonfire with seats around it. In addition to Deo, who spent the
whole night awake on guard, it comes with a waiter, a cook, and a general
attendant – the latter two stayed well out of the way, to protect the refined
nature of the existence. The truth is, it was a little too much pampering for
us. At dinner they served I think six different kinds of vegetable dish, and
then apologized to us for having unnecessarily barbecued three different kinds of
meat which we didn’t want (perhaps the suggestion was that if they’d realized
we didn’t want the meat, they would have bought ten different kinds of vegetable dish?) It was a beautiful spot though
– a bird watcher’s paradise of eagles and kingfishers and geese and herons and
others, with hippos and crocodiles entering or exiting the water, and other
animals occasionally visiting on the other side. After it got dark we saw the
stars more clearly than we have in years – neither of us is sure we’ve ever
really seen the Milky Way before. Deo occasionally swung his flashlight to
illuminate the fish (tilapia) jumping from the pursuing crocodiles. We chatted
occasionally to Deo and to Jimmy the
waiter (yet another person who expressed his desire to be a guide, and for whom
language will be an evident difficulty), learning among other things that the
most popular sport with the guys is English soccer (the previous day, they’d
been collectively watching Liverpool versus Manchester United in the staff
quarters; Tanzania has never even qualified for the World Cup finals) and that
their current favourite musicians include Rick Ross, Chris Brown, DJ Khaled, 50
Cent, Beyonce, Rihanna and Kanye West (I mentioned we had actually seen some of
these perform live, but it seemed like too abstract a concept to fully
register). Sample names such as the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen evoked
not the slightest glimmer of recognition. No one has seemed overly interested
in asking about our lives – hard to say whether that’s a matter of policy or of
disinterest. Jimmy asked the occasional question that stumped us though, for
instance: where would we obtain the firewood, if we were to heat our home using
firewood rather than electricity? (Of all times to have wished for the
Internet!)
We retreated to our tent around 11
pm. It’s strange that once we zipped ourselves up in there, we actually had a
thicker barrier between ourselves and the Selous than we do in our room, where
there’s only the mosquito net. We fell asleep quickly and slept well, although
I had much longer and more vivid dreams than I usually do, perhaps a gift of
the stars (or perhaps, Ally points out less poetically, a side effect of the
malaria pills we take every day). Sometime around 5 am, they started setting up
our breakfast table and preparing our meal – once again, of course, far more
than we needed (we had eggs and toast and a little of the fruit, but declined
the yogurt, cereal, sausage and bacon). Deo reported hearing several leopards
during the night, and a passage of elephants not far away, but I think it was a
largely uneventful night in the African wild - it certainly seemed quieter than
we expected, at least until dawn, when the hippos return to the water after a
night of grazing and call out to each other.
At around
7 am, we set out to walk back to the lodge. This is not the typical end to the
fly camping experience – it’s usually followed by a morning game drive – but we
requested the walk. It took about two and a half hours to cover the 7 km – it
seemed that we took the most direct route possible, ascending and descending
over rocky terrain that would be inaccessible to the truck. It was hot from the
start, with minimal clouds today, and the route allowed little shade, but at
least we had the occasional breeze. To attempt the same walk at noon might
perhaps be virtually suicidal. Poor Deo not only had to do all this after a
sleepless night – we hadn’t realized when we made the arrangements that he
would be on patrol all night, we assumed it would be someone else – but also
had to carry his rifle, a first aid kit, and who knows what else. I assume
there’s only the faintest chance the rifle would ever be necessary, as we
encountered very few animals, and then mostly only brief sightings as they ran
away. It might seem that animals would be more scared of big mechanical trucks
than of people on foot, but experience has taught them the opposite. The
bravest were the wildebeest, or perhaps they were only the most reluctant to
give up their nice patch of grass (which I think they circled round and
returned to as soon as we passed out of sight).
Ally is continuing to try to develop her guide skills, but her ability to recognize animal footprints remains a bit haphazard (it is interesting though to learn from the prints that the dead zones we passed through this morning were, within the past few hours, virtual highways of activity by intermingled zebras, buffalo, baboons, civets, etc.). The camp failed us to greet us with cold drinks and wet towels – somehow I feel Lamai would have been more on top of this! Oh wait, I said we didn’t want to be overly pampered. Ally ventured bravely to the main area to get the drinks herself. The morning passed easily by; we napped, Ally finally finished reading Swing Time, I wrote this. We had a shower – the room has its own solar-heated water supply, and given where we are, it must the most scalding solar-heated water in the world. But then I don’t think it is stored in an insulated tank or anything, because during the night it all gets cold. The monkeys did not return, and the beach and river below our window appeared barely disturbed.
We ate
lunch – Eric came over and commented on how Deo had been dripping with sweat at
the end of his walk. The lodge has five rooms and three somewhat larger
“suites,” which incorporate a private plunge pool – I think it is currently
just over half full. This includes a British family, parents and two boys, who
seem (from our merely superficial impression) to embody teenage alienation –
one of the boys seems disinterested in everything, and has skipped at least one
of the family outings altogether, seemingly preferring just to hang around the
lodge by himself (later we were told he was working on an essay, which seems a
bit odd in a different way). We walked around the grounds for a while and
checked things out. Like all such places, the library is a mystifying mishmash
of curios (an outdated guide to aviation theory and practice, a German
translation of one of the Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo trilogy, A Life on the
Road by Charles Kurault, and so forth). A heavy wooden box decorated in
handsome giraffe carvings opens to reveal a backgammon set. And so on. We’d
been told not to go down to the beach without some accompaniment, and we
considered requesting that, but then decided it was too hot anyway. We spent
more time in the room. Among other things it is equipped with sarongs, which
Fabio earlier went out of his way to position as the ideal evening wear for the
fashionable male – he and Eric both adhere to this at dinner, and at least one
male guest so far has followed suit. For me it was enough of a fashion leap to
have worn something other than black for our daytime drives (probably a wise
decision here, but I don’t think the white T-shirts will see much action at
home). In addition to writing this (as if that wasn’t already more than anyone
would ever read) I’ve started writing the short story I mentioned earlier. Ally
is now reading a recent edition of The
New Yorker, even while lamenting that it makes her think too much about the
real world. We won’t be removed from it for so much longer.
But
first, more game drives. There are very few female guides, Deo tells us,
because “they do not want to spend too much time in the bush because they want to
be taking care of the babies.” So there you are! On the topic of guide
diversity, we saw no white guides in the Serengeti; we did see one down here
though, from another lodge – apparently the guy can speak Swahili and so isn’t
frozen out. We are both quite taken by Deo’s manner of speaking, and the kind
of deliberate poetry he gives to lines like (regarding baboons) “it is the
noise they are making when they are seeing the leopard” or (regarding hippos)
“they are moving from the shallow water to the deep water.” He's also very adept at mimicking various animal sounds (I teased him that he probably practices this in his room). Our game drive
tonight was mostly quiet (apparently we missed no exciting sightings this
morning either) until we saw the leopard, and although it was a close call, I
think Ally may have analyzed the situation and identified the leopard a fraction
of a second ahead of him, so I was very proud – she studied the impala and the
way they were staring in one direction, and then she scrutinized the relevant
portion of the bush, and she located the prowling leopard! Because the leopard
is very shy – we also like the way Deo calls every animal “very shy,” except
for the few exceptions he identifies as “not very shy” – it skulked away into
the bush, and then we and another vehicle spent some time circling until it
came out. It ended up posing nicely on a sturdy tree branch. We also saw the
civet for the first time, although not as much more than a furtive silhouette.
An
English woman at dinner was very jealous of our two leopard sightings here,
having scored none herself, but at least she has two more days to remedy it. We
sat near yet another Swiss couple, and another British couple – the man was
from Liverpool and they were very familiar with the part of Wales where we go
to visit. The conversation was fine except for the times when it veered into
Trump and Brexit. I am seriously thinking on how to spend less time going
forward on monitoring and absorbing the endless depressing sludge of “news,”
and more time on mental engagement that’s elevating (without, that is, being
merely escapist). It’s been easy to do here, but the state of mind you
cultivate in Africa probably won’t make it through Canadian customs.
We again
had a last glass of wine in the room, and set off the following morning at 6.30
am. I mentioned before that one of the rarer sightings, to our surprise, is
that of the wild dog packs, because they roam so widely and unpredictably. A
truck ahead of us got a good sighting this morning of a 14-dog pack retreating
into the bush with its kill, a baby impala; we arrived in time only to see the
last of the fourteen disappearing from view. For the first time today we saw
the kudu, regarded as perhaps the most beautiful of the antelope, especially
the male for its distinctively twisted horns. They were in a particular area
where they often congregate for the dense availability of a particular
yellow-flowering tree. As I sometimes do, I was whispering in Ally’s ear my
imagined translation of an extended radio exchange between Deo and another
guide:
Hamadi: Deo, you lied to me man, there’s no kudu anywhere
around here.
Deo: They’re where they always are dumbass, near the yellow
flowers, you just need to look harder.
Hamadi: Oh I screwed up, I thought you meant away from the
yellow flowers, I always get that wrong.
Etc.
As it
turned out, the first part of that imagined translation was essentially
accurate.
The main
event of the morning though was the lions, the same mother and eight cubs we
saw the other day feasting on a buffalo. We encountered them not far from that
spot, moving regally down towards a lake at different speeds and in varying
configurations, the cubs eventually settling in the shade, where some of them
ended up rolling over on their backs as they slept, basking in the kind of
entitled relaxation that few non-domestic animals can allow themselves. The
lioness positioned herself with a wide view of the lake and of the action
around it, but few animals arrived to drink, and most of those were on the far
side, away from imminent danger; a herd of buffalo managed to come and go
without incident. A warthog toyed with entering the danger zone, but thought
better of it and withdrew. We drove to a nearby spot for breakfast and then
drove on before returning later. Our timing was very fortunate – we arrived as
a family of giraffes came to drink on the far side of the lake; the parents
moved away too soon, leaving a young giraffe behind, still drinking. The lion
immediately reacted to this opportunity, murderously circling the lake like a
dark surge in the sand itself, closing in on the distance (10 to 20 metres)
from which it likes to attack. The various impala in the region tuned in and
took off, but the giraffe didn’t seem to sense danger; we were certain its fate
was sealed. But the careless parents came back into view, the calf closed the
gap, and the lion pragmatically started to return without ever going in for the
kill.
But then
an even more gripping drama developed, because the warthog returned, now with a
companion, stumbling into a patch of beach that now held lions on both sides.
The prowling lioness refocused and drew closer, but the warthogs thought better
of it and withdrew to safety. Deo’s assessment was that the lions would wait
there all day and that the better hunting opportunities would return in the
late afternoon as it cooled, so we headed back for lunch, etc. Not the least
entertaining part of this was that most the lion cubs had been dead to the
world through the whole thing. Presumably they would have been happy to wake up
to eat though; indeed, the lioness would likely have insisted they eat first.
Again, one can satirize this in human-like terms (kids today are just too
entitled!) but that would only obscure the beauty of it rather than
illuminating it.
Ally started to organize our
baggage, to extract the clothes we intend to wear on the way home and so forth,
an obvious sign of things winding down. But neither of us is too sad. The trip
has been relatively short by the standards of many trips to Africa, but our
memories and our senses are already full enough. The big question, as so often,
is how to make this an experience that lives on in Toronto in some form, rather
than solely in the rearview mirror. The other big question is how soon we’ll
return to Africa, or even to Tanzania specifically. At the moment, we’re
thinking it should be very soon, but we may remember in due course that the
world has other choices with other worthy cases to argue for themselves, even
if limited by the absence of lions and giraffes.
On our final evening drive, we saw
twice as many wild dogs as we did before, that is, two of them. Having said
that, we got to see them for an hour as they lay right in the middle of the
road, occasionally standing or shifting before sitting back down again. Of
course, it’s all too easy to compare them with domestic dogs as they sit there
happily panting, to imagine you could feed them treats and teach them commands,
but they are ruthless killers – Deo says that they can pass through an area and
wipe out all the baby impala within it. Anyway, other trucks showed up and
apparently it was a rare day when all the guests at the lodge got a really look
at some wild dogs. Ironically, it almost turned into too much of a good thing,
because no one wanted to leave, for fear of disturbing the dogs, or missing
some great event (such as the return of the rest of the pack) and so all the
evening light got used up. Eventually the dogs just got tired of hanging out
there and ran away, and by then it was too late to drive on to see the lions.
So we drove around a little more before returning to the lodge, without any
further breakthroughs; it’s no doubt fitting that our last sighting was, I
think, of impala, the Coca-Cola of the Selous.
In the end, the heat of the Selous wasn’t as oppressive as some had warned – the mid-afternoon break built into the schedule protected us from the worst of it, and anyway, the heat doesn’t have the vicious humid edge we’ve experienced in some other places. We were happy the trip was organized as it did – the first stop, in the Serengeti, overwhelmed us from the start with its abundance, allowing us the rapid satisfaction of having seen the things people expect you to see (without ever feeling merely crass and touristy); the second stop, in the Selous, was like stepping back and slowing down to apply deeper layerings of colour and texture. Oh, and except for some very brief incidents of “upset stomachs,” we had anything to report in the malaise department. We did not, of course, drink the water.
We joined the group for our last
dinner – it was all people I’ve already mentioned, and not very galvanizing.
Eric was at one end holding people captive with his knowledge of travel logistics
and local geography and the like, and Natasha (whose initial charm rapidly
wears thin) was at the other delivering a long monologue about her days in the
German reality TV business (I wonder if any guest gets out of here without
hearing about that). We took a bottle of wine back to our room. In the morning,
a monkey scrutinized us in great detail, but left without making any move on
us. It’s a little disappointing to have been so uninteresting to the monkeys –
they did reportedly descend on another room the other day. At least we had our
own lizard who liked to hang out by our toilet. We also saw, once again, but
with undiminished pleasure, hippos and crocodiles and impala and a nice array
of birds. We had our last breakfast, and left the place at 8.30 am. Deo (who
was free for this task only because another family had canceled at the last
minute, which one imagines would be a wrenching decision) drove us to the
airstrip, accompanied by an armed guard (required just because of the extra
time spent out of the vehicle I assume). They goofed around with saying bye bye
to the animals on our behalf. The plane arrived almost immediately, and just
like that we were gone, although Ally did make a few final animal sightings
from the air.
We made two brief stops to pick up
more passengers on our way to Dar Es Salaam (or as those in the know call it,
Dar). One woman was lamenting that her only reason for coming to the Selous had
been to see the wild dogs; she’d been in a truck that received a call of a
sighting, but they got there too late. We said nothing. She and her husband
were headed for Zanzibar; someone else was going to the Seychelles. As for us,
Nomad surprised us one last time by having a guy waiting for us at the airport,
just to transfer us from the domestic terminal to the international terminal –
a nice gesture, but something we could likely have managed. Still, it gave us a
brief taste of the rush of activity on a Dar street. The international terminal
is fairly modest, with little energy surrounding the duty-free shops, or surrounding
anything really – although a group of schoolkids seemed to be enjoying their
guided tour. Ally observed a staff member carrying a loaf of bread through security
– just not something you really see much in airports. We flew to Abu Dhabi –
the flight wasn’t too busy so people were able to spread out. We both slept a
bit; the five hours went by easily enough. To balance out my earlier comments
about the flight from Amsterdam, this flight was a multicultural celebration of
sorts – rows of bright head coverings, immaculate white linen outfits, merely a
few white faces like ours looking like refugees from a glummer, worse-dressed
place. The three steps from the plane to the airport bus afterwards may constitute
our only direct time on UAE ground.
It was dark when we flew in, but
the city below looked like a different and much newer world, with precisely
measured intervals between lights, and a sense of immense scale and scope. The
airport reinforces the impression – the planes and trucks and other amenities
all look as if they came from the factory just yesterday. A tired mass of
people were moved most efficiently through a security check; perhaps it’s just
coincidence that the Muslim women seemed more inclined than the men to take the
stairs. I’m sure the airport has plenty of possibilities, but we ignored them
and paid to use one of the lounges for four or five hours. I used the Internet
a bit, not least to get a look at Ozu via the webcam, but he had a cone on his
head for some reason, presumably because of a mishap of some kind. This only underlines
something we discussed several times during our trip, that Ozu’s chances in the
wild would not be high. Even after five technology-free days, it seemed
unlikely the rest of the web would generate anything much better (maybe I
really have changed in this regard!), so I turned back to this diary instead (the Albert Brooks-inspired story would have to wait a few more days, but I did finish that too).
There’s no doubt our vacation is over, and yet we’re still more than half a day
away from home, following up (as we must) one of the most glorious and beguiling
and stimulating periods we’ve ever had by spending time being nowhere at all.
