Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 19,341 feet, was covered with clouds most of the time. You can just see the top of Kili above the cloud bank in this photo if you look carefully
After five pleasant days on Zanzibar, it was safari time, and we caught a flight from Zanzibar Town to Arusha in northern Tanzania. Arusha is the elephant (what, you preferred “lion”???) of the safari industry with over 500 safari companies and 5 major national parks or conservation areas (including Serengeti) within a 4 hour radius. If that’s not enough for one town, it is also the launch point for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, which lies 100 km to the east.
Our single-engine single-pilot plane on Arusha’s single landing strip
We boarded a 12 seat, single-engine Cessna 22 at Zanzibar airport an hour after its scheduled departure time and took off for Arusha. Our group accounted for 7 of the 11 passengers. The other 4 were a family that looked to be from the US as well. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and, yes, the family was from the US, specifically Philadelphia. A few more questions determined that the wife, Amy (perched in the Cessna’s co-pilot’s seat since one engine only needs one pilot) had worked as an intern for our safari-mate, Joe V., at the American Friends Service Committee some 30 years
Every seat counts on a Cessna 22. Here Amy flies co-pilot.
ago. All kinds of crazy cross-connections began to pop up. Africa suddenly seemed local and familiar.
We landed on the sole runway of Arusha airport a couple hours later and found our two guides waiting for us. They introduced themselves as Chagamba and Mika, loaded our bags into 2 Land Rovers, and we headed for Mt. Meru and Arusha National Park where our safari would begin.
On way to our night’s lodging, we hit a traffic jam. A truck crash completely shut down a bridge on the main Arusha road, backing up traffic for miles.
Bystanders trying to see the crash site. Mika knew a dirt-road workaround, but that too was backed up and we waited for over an hour to get through.
What is a “Walking Safari?” Heck, for that matter, what is a safari? Those were our questions, too.
We shared the gravel roads and 2-tracks on the Maasai Steppe with Maasai herds
It turns out to be a lot of driving around in Land Rovers on very rough two-tracks. I use “Land Rover” (Jaguar/Tata) generically as there are as many or more “Land Cruisers” (Toyota) bouncing around in the bush. It was six days before our Rover wheels saw more than a km of paved road. The options usually came down to 1-1/2 lane gravel, with ruts and wash-board, or 1 lane dirt with deeper ruts but no washboard. The ride recalls being caught in a Bounce House at a 10 year old’s birthday party. Dust fills the fabric of one’s shirt and pants and makes them stiff–although it helps to be in the lead Rover. We often don’t notice, though, because we are so intently viewing our surroundings.
An armed park guide is required for protection in Arusha National Park.
To our surprise, in all the national parks you HAVE to stay inside your vehicle for your own safety. No hiking. Except you can hire a park ranger with a big game rifle to guide you on a predetermined hike. We’ve gotten around this by spending 2 days on the Maasai Steppe which is not a National Park or Conservation Area but is owned exclusively by Maasai tribes. Mark Thornton and a couple other safari outfitters have a special paid arrangement with a Maasai village to visit and camp there. On other occasions, we’ve paid the park fees for a local ranger to accompany us.
“Game drives” are a major component of the safari experience. In fact, they are the only component of most safaris. Like “cattle drives”, you get to see a lot of animals, but unlike cattle drives, you don’t drive the animals anywhere. Instead, you drive around in the safety of your Land Rover with your head sticking through the roof scanning the landscape for big game (and, in our case, birds). The Land Rover has to stay strictly on pre-defined two-tracks or rough gravel roads within
You can’t just go hike as you’d like in the National Parks
the parks.
After a while, you get pretty good at spotting and identifying zebras and wildebeests and warthogs, but you rely on your sharp-eyed guides for key discoveries like lions, rhinos and crested cranes. Our guides are animal encyclopedias. In fact, they have many details you won’t find in an encyclopedia, such as Chagamba’s description of a wildebeest as “the animal God made with leftover parts–head of a buffalo, shoulders of a zebra, legs of a gazelle and tail of a horse!”
Most of the time we’ve seen few if any other safari vehicles. But one of the odder experiences occurs in the most visited areas like Ngorongoro Crater, on the road to Serengeti, where 100 safari vehicles will be cruising around in the 30 square mile caldera. A star sighting (a lioness with cubs, a rhino) results in a Rover convention
Wildebeest–the animal God made with leftover parts.
and traffic jam with lots of cameras attached to swiveling heads poking out the top of the vehicles. It’s usually worth it, though.
As for the walking part, well, we really don’t walk a lot, maybe 2 hours a day, and slowly at that. A number of the group are birders and birds are everywhere. Plus there are lots of animal tracks, poop piles and small critters to note, and our guides are constantly educating us. Walks, we’ve learned, add more time to talk and explore the overall ecology of the African bush. But we also have learned that if you want to see the big game and get in close, you need to be in a vehicle.
A Rover Convention in Ngorongoro. This is also why you must stay in your vehicle.
Walks were slow as we scoped out birds and animal sign.
The roads beat the heck out of vehicles. We had to swap out one Rover after it developed clutch problems.
We camped near Oldonyo Sambu, “Striped Mountain” in Maasai. Later Betsy, Craig, Mika and I climbed it along with our Maasai guide.
We spent two nights camping on the Maasai Steppe below a mountain known as Oldonyo Sambu. Zebras, bushbuck, impala, wildebeest and oryx mix freely across Maasai grazing lands with herds of Maasai cattle and goats tended by herdboys. Lions, coyotes and jackals are always a possibility.
Our Maasai guides help Betsy celebrate her birthday in camp.
Mark Thornton Safaris has a special arrangement with 3 Maasai villages allowing us to visit this area. This is an important calving/birthing area for several animal species, and in exchange for payment, the villages agree to limit farming and maintain open savannah. Thornton also uses Maasai guides and guards from the villages when visiting the area.
Maasai, of course, are famous to westerners for their warrior culture and tribal rituals, which include various pain tolerance tests and male and female circumcision. It is said that European explorers and slave traders dreaded crossing Maasai land in the 1800’s due to their ferocity.
Tito and Chagamba at camp on the Maasai Steppe. One of our tents is in the background.
Three Maasai guides and one guard joined us in our camp for the time we were on the Maasai Steppe. Maasai boys herd goats and sheep by 8 years of age, moving up to herd cows once they’ve demonstrated their ability. They stay near the village as long as grazing is adequate; eventually in the dry season they have to go further afield—a day or more’s walk from the village—and junior warriors, in their later teens, take over herding duties. Through prescribed rites of passage, a boy becomes a junior warrior and later a senior warrior. A successful lion hunt is an important part of the warrior progression. Later still, as an adult approaches 40, he moves up to junior elder status, and finally senior elder status.
We had a couple impromptu spear-throwing contests with our guides,
using the practice end of the spear. Our chances against a lion did not look good!
The standard Tanzanian footwear–sandals made from old tires
Mika identified our Maasai guides as junior elders, in their 40’s, no longer with responsibility to look after their herds–their sons and grandsons do that. They’ve done their work for family and tribe, though they will make strategic decisions regarding cattle grazing or selling or buying. We gathered around a campfire one night and exchanged questions, with Mika and Chagamba translating. Here are some things we learned.
Tito leads Betsy and Craig toward Oldonyo Sambu
All of our Maasai guides have killed lions, either individually or as part of a group. They’re the last generation to have regular encounters with lions. Now there aren’t many lions left, and the cattle aren’t attacked often. 20 men from their village have been killed by lions during hunts in their time as warriors, and probably 100 Maasai on Maasai Steppe land. It is a badge of honor and courage to have killed a lion. Sometimes it is revenge for a lion killing your livestock, but now, if a lion kills a cow from your herd, the government pays you more than the cow is worth so you won’t kill the lion.
They aren’t in favor of more farming by Maasai from their village. They need the land for grazing for their herds, which are growing. More farmland means less grazing land, but even some men from their village are growing more and more crops on village land. The world is changing. The needs of Africa’s wild animals are not part of their calculus.
Later, Mika told us that Maasai believe they are the most important people and that God has entrusted all cattle to them. When other tribes or farmers have cattle, they have stolen them from Maasai, and the Maasai warrior culture defends what is theirs. This explains their long running war with the Barbaig tribe, in which the Maasai and Barbaig took turns attacking each other to steal or re-claim cattle. This has largely stopped under modern Tanzanian governance.
Modern life meets tradition: Yohana holding spear, talking on cell phone (photo by Beth V.)
The Maasai enter the 21st century adopting some new technologies quickly while often holding firm to old beliefs. Our Maasai guides carry cell phones along with their spears. They say all of their herd boys today carry cell phones out on the steppe in case of emergency. In addition, our Maasai guides wear trekking shorts under their traditional wraps–pockets to carry cell phones among other advantages. We even saw a herd boy driving his cattle while on a motorcycle! Many Maasai, traditionally herders, are also turning to farming, with expansive new corn and bean fields springing up across Maasai land.
At the same time, Maasai continue to measure a man by the number of cattle, sheep and goats he commands, which in turn decides how many wives he can afford, which determines how many children he fathers. One very wealthy Maasai is rumored to have 28 wives and over 100 children. The government built the district primary school next to his boma (living compound) for obvious reasons.
This all leads to serious herd and population growth while Maasai land area remains the same. The farming–which takes away grazing land–and herd growth result in serious overgrazing, as well as reduced habitat for Africa’s wild animals like impala, zebra, bushbuck, and wildebeest which traditionally share Maasai grazing lands with cattle. Maasai maintain some rights to use national parks and conservation areas on traditional Maasai land, and one can see them pressing herds further into protected territory.
An inevitable collision awaits.
This is the boundary road for Tarangire NP. To the left is Maasai land, to the right Tarangire NP. Overgrazing results in desert-like dirt patches on the left while the savannah grass is thick and tall on the right.
We sat around the campfire every night when we camped on the Maasai Steppe (photo by Beth V.)
Every night on the Masai Steppe we had a campfire, and campfires beget stories. Instead of ghost stories, we concentrated on danger-of-big-animal stories. Here are two stories from Chagamba.
My grandfather was 24 when he went hunting with a man who would be his future father-in-law, though neither of them knew it yet. Three of the man’s nephews accompanied them. This was many years ago, about 1926, and we hunted with bow and poison arrow. The party managed to kill a buffalo, and they cut off the hind quarters and hung it in a tree to carry back to the village. They continued their hunt, but when they returned to the tree the buffalo meat was gone. A leopard had come and stolen it!
A leopard was the one major animal we didn’t see–but there are plenty photos of leopards on the ‘net!
So they tracked the leopard to recover their meat. They came upon the leopard feeding on the stolen meat, notched a poison arrow and shot it. The leopard ran off, wounded, and they began tracking it again. The leopard had other ideas of hunted and hunter, and waited in ambush in the grass. Then he attacked my grandfather’s friend, who was the lead tracker. Everyone turned and began to run, except the unfortunate man who had a leopard draped over his shoulders and was trying to keep from falling to the ground.
Hearing his calls for help, my grandfather turned around, ran back and fired an arrow into the leopard–to no effect. So he pulled out his knife and attacked the leopard by hand and finally killed it.
Progeny of the leopard….
The man recovered and was so grateful that he promised my grandfather that he would give his next baby, if it was a girl, to my grandfather to be his wife. If it was a boy, the boy would become my grandfather’s best friend. Within a year the man’s wife gave birth to a little girl, and sure enough, several years later she became my grandfather’s wife. That is my grandmother. That is why I am here. She is 87 years old and still alive.
And a second campfire story from Chagamba:
Another guide and I, and a third man, were on a scouting and training trip and were camping for the night. It was dark, and we two guides were sitting at the fire, the third man was in the tent. He came out of the tent, looked at us and began shouting, “Lion! Lion!” A big male lion had stalked us and was crouched about 5 meters behind us.
The man grabbed a burning log and threw it at the lion. We jumped up and ran for the tent. The lion never moved and stayed crouched as we studied him from the tent. After a while, we got in our Land Rover and shined the lights at him. He was an old lion and had a serious wound along his shoulder. A younger lion had apparently fought him, cut him badly and taken over his pride. Now he was hungry and injured. We decided to kill him with a gun as it was too dangerous to leave him alive with his misery.
It’s important to know your environs. While we’ve seldom seen a street sign in Tanzania, animals, we’re learning, mark their paths and territories well if you can read their signage. In our ongoing effort to take you behind the scenes with on-the-ground reporting, we bring you this special poop post. Or “scat”, as the naturalists like to call it. That’s an interesting word in itself as naturalists and trackers see the material called “scat” and, instead of turning tail, pick up their pace and say, “We’re hot on the trail!”
We don’t claim to know what all of the animal signs mean but, with the help of our expert guides, we’ve learned a few things that we think could be useful to you on your next safari. Can you match the animals below with their poop or footprint? You can double-click on the thumbnail to get a bigger image. [Answers are at the bottom of the page.]
Scat A
Scat B
Scat C
Scat D
Track E
Scat F
Wildebeest
Zebras
African buffalo
Warthogs
Elephant
Baboons
[A. Zebra B. Warthog C. Buffalo D. Elephant E. Wildebeest F. Baboon]
