Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania

By: Isaiah | June 30th, 2009

This is a post about my recent trip to Tanzania. Enjoy.

The wind picks up slightly, pushing a thin breeze through the truck. I lift my head a little, so that I can see the roof, so that my neck and my chin get some of the new air. Sweat is beading just above my collar, which is shoved against my neck to protect me from the sun. This is how Africa feels when you watch the Discovery Channel, the heat waves simmering on the open plains as the silhouettes of animals pass across the unfocused background. There are a few stray clouds in the sky, but they provide no shade; the only protection from the sun is our roof, which is popped up to allow us to stand.

When I stand up, I can see out across the great “endless plain” that is the Serengeti, a kopje sitting in the distance the only source of shade visible. The rest is grassland, khaki-colored against a baby blue sky that stretches to unimaginable distances before finally meeting the earth. There is the unmistakable feeling that I can see the earth curving, even as I know that’s not possible. The grass here is too short to sway much in the breeze – there is no water here, nothing to sustain life, to keep the heat down, to protect animals from the sun. But there is also no cover for predators, so the gazelles I’m looking at, some laying down, others gently grazing, are safe for a few minutes. I send my eyes over the landscape quickly, trying not to squint against the sun; relax, I tell myself, your eyes will see recognize anything different.

In the distance, a dark shape appears in the grass, it’s far, but I can see it. It’s the right size, it has to be, yes, it’s a predator that the gazelles haven’t seen. I grabbed my binoculars from around my neck and bring them to my eyes. I scan quickly as I focus, looking for the same shape, looking for my cheetah that I know is out there. I see it then, I spin the focus, heart surging, bringing a termite mound into sharp relief.

“Dammit,” I say quietly.

“What?” my girlfriend asks, turning her attention from the gazelles for a second.

“Nothing. Termite mound.”

She laughs and turns back to the animals at hand. They’re Thompsons and they’re perfect targets for the cheetah I’m positive is watching them, if only we had the eyes to see it. Even in my short time on safari, I’ve learned to subconsciously check the direction of the wind so as to understand what the animals are doing and why. Even so, I know I’m missing almost all of the clues being provided by these animals, by the terrain, the sky, everything. Our guide is only a year older than I am, but he has already explained so much about these animals that I know to trust him to point out anything worth seeing or knowing rather than trying to force myself to understand something completely new.

This is, after all, Africa, a continent capable of befuddling the greatest of minds with its raw beauty, size, and diversity both of flora and fauna as well as culture. And here I am, in the very middle of it, in a Toyota LandCruiser, feeling like a colonizer dressed in khaki while the hired help drives me, leading me through the maze of wild creatures that awe me to the comfortable confines of a lodge or tented camp every night. Three large meals a day are carted out into the vast wilderness for me to munch on, water is ported from rivers and heated so that I may bathe in relative relaxation, and generators provide me with light, lest I wish to read or record my thoughts at the end of a “rough day of safari-ing”. At dusk when I stand outside my tent preparing to head to dinner, watching the sun set beyond whatever tonight’s setting is – trees, bushes, hills, mountains – I imagine that this is what Hemingway felt, except drunker and with more guns.

The motor of our truck starts up and we pull away from the gazelles, off in search of other animals. By the end we will have seen everything except my cheetahs, who stay hidden throughout the trip, showing up only when we aren’t around. Bad kitties! We see 5 leopards, lions feasting on a wildebeest, elephants trumpeting at us from point-blank range, black rhinos sleeping in the distance, grunting wildebeest, hippos yawning, giraffes fighting over females, dik-dik scurrying, and countless other animals, from hawks to terrapins, crocodiles to impala. It is a dizzying array of fascinating animals that take your breath away from start to finish, no matter how many times you see them, no matter how small they are, no matter how plain they seem to be.

But beyond that, beyond the tusks and teeth, there is a country with people. There are the Maasai, of course, fascinating on so many levels, not least of which was on the personal level when we were given a walking tour out in the bush, away from the roads, by a Maasai man who demanded pictures be taken of him at almost every possible occasion, his spear raised alongside a skull he has found on the ground or with my girlfriend’s sister. But there are over 100 languages spoken in Tanzania and a substantial number of cultures that remain loyal to their customary ways of life. You cannot pin the country down on anything, it doesn’t seem. For instance, not everyone speaks Kiswahili even if it is the national language (along with English). The Maasai are merely the most obvious, and most plentiful, of those who are not fully “integrated” in Tanzanian nationalist society; they live in traditional houses, or bomas, wear the classic colorful cloths wrapped around them that billow in the dusty wind as they herd their goats and cattle across seemingly empty land that would lay abandoned by even the most ardent of ranchers in the US.

There is great mystique imbued in the Maasai Steppe, which spreads southward below the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Conservation Areas. There are magnificent vistas and Wild West scenes of desolation, the occasional small child running after the truck as it winds its way through the roads distinguishable as such only by the previous truck’s tire marks. It is easy to understand how lost one could become in this land, where the next mile looks just like previous thirty, where the sun plays tricks on your eyes, and where behind every clump of grass, under every spindly tree there could be a lion, a hyena, a wildebeest — the imagination takes over, the scenery blends into itself, and suddenly you have no clue which direction takes you back. This is the wild African bush, this is the Maasai Steppe, this is what you read about, what you see in wildlife videos. This is the land of heroic adventure, of Hemingway and Hatari.

Our guide, Ray, tells us stories occasionally. They are tales from other guides, from his own experiences, and they are thrilling and frightening in equal measure. There’s the one where he was driving in a new part of the Serengeti and ended up taking his clients on an extended tour of a lonely stretch of the plains because he mistook one stone outcropping for another one and went the wrong direction. He was lucky enough to run into another safari group and was directed safely home after only a couple of hours. So close to being lost, to being the truck that once was lost in the dark for an entire night only to find out in the morning that they had driven to within 100 meters of their lodge. Only sometimes the lodge is hundreds of kilometer away. Then there’s the one where the car broke down and the guide led his two clients away from the car for a minute and encountered a pride of lions. They spent the resulting hours of daylight in a tree, under which the lions took shelter, tapping them. When night fell, the lions never budged, having already eaten that day. Only when morning came, agonizingly slowly, and only when trucks filled with photo-happy tourists such as myself began arriving to see the lions were they rescued.

You learn small things, things that never cross your mind. If lost in the Serengeti, place a shirt on your car antenna to signal search vehicles or other cars of your distress. Boil the roots of this plant to cure stomach problems, rub this plant on your scorpion wounds to alleviate the pain, and, for God’s sake, don’t put this plant’s juice in your eye because it causes blindness.

There is, of course, another Africa, far removed from the luxuries of safaris, decadent tourist shops, of endless meals and soft beds beneath mosquito nets. It is the Africa of AIDS, famine, drought, child soldiers, blood diamonds, and, above all else, poverty. We visited a small village in the south, where Alyssa’s sister lives and works as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching math at a secondary school. It is not a desperately poor region — it is Wabena territory rather than Maasai — but it is squirreled away in the Southern Highlands where it gets cold enough to require extra blankets at night; houses are made mostly of brick with tin roofs and a large number of them have electricity, but every house has a garden to either provide or supplement diets. The school itself would be condemned and torn down in the US, even in East St. Louis, but it is in reasonably good repair for the area. Some of the classrooms are lacking panes in the windows or ceilings beneath the tin roofs (making teaching impossible during a rainstorm), some have cracked floors that have created small mountain ridges in tectonic-esque action, but all are viable, all are capable of housing students. All the rooms have chalkboards, even if some are pitted and scarred with age and use. Like many secondary schools, it is a boarding school and the children sleep in bunk beds piled 3 high throughout their dormitory rooms; it was estimated to us that there were 400 students, 100 to a dorm room. Comfortable is, of course, a relative term; if home is just as crowded, but on a smaller scale — it is common for entire families to sleep in the same room, children often sharing beds with other children until the day they get married and move out — then there is no recognition of a lack of privacy. The dining room has a TV with a satellite connection, after all, and even if it only gets 4 channels on the best of days, it is still a luxury few have at home. They’re allowed to watch for 30 minutes a day during meal times or the afternoon, but are occasionally given permission to take in the entirety of a soccer game.

Time does not equal money in a world where there is an abundance of the former and a distinct shortfall of the latter. Patience is important in Tanzania, as it is in much of the world. From New York City to Uwemba was a change of pace, of course, and not one you’re likely to do smoothly, considering that waiting is not part of the game when I speed from Brooklyn to Grand Central in the morning on the express line. In Tanzania, though, you can get on a bus at the appointed hour of departure and then commence to sit for a couple of hours, waiting for more passengers to fill the seats and make the trip worthwhile. Even though Tanzania is relatively far from being the poorest country in Africa it is still very poor and the scrimping in every day life is obvious.

Yet on our second night in Uwemba, we find ourselves sitting in a house being served heaping bowls of food. We are guests and I am given one of the two pieces of meat available that evening, a chicken presumably killed recently just for us. These moments exist in a lot of literature, but their poignancy never fails to impress, the contradiction of them cooking for us when they have so little and we have money to fly around the world on a vacation never failing to implant itself in the mind.

Me, in the center at the back, white shirt

Not even 24 hours later I stand at the edge of my porch in Ruaha, watching the elephants at 40 feet, smiling into a camera as two of them munch leaves behind me. I have lodge staff at my disposal, should I wish to request a beer be brought to my cabin – the clients should not go out in the dark because there are wild animals – the colonial feeling not escaping me. The disparities and contradictions never end, the natural comparisons between Uwemba and the lodges, their lives and mine.

Again and again, though, my thoughts are wiped clean by the sheer magnitude and beauty of the land around me. In the Serengeti we traverse a length of land at nearly 80kph while I stand up and let the wind whip across my face. The land flashes by and I let myself feel everything around me, as I bounce to the tune of the dirt road, as a controlled fire sends multi-colored smoke high into the sky. This living, this is feeling, this is being free in a way that is so rare and it is something lucky to behold, lucky to be able to feel.

On our final day, as we head to Kilimajaro International Airport, we are finally able to see the full glory of Mount Kilimajaro, which had been to date almost entirely obscured from view by clouds. There it sits in the distance, huge, imposing, snow-capped in an arid dry land, looking like the end of the world. The sun is setting in the background, casting a reddish glow across its face. It is the perfect sendoff for us. Well, almost:

“Dammit,” I say quietly.

“What?” my girlfriend asks, turning her attention from the mountain for a second.

“Nothing. Termite mound.”

Damn you, cheetah. Damn you.

Me, adventurer extraordinaire