No Hurry in Africa (38 page)

A
FTER A FEW HOURS’ SLEEP
on the overnight boat from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam, Bríd and I went looking for a bus to the inland city of Arusha next morning. A tout tried to drag us onto the ‘Pope Benedict XVI’ bus.

‘How much is it for the popemobile?’ I asked the driver in Swahili.

About fifty euro was his asking price. No big changes in Dar es Salaam in the meantime, I thought.

Near one small village on the way to Arusha, where we stopped for a break, a complete brass band, instruments gleaming in the sun, was practicing on the roadside. Were they expecting a celebrity? Had they been misled about the popemobile? It was one of those bizarre random sights frequently witnessed in the African bush.

Stepping off the bus in the dark, when it finally reached Arusha, we were immediately accosted by Robert Mugabe’s double. He offered us a good deal on a safari. In fact, we decided it was good enough for us not to shop around, and we were to set off early the next morning.

Arusha lies 650km to the north-west of Dar es Salaam, along the main road to Nairobi. The clock tower in the centre of the town is supposedly the exact midway point between Cairo and Cape Town, the two termini of the British Empire in Africa. Its importance in modern times is for being East Africa’s ‘safari capital.’ Practically every safari in northern Tanzania starts and ends in Arusha. The 14,980 feet high Mount Meru, towering over Arusha, was clearly visible from the hotel rooftop where we had breakfast—as was every male using the urinals along the sidewall of the corridor leading to the rooftop buffet. The staff took away the breakfast buffet long before it was due to end.

‘That’s because you’ve gone up to help yourself too many times,’ Bríd suggested.

I had been looking forward to our classic four-day safari on the vast Serengeti plains since before I left Ireland. I really wanted to complete my sightings of the ‘Big Five’ trophy animals in the wild: lion, rhinoceros, buffalo, leopard, and elephant. I termed this particular trip the ‘soup, dinner, and dessert safari,’ as we were starting with Lake Manyara, followed by two days in the Serengeti proper, and finishing with a day in the wildlife bowl that is the Ngorongoro Crater. They are all located in a corner of Tanzania to the west of Arusha, between the city and Lake Victoria.

Bríd and I were joined in Robert’s jeep by an East Belfast man named Brian, who bore some resemblance to Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider,
and by his New Zealand-born wife, Leonie. Brian and Leonie were travelling overland together from Copenhagen to Cape Town via the Middle East. They were typical of the intrepid adventurers you meet in Africa.

‘We’re going the whole way by using only public transport,’ Leonie explained. ‘The Middle East proved much safer than we anticipated, certainly better than Sudan. Northern Kenya was another story again. Tell them about the dust, Brian, and about those Africans in the back of the lorry with us … ’

Brian and Leonie were an outgoing couple in their mid-forties. As a group, we hit it off straight away. Less than an hour after meeting them, I looked through my binoculars straight at Leonie, and joked,

‘Look, look, there’s a kiwi!’

She turned around instantly.

‘Where, where?’ she exclaimed, before twigging.

There followed four days of never-ending bad jokes that often had us all in stitches. Robert eventually stopped trying to teach us about the animals because we only ended up laughing at some surreal gag we made up about them.

The Serengeti plains provided us with one fantastic surprise after another. We watched a pride of female lions sitting in a tree, watching, waiting, then jumping down to hunt down gazelles crossing a nearby river. The gazelles just made it to safety on this occasion. Later on, we were enthralled by the sight of a lone male lion suddenly standing up from his camouflaged position in the tall dry grass, then licking his front paws, before mounting a small rocky hillock and roaring at full volume only a matter of yards from our jeep. Then he turned his back on us and walked casually away. King of the Plains.

Shortly after this, we saw a leopard lunching on an impala that it had hauled up onto the branches of a tree. That first day in the Serengeti, we also spotted white rhinos, zebras, ostriches, elephants, giraffe herds, and a cheetah with her playful cubs. Bríd was beside herself with excitement. There were lots of baby animals about at that time of year, and many mothers nurturing their young. Then there were the countless animals, both big and small, that I had not heard of before: topis, hartebeests, klipspringers … Robert identified them for us as we drove across the plain.

On Bríd’s birthday in the first week of June, we were up and going before dawn. This was a great time for spotting hippopotamuses, elephants, and zebras crossing the tracks, lit up by the headlights of Robert’s jeep. A rosy dawn in the Serengeti is pretty spectacular too. This particular morning we happened upon a feeding frenzy. Several wildebeest had drowned while crossing a river during the night, so it was breakfast time for any number of hyenas, crocodiles, vultures, and jackals. There was fierce and noisy competition among these predators and scavengers as they attempted to drive each other off.

Hovering serenely above the savannah that morning was a solitary hot-air balloon. Leonie was in a bantering mood.

‘How come you didn’t organise a flight in that for Bríd on her birthday, Brendan?’ she teased.

‘One hour in that balloon with a champagne breakfast to follow,’ Robert interjected, ‘would cost you over four hundred dollars!’

‘Is that all?’ I remarked. ‘Sure let’s book it for the whole day tomorrow.’

We had timed our safari extremely well. In the vastness of the Serengeti, we appeared to be the only jeep observing the huge annual wildebeest migration.

‘This is something special, Bríd—even for Africa,’ I explained, as she stared in amazement through binoculars. ‘This is one of Nature’s greatest spectaculars. At the end of the rainy season over a million wildebeest and around 200,000 zebra and various types of deer migrate north to Kenya’s Masai Mara. It happens every year at this time. They are endlessly on the move in search of water and grazing.’

‘But what are the zebras doing in the middle of the wildebeest? Bríd asked, reasonably enough.

Robert took up the story as he drove the jeep right into the middle of them.

‘The zebras actually marshal the wildebeest herds, because the wildebeest forget the migration route from year to year. In return, the zebra are protected from the great predators—mainly the big cats like the lions, as well as crocodiles—by the sheer numbers of wildebeest,’ he enlightened us.

We hung around a long time marvelling at this extraordinary scene, and felt privileged to have experienced it.

‘Yes, it’s all about timing, and you have timed it very well,’ Robert said. ‘You want to catch the movement of the animals like we are seeing now, and you have avoided the rainy season when the tracks are impassable. But you have also to avoid the tourists who come in great numbers in the later dry summer months.’

‘Of course,’ Brian quipped, ‘the annual migration of tourists.’

‘Yes, and I’ve met some of their predators and scavengers,’ Leonie added. ‘From what I’ve seen of northern Tanzania, it appears to be richer and more full of pickpockets in comparison to Kenya.’

‘Maybe there’s a connection between the two?’ I suggested.

Brian’s eyesight was quite bad.

‘Look, quick, what’s that animal moving beyond the trees?’ he yelped on one occasion later that day.

It turned out to be a distant jeep. So, we did not have the Serengeti to ourselves after all. We trained our binoculars on some rich Americans in their over-the-top safari costumes; they were wielding cameras with huge telescopic lenses and taking endless photos of a very ordinary acacia tree.

‘I spot a smaller specimen of this tourist animal,’ Brian remarked. ‘But it has got an even longer lens. It’s the Japanese variety.’

At times, we travelled for ages without spotting anything interesting, especially in the heat of the day. Occasionally we played host to swarms of flies.

‘God made the fly, he just didn’t tell us why,’ Robert announced, in his wisdom.

We spent some time observing a male gazelle continually trying to mount a female who kept hopping away. Thereafter, he tried it on with all the other females who also kept skipping away from his amorous approaches. At this point Leonie started humming the jaunty tune at the end of
The Benny Hill Show.
We all joined in, getting faster and faster until we were convulsed with laughter.

At our campsite in the evening, I watched in a state of near paralysis as a gargantuan bull elephant sauntered past our tent in search of water. It was only a matter of feet away. Before I drifted off to sleep, I heard lions roaring quite close by, their pronouncements echoing regally over the star-covered savannah. Bríd was petrified on hearing something scratching at the tent, and gave me a dig to wake me up.

‘Probably a rodent of some sort,’ I suggested.

She did not find that very reassuring, for some reason.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I had to step out to relieve myself. Now it was my turn to be paranoid. I was imagining a hungry lioness jumping on me from behind in the pitch darkness. And now it was Bríd’s turn to mock me. On my way back in, I stamped and galloped around the tent a few times in an attempt to frighten her.

‘I knew it was you all along,’ she claimed, calm as you like.

As we neared the Ngorongoro Crater next day, we passed numerous Maasai boys wearing their distinctive red blankets and begging by the rocky track. Their dark faces were painted white.

‘This is part of the preparations for their circumcision ceremony to become a Maasai warrior,’ explained Robert. ‘Another part of the preparations is that each one of them has to catch and kill a wild animal. Yet another common custom is the removal of one front tooth. This is to enable a sharp whistle for controlling their cattle.’

Brian speculated about which to choose if you really had to: being circumcised or having a front tooth removed. Both would be without benefit of anaesthetic!

A Maasai in the city can easily be identified by his great height, his slender frame, his distended earlobes and, sometimes by his missing front tooth. Being semi-nomadic, his is the only tribe freely allowed to cross the Kenyan-Tanzanian border. Maasai territory straddles the border. Nowadays, the tribe is sidelined in the politics of both countries. They are constantly under government pressure to move out of the country’s many game parks.

The Maasai have already been removed from the Serengeti. They still have grazing rights around the Ngorongoro Crater, but the blanket-clad herdsmen that we saw rounding up cattle right beside four huge elephants on the very rim of the Crater, may be forced to evacuate in the near future. It seems unfair to me. It was Lord Delamere, over a century ago, who was among the first people to recognise that the nomadic pastoral lifestyle of the Maasai can exist quite harmoniously with the African wildlife.

Our campsite, high on the crater rim, was freezing cold at night. As I made my way from the tent to the toilet, I could identify buffalo and zebra cantering nearby in the moonlight. Early the following morning, descending into the basin through the thick shroud of mist that had formed around the crater rim, was like entering a lost world.

‘I think we are in
Jurassic Park,’
Bríd commented.

Ngorongoro Crater is truly one of the wonders of the natural world. A mere twenty kilometres wide, it has perhaps the greatest concentration of wildlife on earth. As we drove down and out under the cloud, an entire ecosystem trapped in a bowl stretched out before us. Biodiversity takes on a new meaning here.

Rich in vegetation, the Crater attracts most of the big beasts of the plains as well as a great variety of herbivores such as wildebeest; there are even flamingos in the soda lake at the bottom of the crater. A freshwater lake guarantees an amazing variety of bird life. Exotic birds compete in colour with a profusion of plants and flowers of every hue. Unlike the wild, endless, open, and largely featureless landscape of the Serengeti, you have a sense here of concentration, distillation, essence—the ultimate zoo. The creatures here are encaged by the crater, but naturally so, and that makes all the difference. I was so glad we had kept Ngorongoro Crater to the end of our safari. It made for a perfect climax to our trip.
Safari njema sana!

Returning to Arusha and the noise and bedlam of humdrum urban life was anti-climactic, a shock to the system. Back in the hotel, many visitors to the major game parks were griping about their safari experiences: their jeep broke down; there were no lions to be seen; there were too many jeeps around one lion; there were too many Americans; their guide was not fluent in English; their meals were of poor quality; they did not get on with their companions in their jeep; their jeep kept getting stuck in the mud because of recent rain—and so on and so on. As Brian, Leonie, Bríd, and I got together for a meal that night, Brian spoke for all of us.

‘Maybe we just got lucky, but I’d say we have just had the perfect safari.’

Over drinks, I told them some stories of horror safaris, some of them probably the savannah equivalent of urban myths. The
Daily Nation
in Nairobi was full of these stories. One of the best known concerns a group of Japanese tourists in the Masai Mara game park, the northern extension of the Serengeti in Kenya.

‘Apparently,’ I continued, ‘several Japanese stepped out of their jeeps to take pictures of themselves in front of a pride of lions. Days later, they had not returned. The park rangers eventually called out a helicopter to help search for them. Anyway, there was no sign of the Japanese, but their jeep was found with a camera on the bonnet set to automatic mode. When the photos were viewed, the last ones showed the pride of lions sneaking up behind the group, getting closer and closer and closer … ’