In Africa

Sunday, April 29, 2018
Before entering the Serengeti National Park, we stopped at the Olduvai Gorge, one of the richest archeological sites in the world.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_Gorge

It has yielded evidence of some of humankind's earliest ancestors, including Lucy, an austropicene, on my mother's side. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)

   

A new, excellent little museum has been opened at Olduvai Gorge displaying relics and replicas of some of the key discoveries in the area.  Take a Southern Baptist on a visit with you.

Naonu Moru is the near genuine African safari experience.  It is a group of tents set in the bush, reached by the merest wisp of a road.  There are 11 sleeping tents and several support tents.  They are not entirely primitive; a bathroom is included although not one that might be featured in Modern Plumber.  Each tent covers as much space as a modest Manhattan one-bedroom apartment.  It has room to host a cast party for "Mogambo." 

On the other hand, we are sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere. 

Monday, April 30, 2018

Except for a stretch from the rim to the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater, we have been driving on unpaved roads since approaching the crater on Friday.  East Africa has had the hardest rain in the last two months for the last 20 years, washing out roads and bridges, and rerouting and rescheduling us.  We are in a specially equipped, four-wheel drive Toyota Land Cruiser, but the muddy, deeply-rutted roads make for tough driving, sometimes slower than walking.  Estimating distances is difficult under the circumstances.   

We set out at 7 AM to explore the Serengeti plain.  For the first hour, we moved  very slowly through bush that was almost entirely empty of animals.  However, the land showed clear signs of their recent presence.  The trunks or large branches of many trees were snapped in half, the result of elephants making bark and leaves more accessible to feeding.  Although we saw very few elephants in the Serengeti, we saw broken trees throughout.  We also saw helmeted guinea fowl, Cape buffalo, wart hogs, topis (a horned antelope), African hoopoes (another horned antelope), hartebeests (yet another horned antelope), water bucks (big horned antelope), Marabou storks, hornbills, dwarf mongooses, lesser flamingos, greater flamingos, and one small crocodile.  

With all that, two sights stood out.   First, we saw a leopard in a tree with its cub, an exceptional sighting we were told.  As big as the Serengeti is, it holds few leopards.  Then, several Cape buffalos, big creatures with thick curved horns, strolled on the edge of a pond full of flamingos, lesser and greater, white and pink, while one Cape buffalo sat submerged in the pond, only its horns and the top of its head showing.  It stood still, not going up down, left right, until Kip our supervising guide told us that it was no more than a Cape buffalo skull floating on the surface, the relic of an attack by a lion.  Really spooky

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

We left our tent village early and drove 150 kilometers to the western edge of the Serengeti, on the road for over six hours with some breaks.  At a stop at a visitor's center, we saw hyraxes for the first time, chubby rodents about a foot long.  They seemed to prefer the company of sunburned tourists from around the world using bathrooms rather than hanging out with the the lions, jackals, hyenas and leopards in the bush. 

Another long pause occurred when we encountered a pride of lions on and across the road - one male, six females and 12 cubs.  The male sat and watched as the group marched in file right under the nose of the two-legged Intruders.  It was a memorable sight.  

Hours later, as we navigated a severely eroded patch of road, more water than ground, our companion vehicle fell off the edge, tilting about 30 degrees from the vertical axis.  We had stopped to wait for them, so Clement backed up, took off his shoes, rolled up his pants and joined Kip and the other driver in attaching a tow line to pull the other Land Cruiser onto firmer yet soaked ground.  

A short time later, we arrived at our overnight stop, Speke Bay Lodge, a beautiful facility on the shores of Lake Victoria.  We got a round, thatch-roofed hut (they call it a bungalow) about 15 feet from the water's edge.  It will be hard to leave it tomorrow at a typically ungodly hour to go back to Kenya.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Goodbye Speke Bay Lodge, the place that you hope they choose for your witness protection program.  On the other hand, I would like to nominate belatedly for a Nobel Prize the person who invented paving.  We drove north for three plus hours into Kenya on solid concrete, allowing our kishkes to return to their natural position in our body cavity.

About a half hour beyond the border crossing, we got onto a 12-passenger, single engine airplane for a 20-minute flight to Maasai Mara National Preserve (differing from a National Park by allowing residency within).  Once we landed, it was back to rocking and rolling in a  four-wheel drive Land Cruiser to get to Fig Tree Camp, another tent complex, about six times larger than Naona Moru Camp in the Serengeti.  Our tent is about 1/4 the size of the one in Naonu Moru, but equipped with a real tiled bathroom.  It is also perched directly on a stream where four hippopotamuses were bathing shamelessly in front of us.

We were supposed to go on a game drive this afternoon, but a huge rainstorm stopped us, leaving me in the dark to compose this timeless  prose, because of one of the camp's regularly scheduled blackout periods from 3 to 6 PM.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

I thought that the hippopotamus was chattering right next to our tent at 4:30 this morning, but it was only sitting in the stream 10 feet from our front flap, what passes for a door.  Meanwhile, the stream has gotten noticeably closer to our tent, because of yesterday's big rainstorm.  

Two of our seven person group chose to ride a hot air balloon over the Maasai Mara plain bright and early this morning.  I chose not to, because of my vertigo and 450 other reasons.  The rest of us were on the road (more like a swamp) before 7 AM to look for animals.  They were much less densely gathered here than in other regions.  However, we saw clusters of Cape buffalos, topis, gazelles, Impalas and wart hogs, with occasional jackals and hyenas lurking around.  A few elephants and giraffes were visible in the distance, but no big cats could be seen.  They might have been around,  sheltered by the tall grass that covered most of the terrain.  The only new sighting was the wattled plover, a description suitable for several of my friends.

. . .

Giuliani said what?

. . .

At 3 PM, we left for our last game drive.  I was satisfied that it would be much the same as this morning's, sort of a recap of recent sightings.  Well, don't you know that our luck with rare encounters continued.  We came upon a group of five cheetahs strolling together directly in our path.  I captured them on video, which I can transmit on What's App, but not Gmail.  All reasonable requests to view, accompanied by a Häagen Dazs gift certificate, will be honored.  They were most remarkable animals, rarely seen and more rarely seen under such favorable circumstances.

We continued on, encountering a family of elephants close up and seeing our first martial eagle dining on a lizard.  It turned out to be a major league excursion.  As we approached our tent back at Fig Tree Camp, two hippopotamuses were splashing in the water at our feet, almost a bookend to our arrival yesterday.  By the way, another gift certificate gets you this video.

Friday, May 4, 2018

This was wrapping up day, the last time in the bush as we prepared to return to Nairobi on a flight from Olkiombo Airstrip.  On the ride over, likely our last bumpy ride for awhile, we had some interesting sightings.  We saw three giraffes, closer than at any time before.  They were just hanging out, so we could observe them for many minutes.  While there is no denying the beauty of the cheetahs and the other big cats, giraffes seem to have no parallel.  

Almost at the other end of the size scale, a 4" chameleon caught all of our attention.  It appeared predominantly light green, exactly matching the color of our vehicle.  Then, back up to another extreme when we saw an enormous crocodile on the edge of a stream alongside the road.  Six, seven, eight feet long; you couldn't tell because the crocodile was directly facing us.  It lay still, which was fine with us, even though it was an uphill climb to reach us.

. . .

We have been entertained three times by Maasai people singing and dancing, twice after dinner at our lodge or camp.  Before reaching the airstrip today, we made a scheduled stop at a small Maasai village, holding 84 people in six families.  The men and women danced and sang for us and then we went into one of their very small boxy houses, built by the women after they marry.  The houses are no higher than the height of the builder and are made of a crude stucco covering pieces of scrap wood and tree branches.  The roofing material was dried cow dung over a plastic sheet, an upgraded feature at the house that we entered.  It had no electricity or running water.  The small front room (as if there was room for anything large) held a baby cow overnight, which would bring its mother each morning with milk for the children and the baby cow as well.

We ended the visit by walking a gauntlet of women offering their beadwork and other handicrafts for sale.  The process was awkward.  No prices were marked; you were supposed to select everything that interested you and then get a collective quote, understood to be unreasonably high.  Bargaining ensued, but I backed away when I was quoted $65 for the $12-18 of merchandise that I picked.  In China, I jumped into such negotiations with relish.  Here, I was disheartened.  I could not play act into some back and forth in the face of such grinding poverty.  

My mood was affected by the whole character of the visit.  The people, their customs, their crafts, their living conditions were on display, to be recorded and recounted, as strange to us as many of the animals that we have seen.  The tour company paid the villagers for their time and access and, for all I know, it represented a great windfall.  But, I wish that we stuck to staring at animals.