I took my last malaria pill tonight. That means it's been 81 days since that first night in Doha, dozing in a chair and conversing awkwardly with American missionaries headed, like me, for places they'd only read about. That also means it's been 30 days, give or take a few missed doxycyclines, since I returned. The danger of bloodborne parasites has passed. Africa, one might say, is out of my system.
But of course it isn't. My room, like my head, is full of mementos from my trip: Zanzibari scarves folded on the corner of my desk here in Honolulu, a hand-painted card from Dar's museum beside the computer, the skirt I had tailor-made from kitenge fabric hanging in my closet. My wandering thoughts and eyes both frequently come to rest on notions of Tanzania. But the card remains unsent; I never could figure out for whom it seemed right. The skirt I've only worn once--its bold, waxy print just feels out of place, and besides, the fit is a little off. And the unworn scarves sit in mockery of my ignorance of both the city in which I bought them and the one into which I have since moved; neither, in any season, is cool enough to facilitate their wear.
I haven't decided what to do with these things. I don't yet know all that my experience really meant, or what, besides a few scarves, I should take away. The residue of that trip has also inadvertently become a part of my foundation here in Hawaii, as I've been adjusting to my new situation even while ruminating on my recent past. The two have already blended in at least one respect; I am designing a Swahili course with one of my professors (UH offers an amazing array of languages for study, but Swahili happens to not usually be one of them.) Who knows; maybe I'll find myself back in East Africa for research someday. Perhaps my new life as a grad student is actually just an indirect and incredibly expensive continuation of this experience.
At least for right now, though, I'm just an island-bound student bobbing in the gentle wake of my first week of classes. Despite the fact that everything has been incredibly easy so far, though, I often have the creeping feeling that I'm some sort of impostor, that I'm not smart enough to be here with all these amazing students and that sooner or later someone else is going to catch on to this. Sure, it's not really true, but something about the thousands of hours of serious labor that I put into my undergrad degree, only to discover that none of it was enough to distinguish me to employers, eroded my confidence a little. I'm working on getting it back; maybe this is where I'm supposed to apply some lessons from Tanzania. In the meantime, I'll take a lesson in humility.
Well. It's late here on my watery slice of the globe. The streetlights are reflecting off the shiny wet blackness of my post-rain lanai, a reproduction in miniature of the stars on the ocean that I can see from the top of my block. It's unlikely that I'll arrive at any sort of concrete answers to my musings any time soon, but I think it's healthy to keep my memories of Tanzania out where I can actively interpret and integrate them into this latest Hawaiian episode. Now I just need to figure out what to do with these scarves.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The Beach, The Boat, The Beginning
After arriving back in Stone Town that evening, July 31, I had dinner at the street market next to the Beit El-Ajaib (House of Wonders--i.e., Zanzibar Museum), a huge and lovely old building with supposedly one of the world's largest carved wooden doors. Vendors lined the street at the market, all displaying a very similar array of fish kebabs, calamari, dangly tentacle-things, banana chapatis, and these funny little "Swahili pizzas," which were dough pockets filled with ground beef, an egg, and cabbage, and topped with the strawberry-jam-pinkish-red ketchup that they served all over Tanzania. The fish was actually rather dry--maybe I was a few hours too late--but it was still fun to be out in such a lively atmosphere. I also ran into a Dutch guy I'd met back in Lushoto and an Icelandic girl from the spice tour, and I convinced them to join me in searching for this place I'd read about in my Lonely Planet where some taarab band rehearses in the evenings. We actually found it--no small feat in those winding alleys, especially since it turned out to be in the top floor of some unmarked, mostly-empty building. We just followed our ears up to where the band members (several violinists, an accordian player, some tambourine players, a bassist, and quite a few singers) were practicing their rhythmically wailing, Arab-inspired music. For the last number, the women floated over to us in their acres of sumptuous fabric and asked the Icelandic girl and me to dance with them, which we did while laughing at our own robotic attempts to mirror their effortless undulations. It was a good time.
Afterwards the three of us went to a ridiculously overpriced bar on the waterfront and chatted for a while; I joked that I was hanging out with my two oldest friends on Zanzibar, which was amusingly true. Our bar, along with pretty much the entire city, shut down by 11pm (the Islamic influence, no doubt), so after not too long we called it a night.
The next morning I got up with the mosque at dawn again, put my bathing suit on under my clothes, and headed out to the sketchy-as-hell bus station to find my ride to the beach village of Jambiani, on the southeastern coast, chosen because of my guidebook's description of its quiet atmosphere and "otherworldly" turquoise waters. The driver told me I had about a 45-minute wait until my "bus" (read: flatbed pickup truck, actually rather nicely appointed with benches in the back and a covering over the top) left, so I wandered over to have black coffee and sweetbread with a group of men seated under a tree. They found this very funny in a good-natured sort of way, their amusement augmented by my comical attempts at Swahili. The guys were even so kind as to offer me my sweetbread for free, and while I didn't take them up on that, I sincerely appreciated the offer. These salesmen posed an interesting contrast with the dozens of guys per day who tried so hard to sell me overpriced stuff. By doing something completely out of the ordinary for a tourist--after all, only local dudes sit around under trees drinking out of weeks-since-they-were-washed enamel cups--I suddenly became their guest, and they wanted to take care of me as such. It was a really lovely moment.
Anyway, the ride to Jambiani took somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours, despite the fact that it wasn't that far away. The driver and his two helpers were remarkably amenable, though, to helping passengers hoist all kinds of luggage up onto the roof over the flatbed: stalks of bananas by the dozen, huge bundles of firewood, bags and boxes and burdens of all sorts went up there.
I've spoken before about the idea of personal space in Tanzania, but this bus ride provided the best example yet. In Western countries, when boarding a public vehicle with benches stretching out in front of you, you'd probably scoot all the way down to the far end to make room for the people getting on behind you. There, though, people sat as close as possible to the end at which they entered, whether there was any room there or not. If other people were sitting by the end, they'd just sit on them. Even if there was no one at all sitting on the back half of the bench, people entering would still crowd into the front half as if they had no other choice. And, perhaps strangest of all, those sitting on the far ends made no motion to scoot down to alleviate the crush on one side of them. Nobody minded being squished. It was just so completely normal to them.
Anyway, Jambiani was as idyllic as the book said, with little tiny huts made of rough white sea stone (some kind of coral, maybe) and the whitest white sand I'd ever seen. It was so powdery that it swirled into the waves as they lapped the shore, giving the shallows a milky quality; it was so fine that, when wet, it was sticky to the touch, sucking my sandals off like a giant mixture of flour and water. I was the only patron at my little guesthouse (whose "reception" was a solitary desk with absolutely nothing on it in a bare concrete three-walled room, while the "breakfast area" consisted of several chairs and tables plunked into the sand under a thatched roof.) I swam, practically at my doorstep, in the Indian Ocean that night, and spent the next morning walking out to much-receded waterline. The tide was at least a mile out, leaving behind a fascinating array of tide pools filled with sea urchins and starfish that took me over an hour to veeeeeery carefully pick my way through. The water was so marvelously clear that I could see every hair on my toes, even through knee-deep pools. There were lots of women and children in the water tending the seaweed crops (some random guy named Ali who walked me all around the beach the day before had told me that they sell it to Denmark for cosmetics.) It was such a beautiful scene, with the women's kangas and headscarves billowing out on the water as they worked, fully clothed, up to their chests in the vividly blue-green water. I wandered around that foreign landscape for quite some time.
I took the open-sided dala-dala back to Stone Town that afternoon in time to catch the night ferry back to Dar. The ferry trip to Zanzibar usually takes about two hours. Because of the currents, the ride back usually lasts four...unless you take the infamous night ferry, that is. Then it takes ten hours.
Several hours, a light rain, and a handful of invitations to Porno Man's house later, the ferry finally started moving and I made my way to some chump's vacated seat, where I nodded off sporadically for the next five and a half hours, my moments of wakefulness punctuated by the melodic sounds of vomiting all around me. We docked in Dar at first light, and I groggily got a cab and headed straight for the airport to await my afternoon departure.
I once again had an overnight layover in Doha, Qatar, and was completely prepared to spend it, as I had on my way to Tanzania, alternating between dozing in a chair, pacing the airport, and accidentally squirting myself awake with the bidet in the ladies' room. Because it was still relatively early in the evening when I landed, though, I decided to try going through customs first to see if they'd let me out into the city for a few hours without buying a visa. I went up to the guy behind the desk, told him I had a connecting flight in the morning and that I was hoping to leave the airport...and then the clouds parted and Allah smiled and he handed me, completely unbidden, a voucher for a free cab ride to my free hotel with a free buffet dinner and breakfast before my free cab back to the airport in the morning to catch my next flight. Not kidding.
What little I saw of downtown Doha (on the way to my Free! Free! Free! accommodations) was a bizarre mass of construction projects and brand new skyscrapers flaunting an abundance of shiny steel and an excess of windows, all incongruously thrust into the 110-degree air (and this was at night) above empty streets blowing with desert dust. It seemed very much like a city that had just sprung up the week before, built by an eager contingent of citizens who had suddenly realized that they're richer than God.
I chased the sun westward all the next day, and by the time I touched down on home soil it was still high in the sky, though 20 hours had passed since my sunrise. I was glad to be back in my beautiful and diverse home country, glad to be in a place where I could communicate easily, understand the customs, and not be a public spectacle. I was also, though, truly sad to stop traveling, sad to no longer be living so independently and spontaneously. Sometimes the trip was very removed from my typical daily reality; a life-away-from-real-life. But then again, sometimes I was frustrated. Sometimes I was bored. Sometimes I was excited, nurtured, afraid, content, amazed, lonely. In many ways, the trip was as real as real life gets.
I am now a graduate student. I arrived in Hawaii one week ago, just eight days after I returned to the US. I've been to the beach, the forest, the art museum and the farmers' market. I've gone to a slack key guitar festival and been given a lei. I've been rained on at all times of the day and night. I've watched geckos scamper across my kitchen table.
I start class on Monday, and I'm a little nervous.
I'm already planning my next big trip.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Putting the 'Zan' in Tanzania
Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous archipelago off Tanzania's coast; it joined with the mainland, then called Tanganyika, in the sixties, and the whole country's name was changed to include the "zan." I spent my three short days there on the main island, also called Zanzibar. It was a truly fascinating place that was just as Arab as it was African and just as Indian as it was Arab. (It used to be the seat of the Sultan of Oman, so the cultural influences there are vastly different from those of greater Tanzania.) Men in long white Islamic robes sat under intricately carved wooden doorframes sharing long-spouted silver pots of coffee, while women with only their eyes showing shepherded children through the impossibly narrow cobblestone alleyways. And of course a million tourists milled around, but that only marginally detracted from the allure. The place seemed to handle its glut of visitors with relative aplomb.
My first evening walk through the main city, called Stone Town, was positively magical--straight out of Arabian Nights--with the winding streets bathed in soft gold lamplight and the smells of cardamom and cinnamon and cloves wafting from restaurants and kitchens. I stopped at a little gelato cafe right on the beach (true, gelato isn't entirely authentic, but there is actually a large Italian population on Zanzibar for some reason), which was highly atmospheric. I couldn't wait to get started on my day the next morning, and the 5am wailing of the mosques made it pretty easy to get up early.
I found the next morning that the town actually lost a little of its mystique by daylight, but it was still great. I joined a spice tour that morning, which I honestly didn't find all that interesting. I was driven in a dala-dala with eight or so others to a spice farm a little ways outside of town that seemed to have been made specifically for tours, as there were several other large groups there too. Our guide let us smell and taste plants like clove and vanilla bean; I was really surprised to learn that cocoa bean pods are covered in a slippery, sweet gel, like lychee, and that the beans themselves are purple. I also got a whiff of cinnamon bark and fresh ginger root, and at the end they cut up several fruits for us to try--breadfruit, Zanzibar apples, jack fruit, some type of orange, etc. Then we had a really good lunch of rice and curry and mboga mboga (stewed greens), followed by a strange and unplanned trip to some slave caves. After slavery was abolished on Zanzibar, the slave traders used networks of underground caves to store slaves until they could be illegally sold and smuggled away by boat. We entered by descending two flights of stairs, and then the guide walked us back into the cave maybe about a hundred yards or so, which was funny because we were all wearing sandals and only the guide and his helper had flashlights. Walking was difficult, but I was most intrigued by the fuss that people put up about it. Their attitudes made an interesting contrast with the African perspective on walking; namely, it seemed to me throughout my seven weeks there that Africans rarely stumble and that they never complain about distance or terrain. Everyone--children, old people, sick people, pregnant women, everyone--was like a mountain goat in their sure-footedness, despite (or perhaps because of) always walking barefoot or in broken plastic flipflops imported from China. I was noticeably, remarkably clumsy by comparison in my village, even in my indestructible hiking boots. It was funny, in the cave, to once again be around people who slid and stumbled just like me.
After the cave, they took us (briefly, briefly) to the beach, a trip cut short by the encroaching tide. Zanzibari tides were the most dramatic I've ever seen--when they were out, they were way out, and when they came in, the beach disappeared all the way to the treeline. We hurriedly snatched our shoes away from the encroaching waves after only ten or so minutes there, which was fine with me, as I was excited to get back to Stone Town.
My first evening walk through the main city, called Stone Town, was positively magical--straight out of Arabian Nights--with the winding streets bathed in soft gold lamplight and the smells of cardamom and cinnamon and cloves wafting from restaurants and kitchens. I stopped at a little gelato cafe right on the beach (true, gelato isn't entirely authentic, but there is actually a large Italian population on Zanzibar for some reason), which was highly atmospheric. I couldn't wait to get started on my day the next morning, and the 5am wailing of the mosques made it pretty easy to get up early.
I found the next morning that the town actually lost a little of its mystique by daylight, but it was still great. I joined a spice tour that morning, which I honestly didn't find all that interesting. I was driven in a dala-dala with eight or so others to a spice farm a little ways outside of town that seemed to have been made specifically for tours, as there were several other large groups there too. Our guide let us smell and taste plants like clove and vanilla bean; I was really surprised to learn that cocoa bean pods are covered in a slippery, sweet gel, like lychee, and that the beans themselves are purple. I also got a whiff of cinnamon bark and fresh ginger root, and at the end they cut up several fruits for us to try--breadfruit, Zanzibar apples, jack fruit, some type of orange, etc. Then we had a really good lunch of rice and curry and mboga mboga (stewed greens), followed by a strange and unplanned trip to some slave caves. After slavery was abolished on Zanzibar, the slave traders used networks of underground caves to store slaves until they could be illegally sold and smuggled away by boat. We entered by descending two flights of stairs, and then the guide walked us back into the cave maybe about a hundred yards or so, which was funny because we were all wearing sandals and only the guide and his helper had flashlights. Walking was difficult, but I was most intrigued by the fuss that people put up about it. Their attitudes made an interesting contrast with the African perspective on walking; namely, it seemed to me throughout my seven weeks there that Africans rarely stumble and that they never complain about distance or terrain. Everyone--children, old people, sick people, pregnant women, everyone--was like a mountain goat in their sure-footedness, despite (or perhaps because of) always walking barefoot or in broken plastic flipflops imported from China. I was noticeably, remarkably clumsy by comparison in my village, even in my indestructible hiking boots. It was funny, in the cave, to once again be around people who slid and stumbled just like me.
After the cave, they took us (briefly, briefly) to the beach, a trip cut short by the encroaching tide. Zanzibari tides were the most dramatic I've ever seen--when they were out, they were way out, and when they came in, the beach disappeared all the way to the treeline. We hurriedly snatched our shoes away from the encroaching waves after only ten or so minutes there, which was fine with me, as I was excited to get back to Stone Town.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Mountains
The day after my safari ended, I took a bus to Moshi, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The only real reason I had for stopping there was to see the mountain, but that proved infinitely harder than one might imagine, given that it was only about 15 miles away. It was completely ensconced in fog--every bit of it, bottom, sides, and everything--for all but a very brief moment in the evening, when I saw a hint of snowcovered side peeking out. I never saw the whole thing, and certainly not the top, but that little fraction of a side was nice...I guess. It loomed significantly higher in the air than all the surrounding scenery, giving a hint of what the mountain's actual size might be, which was cool.
I'm glad I stopped in Moshi anyway, though. It was so much quieter than Arusha (and on a different scale altogether from Dar). I spent the afternoon on a long walk outside the city and encountered something strange that I could only call...suburbs. The streets were peaceful and shaded by large trees. There were no open sewage drains and very little trash. Houses were neat and tidy, painted, and made from stucco and stone, glass and metal. Some people even had flowers and shrubs planted around their homes. It was truly odd seeing this, as all I'd experienced in Africa until that point were the crowded urban areas, with their hordes of people, speeding cars, and mounds of trash, and the sudden, stark contrast presented by the villages of mud and thatch and farm animals and children in rags. The suburban houses looked as if their owners had built them with the intention that they would last; both the urban and rural structures always seemed to be built as quickly as possible from whatever materials were on hand, and often appeared to be on the brink of collapse.
After my underwhelming rendez-vous with Kilimanjaro, I left by bus for what turned out to be my favorite destination on mainland Tanzania. The tiny city of Lushoto is tucked away in the green, misty Usambara Mountains, beautiful enough that the people are relatively used to seeing travelers, yet small and remote enough that most locals don't make their livings hawking things to them. I checked into a hilariously gross hotel attached to a bar. My little concrete room had two beds, a window with a broken screen and shredded curtain, and a ceiling alive with mold. The room was off a concrete courtyard that contained a truly smelly pit toilet and an oil drum filled with water and swimming insects to use for washing. I only ended up spending one night in that hotel; I changed to a nicer one for the second night. It wasn't so much the facility itself that I couldn't abide, though the atmosphere there was pretty depressing; it was the scent of my unwashed sheets that drove me away. They didn't smell particularly bad, I suppose. They just smelled distinctly like someone else. I spent the whole next morning catching whiffs of myself-as-another--it was the smell of African hair creme, and it clung to my slippery strands just as well as it would to any braids. It was finally just too weird, and I moved my stuff to another hotel down the street and showered, though it wasn't even my shower day--the only time during my trip that I bothered with more than two showers a week, if that gives any indication of how odd the odor situation really was.
In Lushoto, I spent the first evening walking to a place farther up in the mountains called Irente Farm and "Biosphere Reserve" (whatever that means--it looked pretty much like a farm to me). I bought a wheel of cheese, but I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete the 7-mile roundtrip journey, and it was already 5pm by the time I arrived, so I just bought my cheese and headed immediately back down to my hotel so as not to be out after dark. The walk was absolutely stunning, though; everything was magnificently lush, and the path afforded beautiful views of the valley below. I actually went back the next morning so I could spend more time there; I ate breakfast on the patio of the farmhouse (they offered a set menu of bread with jam, cheese, cucumbers, carrots, and tea), and then headed about a kilometer farther up the mountain to a place called Irente Viewpoint. It was a stunning perch with unobstructed views of the arid plains far below (and yet it was so very green around me!); I even saw the bus I'd be taking the next day trundling by on a puny rope of asphalt that, somewhere far eastward, would end by the sea and mark the conclusion of the overland portion of my journey.
That sea was precisely where I found myself the next evening as I boarded a ferry to the Zanzibar Archipelago, formerly known as the Spice Islands. This, my last destination, turned out to be the most unique, surprising, and utterly delightful place I visited; I will finish up my travel tales with stories of Zanzibar when I next get a chance to post.
I'm glad I stopped in Moshi anyway, though. It was so much quieter than Arusha (and on a different scale altogether from Dar). I spent the afternoon on a long walk outside the city and encountered something strange that I could only call...suburbs. The streets were peaceful and shaded by large trees. There were no open sewage drains and very little trash. Houses were neat and tidy, painted, and made from stucco and stone, glass and metal. Some people even had flowers and shrubs planted around their homes. It was truly odd seeing this, as all I'd experienced in Africa until that point were the crowded urban areas, with their hordes of people, speeding cars, and mounds of trash, and the sudden, stark contrast presented by the villages of mud and thatch and farm animals and children in rags. The suburban houses looked as if their owners had built them with the intention that they would last; both the urban and rural structures always seemed to be built as quickly as possible from whatever materials were on hand, and often appeared to be on the brink of collapse.
After my underwhelming rendez-vous with Kilimanjaro, I left by bus for what turned out to be my favorite destination on mainland Tanzania. The tiny city of Lushoto is tucked away in the green, misty Usambara Mountains, beautiful enough that the people are relatively used to seeing travelers, yet small and remote enough that most locals don't make their livings hawking things to them. I checked into a hilariously gross hotel attached to a bar. My little concrete room had two beds, a window with a broken screen and shredded curtain, and a ceiling alive with mold. The room was off a concrete courtyard that contained a truly smelly pit toilet and an oil drum filled with water and swimming insects to use for washing. I only ended up spending one night in that hotel; I changed to a nicer one for the second night. It wasn't so much the facility itself that I couldn't abide, though the atmosphere there was pretty depressing; it was the scent of my unwashed sheets that drove me away. They didn't smell particularly bad, I suppose. They just smelled distinctly like someone else. I spent the whole next morning catching whiffs of myself-as-another--it was the smell of African hair creme, and it clung to my slippery strands just as well as it would to any braids. It was finally just too weird, and I moved my stuff to another hotel down the street and showered, though it wasn't even my shower day--the only time during my trip that I bothered with more than two showers a week, if that gives any indication of how odd the odor situation really was.
In Lushoto, I spent the first evening walking to a place farther up in the mountains called Irente Farm and "Biosphere Reserve" (whatever that means--it looked pretty much like a farm to me). I bought a wheel of cheese, but I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete the 7-mile roundtrip journey, and it was already 5pm by the time I arrived, so I just bought my cheese and headed immediately back down to my hotel so as not to be out after dark. The walk was absolutely stunning, though; everything was magnificently lush, and the path afforded beautiful views of the valley below. I actually went back the next morning so I could spend more time there; I ate breakfast on the patio of the farmhouse (they offered a set menu of bread with jam, cheese, cucumbers, carrots, and tea), and then headed about a kilometer farther up the mountain to a place called Irente Viewpoint. It was a stunning perch with unobstructed views of the arid plains far below (and yet it was so very green around me!); I even saw the bus I'd be taking the next day trundling by on a puny rope of asphalt that, somewhere far eastward, would end by the sea and mark the conclusion of the overland portion of my journey.
That sea was precisely where I found myself the next evening as I boarded a ferry to the Zanzibar Archipelago, formerly known as the Spice Islands. This, my last destination, turned out to be the most unique, surprising, and utterly delightful place I visited; I will finish up my travel tales with stories of Zanzibar when I next get a chance to post.
Monday, August 11, 2008
A Somewhat Belated Continuation
I'm back at home in Tennessee now, where I've been for six days. I'm sitting on my bed with an Appletini a la Mom, I'm over the jetlag, and I've had ice cream almost every day since I returned: in other words, life is good and I have no excuse not to finish these posts. Furthermore, since I'm shipping out to Hawaii in only slightly over 24 hours, it might well be now or never.
So where was I? Ngorongoro. It was cold. Okay, the water in my bottle didn't freeze, so it couldn't have been below 32, but I'd be surprised if the nighttime temperature were any higher than 35...and that's cold when you're in a moth-eaten cotton tent from 1982. I wore pretty much all the clothes I brought to Africa with me, or at least all the ones that I could fit on top of each other on my body at the same time--three t-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts (one, luckily, had a thin hood, which helped), three pairs of pants, and three pairs of socks. Even with all that I couldn't feel my toes at all for 18 straight hours, despite the boots into which I bundled them.
The crater was really beautiful, though. Our lush campsite on the rim was completely ensconced in fog all morning, giving our breakfast (huddled, wrapped in blankets, over steaming cups of Milo) a dreamy quality. Soon after daybreak we drove down the steep, switchbacked road into the crater. It was bloody cold down there too, keeping some animals away, but we still saw quite a profusion. Most notable were the wildebeest, traveling around the grassy parts of the crater floor in their great herds, with their long bodies, spindly legs, and oddly thin faces. The wildebeest were often accompanied by groups of zebras--a symbiotic relationship, our driver, William, explained, as one species likes to munch on tall grass while the other prefers short. We saw wildebeest first thing upon reaching the crater's bottom; a large herd of them was running--nay, frolicking--across the road. The way they leaped and bucked their shaggy heads was pretty amusing. We also saw cape buffalo, lions, flamingos, a cheetah, and many more DLTs ("deer-like things;" Gretchen's term.) We didn't find the elusive and highly endangered black rhinoceros for which the crater is famous, but the lubberly love of the two mating hippos we encountered was perhaps treat enough.
We drove up and out of the crater that afternoon, and I stood with my upper body out the top of the Land Cruiser the entire way, like a dog out a window; there's something innately pleasing about the wind and the smells and the whooshing sensation, and even the black film of dirt that I wiped off my face afterward was a satisfying testament to both the speed and the intimacy with which I had encountered the land we'd traversed. After striking camp (I went with such a budget company that we not only slept in tents, but we also got no offers of help from the driver when it came to putting them up or taking them down), we headed out to Lake Manyara National Park. We arrived in the mid-afternoon, and unfortunately weren't able to do much with the rest of the day; something about park entry fees prevented us from entering before the next morning. Our campsite was very nice, though, with a beautiful overlook and a nice little open-sided hut serving as a mess hall.
That night, as we waited for dinner from Pius, the slowest imaginable cook (four hours to boil pasta?), an entire troupe of acrobats bounded into the mess hall unannounced. Dressed like actors from an ill-equipped community theater's valiant attempt at The Lion King, they all wore motley incarnations of animal print, except for their leader, who attired himself in a spandex wrestling suit and a skirt of feathers. They then proceeded to make me wince with their daring (and, as it turned out, nicely performed) stunts on the bare concrete floor, and then just disappeared back into the night after asking for some well-deserved tips. Bizarre spectres in an unlikely location.
The next morning we drove into Lake Manyara National Park, which was beautiful and very different-looking from the other parks; it had lush, thick, green forests that gave way to grassy plains and then finally to the lake itself, with its amazing contingent of flamingos. There were so many that, from a distance, the lake seemed completely pink along its shoreline and for quite a ways out. Giraffes grazed calmly near the lake, and we saw several elephants crashing through the brush. There were also many baboons, vervet monkeys, and blue monkeys, as well as a huge monitor lizard and a plethora of birds. The leopards and the famous, if rarely sighted, tree-climbing lions didn't make appearances. While Lake Manyara definitely offered the lowest number of animal sightings, it had arguably the best scenery--plenty of green; great baobab trees with their impossibly thick trunks and spindly, clawlike branches; bushes covered in butterflies; the scent of fragrant flowers wafting in through our pop-top. It was also our warmest destination, which helped. After lunch back at the campsite, we drove back to Arusha, and William, Pius, and my safarimates left me in front of the same hotel from which they'd retrieved me four days prior.
Ack, so much more to tell! I'll do my best to finish tomorrow.
So where was I? Ngorongoro. It was cold. Okay, the water in my bottle didn't freeze, so it couldn't have been below 32, but I'd be surprised if the nighttime temperature were any higher than 35...and that's cold when you're in a moth-eaten cotton tent from 1982. I wore pretty much all the clothes I brought to Africa with me, or at least all the ones that I could fit on top of each other on my body at the same time--three t-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts (one, luckily, had a thin hood, which helped), three pairs of pants, and three pairs of socks. Even with all that I couldn't feel my toes at all for 18 straight hours, despite the boots into which I bundled them.
The crater was really beautiful, though. Our lush campsite on the rim was completely ensconced in fog all morning, giving our breakfast (huddled, wrapped in blankets, over steaming cups of Milo) a dreamy quality. Soon after daybreak we drove down the steep, switchbacked road into the crater. It was bloody cold down there too, keeping some animals away, but we still saw quite a profusion. Most notable were the wildebeest, traveling around the grassy parts of the crater floor in their great herds, with their long bodies, spindly legs, and oddly thin faces. The wildebeest were often accompanied by groups of zebras--a symbiotic relationship, our driver, William, explained, as one species likes to munch on tall grass while the other prefers short. We saw wildebeest first thing upon reaching the crater's bottom; a large herd of them was running--nay, frolicking--across the road. The way they leaped and bucked their shaggy heads was pretty amusing. We also saw cape buffalo, lions, flamingos, a cheetah, and many more DLTs ("deer-like things;" Gretchen's term.) We didn't find the elusive and highly endangered black rhinoceros for which the crater is famous, but the lubberly love of the two mating hippos we encountered was perhaps treat enough.
We drove up and out of the crater that afternoon, and I stood with my upper body out the top of the Land Cruiser the entire way, like a dog out a window; there's something innately pleasing about the wind and the smells and the whooshing sensation, and even the black film of dirt that I wiped off my face afterward was a satisfying testament to both the speed and the intimacy with which I had encountered the land we'd traversed. After striking camp (I went with such a budget company that we not only slept in tents, but we also got no offers of help from the driver when it came to putting them up or taking them down), we headed out to Lake Manyara National Park. We arrived in the mid-afternoon, and unfortunately weren't able to do much with the rest of the day; something about park entry fees prevented us from entering before the next morning. Our campsite was very nice, though, with a beautiful overlook and a nice little open-sided hut serving as a mess hall.
That night, as we waited for dinner from Pius, the slowest imaginable cook (four hours to boil pasta?), an entire troupe of acrobats bounded into the mess hall unannounced. Dressed like actors from an ill-equipped community theater's valiant attempt at The Lion King, they all wore motley incarnations of animal print, except for their leader, who attired himself in a spandex wrestling suit and a skirt of feathers. They then proceeded to make me wince with their daring (and, as it turned out, nicely performed) stunts on the bare concrete floor, and then just disappeared back into the night after asking for some well-deserved tips. Bizarre spectres in an unlikely location.
The next morning we drove into Lake Manyara National Park, which was beautiful and very different-looking from the other parks; it had lush, thick, green forests that gave way to grassy plains and then finally to the lake itself, with its amazing contingent of flamingos. There were so many that, from a distance, the lake seemed completely pink along its shoreline and for quite a ways out. Giraffes grazed calmly near the lake, and we saw several elephants crashing through the brush. There were also many baboons, vervet monkeys, and blue monkeys, as well as a huge monitor lizard and a plethora of birds. The leopards and the famous, if rarely sighted, tree-climbing lions didn't make appearances. While Lake Manyara definitely offered the lowest number of animal sightings, it had arguably the best scenery--plenty of green; great baobab trees with their impossibly thick trunks and spindly, clawlike branches; bushes covered in butterflies; the scent of fragrant flowers wafting in through our pop-top. It was also our warmest destination, which helped. After lunch back at the campsite, we drove back to Arusha, and William, Pius, and my safarimates left me in front of the same hotel from which they'd retrieved me four days prior.
Ack, so much more to tell! I'll do my best to finish tomorrow.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The "Way Too Much Has Happened for One Post" Post
Lord, I'm never going to fit this all in before I have to go get on my plane. Yes, that's right, I'm leaving Africa today. I'm variously glad to be going home (hot showers! potable water on demand! no one who even knows what "mzungu" means!), and also very disappointed to be leaving. I know I haven't seen any more than just the beginning of what this part of the world has to offer. Such diversity, such color, such vibrance. Such a short amount of time in which to try to understand it all.
Ok, so we drove to the Serengeti on the first day of the safari. My travelmates were three American kids traveling together (two of whom were--get this--UCSD students, and all of whom were in Tanzania through UCSD's Arusha Project), and one Canadian guy traveling alone like me. We started out in the gloom of Arusha and went up, up, up, past Lake Manyara, across the misty, rainy rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, and down to the (finally sunny, almost) grassland of the Serengeti. It wasn't quite the endless plain of my imagining; there were definitely trees here and there (including some magnificent, and very "African" looking, flat-topped thorn acacias, as well as many others not quite so much like you'd picture) and blue mountains off in the distance marking a definite endpoint of the lowlands, as well as the mounds of flaky rock, cropping up out of nowhere, called kopjes. We saw some great animals and scenery--perhaps, even, the best of our whole trip--one the loooong drive through the park to our campsite (a cleared-out area right there in the park where everyone who is sleeping in a tent must camp together; safety in numbers, right? Though on that night we spent there, we definitely heard the snuffling of an animal--zebra, perhaps?--grazing right outside our tent and even nudging our heads out of the way to get the grass underneath. We also heard the lions roaring just before dawn as we sat down to breakfast.) On that first drive in, we saw hippos, cheetahs (a mother and two adolescents!), zebras, giraffes, elephants; more gazelles, impala, and antelopes than I can count; dik-diks, an African Wild Cat (looks almost exactly like a housecat), baboons, two rock hyraxes (East Africa's answer to the rabbit), cape buffalo, the morally poisonous puff adder (one bite kills a human in ten minutes), and countless birds (eagles, vultures, cranes, secretary birds, etc.) Perhaps best of all, we saw a male lion in his fully-maned glory, lounging by the side of the road (right by the side of the road) before he sashayed lazily across it directly in front of our car. We marveled at an astounding sunset (reds, golds, feathered clouds, a burning ball that sank below the grass leaving the chill of darkness behind), and then hit the hay early for our 5:30 am rise.
The next day was chilly and unreasonably rainy (lamest dry season ever), which kept us inside the pop-top and many animals at bay, though we did see a pretty good showing even so. Nothing that we hadn't seen on the way in, but hey, who can complain about giraffes loping through the bush twenty feet away? After lunch on that second day, we drove back up into the mountains to the lush rim of the Ngorongoro Crater (an ancient, collapsed volcano that calls itself, with perhaps some degree of accuracy, the world's eighth wonder), where we FROZE.
Ok, computer time is up and I have to go check in from my flight. May have to finish this stateside. Onwards and upwards--next adventure, grad school!!
Love to all. See you soon.
Ok, so we drove to the Serengeti on the first day of the safari. My travelmates were three American kids traveling together (two of whom were--get this--UCSD students, and all of whom were in Tanzania through UCSD's Arusha Project), and one Canadian guy traveling alone like me. We started out in the gloom of Arusha and went up, up, up, past Lake Manyara, across the misty, rainy rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, and down to the (finally sunny, almost) grassland of the Serengeti. It wasn't quite the endless plain of my imagining; there were definitely trees here and there (including some magnificent, and very "African" looking, flat-topped thorn acacias, as well as many others not quite so much like you'd picture) and blue mountains off in the distance marking a definite endpoint of the lowlands, as well as the mounds of flaky rock, cropping up out of nowhere, called kopjes. We saw some great animals and scenery--perhaps, even, the best of our whole trip--one the loooong drive through the park to our campsite (a cleared-out area right there in the park where everyone who is sleeping in a tent must camp together; safety in numbers, right? Though on that night we spent there, we definitely heard the snuffling of an animal--zebra, perhaps?--grazing right outside our tent and even nudging our heads out of the way to get the grass underneath. We also heard the lions roaring just before dawn as we sat down to breakfast.) On that first drive in, we saw hippos, cheetahs (a mother and two adolescents!), zebras, giraffes, elephants; more gazelles, impala, and antelopes than I can count; dik-diks, an African Wild Cat (looks almost exactly like a housecat), baboons, two rock hyraxes (East Africa's answer to the rabbit), cape buffalo, the morally poisonous puff adder (one bite kills a human in ten minutes), and countless birds (eagles, vultures, cranes, secretary birds, etc.) Perhaps best of all, we saw a male lion in his fully-maned glory, lounging by the side of the road (right by the side of the road) before he sashayed lazily across it directly in front of our car. We marveled at an astounding sunset (reds, golds, feathered clouds, a burning ball that sank below the grass leaving the chill of darkness behind), and then hit the hay early for our 5:30 am rise.
The next day was chilly and unreasonably rainy (lamest dry season ever), which kept us inside the pop-top and many animals at bay, though we did see a pretty good showing even so. Nothing that we hadn't seen on the way in, but hey, who can complain about giraffes loping through the bush twenty feet away? After lunch on that second day, we drove back up into the mountains to the lush rim of the Ngorongoro Crater (an ancient, collapsed volcano that calls itself, with perhaps some degree of accuracy, the world's eighth wonder), where we FROZE.
Ok, computer time is up and I have to go check in from my flight. May have to finish this stateside. Onwards and upwards--next adventure, grad school!!
Love to all. See you soon.
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