I was a little worried about our road trip yesterday (Wednesday. When you research the option of renting a car and driving around Morocco, you discover two very different schools of thought. One is dark: Moroccan drivers are terrible, the road-death toll is high, the pass over the mountains blood-curdling. On the other, sanguine, side of the fence, people attest that the roads are mostly well-surfaced and once you’re outside the cities, driving is no big deal. We weighed both, and after talking to a couple of friends who’ve driven here, we decided that the advantages of getting from Marrakech to Fes in our own (rented) vehicle outweighed the alleged drawbacks.
Arranging the rental was also not without its complications. Go online and google “Morocco car rentals” and you’ll find lots many choices. But the comments and reviews of most of them discouraged me. I finally posted a question on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree travel discussion forum, and I heard good things about Malta Car. I emailed the main contact person, Jawad, and arranged for a car to be delivered to our riad at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, March 19.
This was a good call. It’s possible I could have gotten a cheaper rental had we waited to arrange it until after we arrived here. But that would have required hours of work, and as it was, we didn’t have time to see at least a couple of key Marrakech attractions. Instead two young people showed up at our riad as arranged, shortly after 9 yesterday (Wednesday) morning, then they led us on foot out of the inner medina to the place where they had parked our gleaning white Dacia Logan (a type of Renault). The young woman was sweet and charming; her male colleague efficient. They pulled out forms for us to fill in…
...on the trunk.
and a credit-card-processing machine to log our deposit and vehicle-rental payment. They patiently answered all our silly questions (“Do the windshield wipers work?” “What are the rules for entering a traffic circle?” etc.) When we got to asking about the details of how we should get out of Marrakech, they gallantly offered to drive us to the road out of town. And so they did! (Another colleague then collected them and took them back to the city.)
It's not Kansas, but it wasn't Hell either.
This was a godsend; it made our day easy. The car is fine, the roads are indeed well-paved. The weather was glorious and the scenery spectacular. We did occasionally get trapped behind a Scandinavian hogging the road in an RV, and some of the hairpin turns and low guardrails in the Atlas Mountains made me hold my breath. But there simply wasn’t all that much traffic, and with a stop for lunch and a bit of roadside shopping and photo-shooting, we pulled into our B&B in Ait ben Haddou (the Cafe Baghdad) and around five hours after we bade Karima and her colleague goodbye.
We whiled away the rest of the day exploring the old fortified town (ksar) of Ait ben Haddou. It’s a spectacular place — a UNESCO World Heritage site that in centuries past figured prominently in the salt trade. For more than 50 years, moviemakers have flocked here to shoot scenes from Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, Gladiator, Babel, and more. The ksar served as a set for the second season of Game of Thrones. And people told us that just five weeks ago Nicole Kidman was here, starring in something called The Queen of the Desert.
When Nicole was filming, the movie-makers closed the ksar to tourists. So we lucked out by not arriving here then. Being in the set feels like being in a movie fantasy set, and there’s more of the same on the road ahead of us — kasbahs, palm oases, and beyond, the beginning of the Sahara.
One of the coolest things about the Jemaa el Fna — the enormous public space at the heart of the Marrakech medina — is how the action changes throughout the day. When S and I walked through it about 9 Tuesday morning, we saw more henna ladies than anything else. They’ll paint fancy designs on your hands and arms, supposedly with henna (but you have to watch out that they don’t use the black stuff that’s toxic.)
We saw only one or two snake charmers.But later that morning, when we walked through the plaza again on our way back from visiting the Artisanal Arts center and making a brief foray into the souks, I counted several more of the serpent guys, and I paid 10 dirham (about $1.25) to take this photo:
My photographic subject explained that the erect black snake (swaying cartoon-style to the accompanying piping) was a cobra. The other snakes (on another part of the rug) were vipers. “Oh like rattle snakes!” Steve exclaimed. He asked if they rattled. The snake charmer told us that they do not. Only American vipers do that.
These were real cobras and vipers, mind you. And other men had what looked to me to be real Barbary apes, wearing diapers and trained to pose with photographic subjects on demand. If the snakes and monkeys were clearly there for the tourists, almost everything else in the plaza seemed intended for local consumption. There are the “dentists,” for example, who sit at tables laden with dentures…and a pair of pliers. We paid another 10 dirhams to photograph this fellow:
He was kind enough to show us what was under the folded paper napkin in the lower right-hand corner of his table: still blood-stained teeth that he’d “extracted’ that very morning.
At 1 p.m. every day, the square becomes off-limits to cars and vans, though motor scooters can still zoom through, pumping out noise and air pollutants and threatening the limbs and lives of everyone on foot. Through the afternoon, the entertainment grows more and more diversified. We saw fortune-tellers and musicians, along with the restaurant touts and portrait painters and orange juicers and snack vendors. About 6 p.m. a huge section of the square begins to fill with tents under which dozens of “restaurants” operate. Once it’s dark, the smoke and enticing smells from them rise up and roil, a delicious miasma into which hawkers occasionally launch high-flying glow-in-the-dark toys.
On Monday night, Steve and I had walked about 10 minutes from the square to find a simple Moroccan restaurant recommended by a friend. But when we’d passed through the square, we’d been assailed by at least two dozen touts, each insisting that his employer’s restaurant was the best. We’d told everyone “Maybe later.” But we’d been struck by how the places that were jammed with mainly locals didn’t seem to have any touts — probably because their good reputations were pulled regular customers in.
So when we returned to the square around dinner time yesterday (Tuesday), we headed to one of those — #14, specializing in fish and chips. It looked like every seat was packed, but then one of the workers waved us to open spots way in the back, at one of the long picnic tables. He slapped rectangles of butcher’s paper in front of us both and tossed on them pieces of the Moroccan rolls that look like giant flattened hamburger buns.
We’d failed to study the little menu/sign in front of this stall, but the guy serving our section took command, delivering a little plate of tasty mashed roasted eggplant, then pureed fresh tomatoes, then a pile of fried fish chunks that, if bony, tasted very fresh. The pile of fries that he brought were good too. All that would have been enough, but he also dropped off a plate of fried calamari (which we later learned cost 30 dirhams — about $3.75 — by itself.)
The total tab was 70 dirhams (about $8.66) including the tip we left for our whirligig of a waiter. It seemed to me at least as good as any dinner S and I ever had at McDonalds — at least as fast (slapdash, even!), more gastronomically interesting, more sociable, cheaper.
Walking home I wished we spoke Arabic. I would have loved to understand what the storytellers were saying to enthrall the crowds that they were drawing. But with luck we’ll have our own tale of adventure to tell this evening. We’re off to eat breakfast now, then we’re supposed to meet Jawad from Morrococar to rent a vehicle that we’ll drive through the Atlas Mountains (today), then on to the oases and the desert beyond.
Yesterday we set our alarms for 4:15 a.m. The wheels of our Airbus lifted off the runway shortly after 6, and the Moroccan immigration official stamped our passports about 4 hours later. Because Morocco is one hour earlier than France, we were installed in our guesthouse (aka riad) in the old city (aka medina) by not much after 10 a.m. — not much later than we had originally expected to be here.
We’d arranged to be picked up by a driver from the riad, so that left us free to take in the sights, which evolved pretty dramatically along the way. Near the airport, the highway is wide and well-paved and lined with pleasant looking shops and familiar Mediterranean plants. I noted little trash or graffiti or ruination of the sort so common in Africa. We soon reached the walled inner city, and the wall looked to be in good shape too. Approaching the huge and famous central plaza, the Jemaa el Fna, the motorscooter traffic got crazier and crazier, and the ambient noise level cranked up. Larger motorized vehicles can’t travel in the innermost streets of the walled city, so we climbed out of the van and loaded our few bags into a hand-cart pulled by a half-toothless but friendly old guy. He led us through a Marrakech that felt 1000 years old (the approximate age of the city). It reminded us of Venice, but the passageways are filled with beautiful doorways that seem quintessentially Moorish.
Some are humble
Some are grand...
We checked into the riad, which is great (one of the dozens upon dozens of old homes that Europeans (mostly) have bought and converted into guesthouses over the past 20 years.) We spent most of the rest of the day and evening exploring the center city on foot, except for the hour-long break I took in the mid-afternoon. That proved to be both interesting and restorative....with a bit of everything in between.
Hammams — Turkish-style baths — are a prominent feature of life in Marrakesh, and most guidebooks urge a visit. But being scrubbed and massaged by strangers holds little interest for Steve. Normally I’m not much of a spa patron either. But when I heard that our riad had its own little hammam offering spa services, the idea of a scrub and a rub for some reason called to me.
At 3 p.m. I showed up wearing only the flip-flops and thick white robe that had been deposited in our room. A sturdy woman wearing a long black tunic and a headband directed me to the room to the right. She pour a bucket of hot water over the plastic mat on the concrete table within it, then she had me take off the robe and lay down. For the next half hour or so, she poured cupfuls of warm water over me then went through an elaborate cleaning ritual that started with applying soft aromatic liquid soap and worked its way up to a vigorous whole-body scrub with an abrasive mitt and something she said was black soap. By the time she was done, she’d peeled off at least one (and maybe several) layers of my skin. She applied a facial mask too and she shampooed my hair and finished me off with more rinsing. I re-donned the robe, moved into the central sitting area for a cup of sweet mint tea then went on to be massaged by another young Moroccan women (deeply relaxing but much less weird.)
After our frenetic week in Paris, it felt great, and it reinvigorated me for venturing into the Jemaa el F’na at night. Marrakech’s central square is something else again — different from anything we’ve experienced anywhere. It deserves a separate post of its own.My scrubber (left) and masseuse (right)
With our trip to East Africa fast receding behind us, I didn’t think there’d be anything more to write about it. Then the following showed up at our door the other day — an envelope from Rwanda! Sent in a very official plastic envelope, emblazoned “Securite assuree (Safe and secure).”
Inside Steve found an even more official looking letter from Dr. Alexis Nzahabwanimana, the “Minister of State in Charge of Transport,” who was responding to the letter Steve had written him.
Steve had been complaining about an incident that I didn’t report on in this blog. It occurred June 12, when we flew from Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) to Tanzania on Kenya Airlines. Here’s how Steve described what happened:
“After passing the first checkpoint, I checked my baggage, which contained items such as large bottles and a pocket knife that are prohibited in the cabin. In my hand luggage, I had some AA and AAA batteries that I need for my electronic devices. These items are not on Kenya Airlines’s list of prohibited items. I have traveled all over the world and I have never been told that dry-cell batteries are prohibited from airline cabins. Had Kenya Airlines advised me that these items are prohibited, I could have tucked them in my luggage before checking it.
“At the second checkpoint, the police confiscated my batteries. I explained that they were not on the list of prohibited items, but the officer in charge was not amenable to reason. The loss of my property caused me considerable inconvenience and some expense.
Steve wrapped up with a lecture: “If Rwanda is to realize its goal of becoming a high tech center of East Africa, it is important that visitors not have their property confiscated illegally, especially when it relates to their electronic equipment. I am bringing this matter to your attention because I hope you will correct this improper behavior on the part of the police through appropriate channels.”
Dr. Nzahabwanimana begged to disagree. Batteries are a component of improvised explosive devices, he pointed out, helpfully including for our edification a diagram of how to build one.
As “a signatory to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) that establishes international Standard and Recommended Practices (SARPs) that have to be complied with by all its signatories to Safeguard International Civil Aviation against Acts of Unlawful Interference,” Rwanda had a duty to keep such potentially dangerous goods out of airline cabins. Hence, the police “were therefore acting within the confines of the International Standards and National regulations…”
Dr. Nzahabwanimana also included a “Dangerous Goods List” that included “Batteries, dry, containing potassium hydroxide solid, electric storage” on it. Steve jumped right on that, determining it to be part of an obscure UN document. He also researched the US Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) guidelines. We all know how lax they are — but they make it clear dry batteries for personal appliances can be transported in cabins.
Steve was threatening to write back and argue with the Africans some more. For my part, I’ve been urging him to spend the time instead earning some money that we might use for further travel to electrifying destinations.
I’m writing this from back home in San Diego, where I’m feeling guilty that I still haven’t written about what Steve and I agree was the most remarkable experience of this most amazing trip: our visit to the village of Nyaka in western Uganda.
It wasn’t originally on our itinerary. But back in early February, I happened to be at a social gathering with Leigh Fenly, an old friend who also was the co-founder of Women’s Empowerment (WE). Based in San Diego, WE was formed to provide low-interest “microloans” to poor women to help them start or expand their small (minuscule) enterprises. In Mexico, Honduras, San Diego, and other parts of Africa, WE’s lending has helped many women improve their economic conditions and develop pride in what they can accomplish. Leigh mentioned that the organization had been approached a few months earlier by the Nyaka AIDS Foundation about lending money to some Ugandan women who are the sole support of their grandchildren, youngsters who’ve lost their parents to AIDS. Although WE had gathered information about this group from a distance, Leigh felt it would be valuable to have us check it out in person.
Grannies arriving at a meeting
It’s hard for those who haven’t traveled in the developing world to imagine how remote Nyaka is. I myself couldn’t believe the village would be so very hard to reach, when I looked at its approximate location on my Uganda map. But the map doesn’t show how mountainous the area is. Road lines neatly rendered on paper in reality are rutted dirt tracks studded with rocks and other impediments. Occasional holes help to make driving on them hellish. There are no road signs. Our Ugandan driver/guide, Robert, was born and raised in this region, but he’d never heard of Nyaka. He got us there by following rough directions from one of our contacts over the phone — and then stopping to ask bystanders for details as we homed in on our destination.
Bizarrely, Uganda’s long-time president grew up around here; why he hasn’t doled out more patronage in the form of road work is a mystery. But another former son of Nyaka has been more loyal. Jackson Kaguri was a bright boy who studied hard and won a scholarship to attend a university in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He went to the US for graduate work and there met and married an African-American woman. They were on a trajectory to a comfortable middle-class life in Indiana, but Kaguri continued to visit his family back in Africa. His older brother had died from AIDS, and Jackson had committed to helping educate his nieces and nephews. On his first visit back with his new wife, the two were struck by the plight of the other AIDS orphans in the village. They resolved to build a school that would provide free education for at least some of the orphans. (All the “public” schools in Uganda require parents to pay fees that often are significant enough to be unaffordable.)
Kaguri subsequently published a memoir of how the school project unfolded, and one of the best things about it is how clearly it communicates his mental state. He didn’t set out to try and change the whole country. He simply wanted to build a couple of primary-level classrooms, despite his pretty much total lack for preparation for any such undertaking. But he was determined, and he did eventually get those first classrooms built. Over time, the school expanded. The need for a health-care center became clear and eventually got built The lack of clean, easily accessible water led to creation of a drinking water system for part of the village. Jackson did none of this on his own; he got help from folks both in America and Uganda. But a dozen years after that first vision of a few classrooms took shape, a remarkable amount has been accomplished.
The Nyaka Granny Project was yet another outgrowth of this work. Around 2007, the school staff began to focus on the fact that many children were suffering from malnutrition and sleep deprivation due to inadequate food, water, and shelter. Somehow, the staff found the resources to begin organizing support groups for the grandmothers struggling to raise those children — not only the few lucky enough to attend the Nyaka school, but many others whose kids are in public schools. When Steve and I finally reached Nyaka, we could scarcely believe our ears when the two program coordinators told us there are now 91 such groups, including 7,000 women providing sole support to something like 35,000 kids.
Some of the grannies with whom we met
Within short order, the reality of those numbers became clearer. After depositing our bags in the little house that’s been built (and is run by Jackson’s sister) to accommodate visitors, Martin and Godfrey (the Granny Project coordinators) led us to a nearby building where one of the groups had assembled to meet us. Dressed in their finest Sunday clothes — brightly colored and patterned dresses and wraps that left no doubt we were in Africa — the women, including one 91-year-old member, were singing and dancing. It was an infectious, boisterously joyful greeting, and it instantly won our hearts. We all gathered in a big circle under a tree. Most of the grannies sat on the ground, while we as the guests were offered chairs. Jackson and Martin introduced us, and Steve (bravely) responded to a request to explain why we were there. Then for most of the multi-hour session, we asked questions.
We took pages and pages of notes, which Steve patiently transcribed in spare moments throughout the rest of our travels. What we learned in the first group was echoed in the two others with which we met (one later that first afternoon and the other the next morning.) The grannies told us about the many benefits they’d gained from participating. First and foremost, the groups provided fellowship. It’s misleading to talk about African “villages.” For me that term conjures up some compact community in England where everyone can walk to everyone else’s home. But in rural Africa, communities are typically far-flung. While some of the grannies lived within a half-kilometer of each other, others walked two or three hours to attend the twice-monthly meetings.
Each time they attended, they paid a small amount (ranging from $.75 to $1.50) into a fund, knowing that every 15 months or so they would receive all or part (arrangements varied) of the pot collected that meeting. This simple system provides a way for the poor to save for needed items — a blanket, say, or a saucepan –instead of seeing any savings dribble away to friends or relatives needing help. The Nyaka coordinators also provided some educational programs (farming tips; AIDS prevention), and the groups gave the women a chance to share their troubles and pray together “for our homes and our families” (as one English speaker put it). Finally, a small microloan program that began in 2008 was offering some of the women a chance to borrow tiny amounts of money and pay it back within a few months at interest rates that might seem high to Westerners (3% a month), but were far more reasonable than the 10 to 20% monthly interest charged by other African lenders.
JoAnn, 52, caring for 3 grandchildren, had borrowed a little under $20 and used $7.75 to buy a piglet and the rest to build a pigsty for the animal. Jacqueline, 53, had used her $4 loan to hire someone to prepare some ground for her to plant. Her subsequent peanut and sweet-potato harvest had been good enough to help cover her grandchildren’s school fees. Maria, supporting 6 grandchildren, had combined her $19 loan with another $7.75 she’d saved and bought a goat that she bred with a neighbor’s billy. She’d sold the resulting twins and since had built her herd up to 6. When I asked if she and her grandkids drank the milk, the group burst out laughing. If she did that, someone pointed out the obvious, the baby goats would die of malnutrition.
A scene from the play
Our meetings included other light moments. The second group put on a play for us fashioned after the Biblical story of King Solomon’s trial of two women who both claimed the same infant. The actors were equipped with props that included a fake sub-machine gun fashioned from banana-tree branches. It was unforgettable. But so was the women’s response when we asked if they had any complaints about the Nyaka micro finance program.
They did indeed: there wasn’t enough money to be borrowed. They had ideas. They were willing — eager! — to muster the energy to raise piglets and goats and chickens; plant sweet potatoes, roast them, and sell them to passing travelers; sew, weave baskets, make bracelets and other handicrafts. They were confident they could pay back the money with interest. Indeed the repayment rates do approach 100%. “How many of you would borrow more money if there was more available to borrow,” I asked. Here’s how they answered:
What a journey we had Saturday (6/24). Woke up in a tent in a vast Tanzanian wilderness. Went to bed in downtown Nairobi (Kenya) — home to 6 million, famed for terrorist turmoil and more plebeian crime. Traveling from Point A to B began with two short flights in a Cessna designed to seat 12 but in practice seating 13, the extra space being the one next to the pilot. (I loved the Safety Instruction that directed any passenger in it “not to step on or interfere with the pedals on the floor.”)
At the Arusha airport, we were picked up by a pre-arranged driver who took us through insane Saturday morning traffic to the bus-shuttle depot. The subsequent bus ride took 5.5 hours, including the stop at the Tanzania/Kenya border crossing (reminiscent of San Diego/TJ’s maybe 75 years ago.) It was twilight by the time we reached the outskirts of Nairobi, and the sights out the windows were grim: decrepit buildings; more insane car and pedestrian traffic, choking diesel fumes, squalor. Full-on dark had descended when we finally pulled into the bus terminus, where another pre-arranged driver met us with our names on a hand-held whiteboard and transported us to our hotel. It occurred to me that we’d done a disservice to Kenya by planning to spend barely 50 hours in it, and all of that in its ominous capital. We would probably leave with unpleasant memories, vowing never to return.
But good impressions of Kenya started to accrue as soon as we checked into the Kahama Hotel. Spotless and stylish, it included an excellent breakfast buffet for the $50/day tab. The clientele looked to be mostly African businessmen with a sprinkling of white readers of Lonely Planet East Africa (where it’s a “TOP Choice!”). The free wifi was excellent, the customer service even better, the water in the shower hot and plentiful. One drawback was the noisy adjacent highway, but, eh, I had my lion’s-roar-blocking earplugs. And Steve sleeps like the dead.
Our full day in Nairobi Sunday (6/25) piled on more pleasures. We drove out to the suburb of Karen, home to posh private academies and mansions, and lunched at the sophisticated restaurant that today operates on the land that Out of Africa author Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixon) once farmed. After lunch, we visited a nearby center celebrating Rothschild’s giraffes. In 1979, when the Kenyan grandson of a Scottish earl and his American wife began raising a baby giraffe in their home, the number of these animals in the wild had sunk to 120. Thanks in part to the subsequent work of the couple, the population of wild Rothschild’s has now climbed to 700 or so, and the center is devoted to both conservation and educational work. It combines this with the huge fun of giving visitors the chance to place tasty pellets on the amazingly long, liver-colored giraffe tongues from a raised platform that literally brings the humans nose to nose with the leggy beauties.
Giraffish love
All this was great. But our experience earlier that morning at the Sheldrick center for orphaned elephants was phenomenal. The trust that runs the center was started in 1979, shortly after the death of David Sheldrick, who served as the anti-poaching warden at Tsavo National Park. His formidable wife Daphne (and, now, their children) have carried on the work of rearing baby elephants whose mothers have been killed for their ivory (or, less commonly, by irritated farmers).
Killing elephants for their tusks continues to be a huge problem, perhaps worse today than it’s been for a while (because of corrupt officials in Kenya and Tanzania who turn a blind eye to this hideous trade). There are a lot of elephant orphans to care for. The Sheldricks years ago solved one huge problem by developing a formula the animals could tolerate (cow’s milk gives them fatal diarrhea), but they can thrive on a variant of human baby formula. Each animal needs a lot of it: about 6-12 pints every 3 hours, around the clock. During the days, each baby, under the watchful eye of a tender, is free to range into the wilds of Nairobi National Park, on which the Sheldrick trust leases land. When the youngsters get to be about 5, they move to an an advanced facility where they can venture out to begin spending time with various groups of wild elephants. Eventually, they find a group that’s a good fit and begin their independent lives in the wild. But it’s the elephants who decide when they’re ready to make this move, and with whom.
Until each orphan reaches that stage (some time between the ages of 5 and 10), it costs about $900 (per animal per month) to support this ambitious operation. All the money is privately raised. (In fact the trust has to pay the Kenyan government a hefty rent for the property it occupies, I was appalled to learn.) One source of income comes from the 500 shilling ($6) entry fee for visitors to the facility. It’s open daily, but for one hour only — from 11 to noon.
Steve and I arrived about 45 minutes early, and that was lucky. We sat waiting next to the rope admissions barrier, and almost immediately other tourists streamed in behind us. When the guards finally released the rope, a crowd of several hundred people had massed. We led the way down a path to a clearing with a small muddy pool in the center. Around the pool, giant milk bottles were positioned. We stood next to the encircling rope barrier, a prime position for watching an attendant emerge from the thick bush, walking next to a tiny elephant — just 2 and a half months old, we later learned. A bright red Maasai blanket covered the sensitive skin on her back.
I think human babies are cute and puppies give them a run for their money. But I’m sorry. In the Cosmic Cuteness competition, baby elephants leave them both in the dust. Tiny, hairy, with oversized ears, and long, long eyelashes, this little female was named Mystery (in Swahili) because she’d been found when she was just 3 days old, in good health but lying down in the middle of an airstrip with no trace of her mother.
She guzzled down the milk from the bottle held by her human attendant, then stroked him delicately with her trusting little trunk, provoking a concert of cooing. I felt almost as tickled by the reactions of the crowd: kids, women, and men from all over the globe, all enraptured.
The pachyderm-human love fest continued as more attendants led in a dozen more of the big babies for their feeding. There were comic moments, as when one little guy rushed up to his bottles, knocked them over, then trumpeted with amazing volume in his impatience to be fed. Another rambunctious character thought it funny when he or she bumped into the crowd pressing up against the rope, provoking shrieks and howls of laughter. Another baby, after feeding, played with a shovel in the enclosure, balancing the tool on its hairy head. There was pathos too, as a narrator/attendant introduced each orphan, detailing what had brought each to the center. So much murder and heartache — for the sake of tchotchkes.
A baby elephant joke: kick over your milk bottle!
Steve and I think with education and public pressure, the Asian appetite will dry up (and maybe sooner rather than later; Dame Daphne’s new autobiography is being translated into Mandarin and Cantonese). But other forces also threaten the world’s elephants and other great wild animals, most prominently the ravenous human appetite to exploit the wildernesses needed to support wildlife. When you see warriors like the Sheldricks fighting to protect and nurture the elephants, the battle feels epic.
Compared to that, our other final activities in Nairobi, while pleasant, were anticlimactic. We dined Sunday night at Carnivore, once legendary for serving up grilled zebra, giraffe, eland, and other antelope, but since 2004 restricted to more familiar meats (plus crocodile, which I found to combine the texture of chicken with a vaguely piscine taste.) Monday morning we toured an interesting enterprise that’s recycling old flip-flops into charming art. And for our final lunch in Africa, we had our taxi take us to the Stanley Hotel. We had to park several blocks away, but our taxi driver, Washira, guided us on foot, and we both enjoyed the chance to walk a bit in the center city. It’s run-down, but bustling with purposeful pedestrians, despite the strangling vehicular traffic. Happily, we never got robbed. (Surprisingly, Steve didn’t get his pocket picked.)
The Stanley is said to be the oldest hotel in the city. I wanted to eat there because of the thorn tree that grows in a courtyard. A predecessor tree was planted there in the late 50s, and travelers used to pin notes to it seeking rides, praising this hotel or that, and generally sharing information as they journeyed from Cairo to Capetown or elsewhere on the Dark Continent. Later this practice inspired the Lonely Planet guidesters to start the Thorn Tree online bulletin board. In recent years, I’ve increasingly turned to it in planning our travels. It helped me to organize the amazing African journey we’ve just completed. I feel grateful, and I wanted to give it my regards.
“Did you hear the lions last night,” our guide Frank asked us at breakfast Friday morning (6/21).
Incredibly, I didn’t. Knowing that we were going to rise before dawn, I had taken the first sleeping pill I’ve consumed since arriving in Africa, and I’d inserted my protection against Steve’s snoring: earplugs. When the SEVEN lionesses and their cubs strolled through the staff quarters, roaring (at least four times, loudly, according to the group of jolly Germans who provided details at the next evening’s campfire, I snoozed right through it, as did Steve, despite the fact that only a thin layer of canvas separated us from all the ruckus (which apparently was resolved when one of the staffers got in a truck and drove it toward the pride to scare them off.) The next night I slept both drug- and plug-free, but all was quiet. To my regret.
I’ve had some great experiences on camping trips, but in general, I’m not crazy about camping. The dark, the cramped quarters, the separation from washroom facilities — I can do without all that. When we’ve stayed in spartan little budget hotels on various continents, I frequently have reflected, “At least it’s a lot better than camping.”
But camping while on safari can be another world altogether, a dreamy, pleasure-filled realm. I’ve stayed at four such places in my life (one in South Africa and three here in Tanzania). The South African one and the first two here came close to my idea of paradise. All had huge tents erected on and/or around platforms that held big comfortable beds with soft linens, electric lighting, civilized toilets and wash-up areas, and auxiliary furniture. Because they were tents, you could zip down big expanses of the canvas, lie in bed, and take in the natural world through the mesh “windows.” Food in these places is always served in a central lodge or mess area, and our meals have ranged from okay to excellent.
For our last two nights on safari, I’d chosen the Serengeti Kati-Kati tented camp. It gets excellent reviews on Trip Advisor, and Frank, our guide, had expressed strong approval of it at the start of our trip. But when we arrived on Wednesday night, I felt a twinge of disappointment. This was the most basic of the tent camps we’ve experienced. Although the tents and their covered verandas were the size of modest California bungalows, the ceilings weren’t as high as in the other places. The floors were simple canvas, and after dark the only sickly light came from two bare LED bulbs suspended from the ceiling and powered by a car battery. Each tent had its own toilet, but it was situated over a chemically sanitized drum in the ground, and we were only able to shower after requesting that one of the staff members haul a 20-liter bucket of hot water to the rear of our tent, fill a receptacle, and hoist that up so that gravity would make it flow through a shower head controlled by a simple on/off valve..
Still, the Kati-Kati grew on me. Sitting around the bonfire before dinner gave us a chance to interact with other travelers, something we’ve had little of and have missed (perhaps my only complaint about this whole trip). The food was extremely good — some of the best we had anywhere. The simple camp beds were well padded, warm, and cozy. And the simplicity of the accommodations suited the location — close to the center of one of the biggest and most spectacular wilderness areas on the planet (Serengeti National Park).
Serengeti comes from a Maasai word meaning “endless plain.” At the park headquarters on the eastern side of the preserve, there’s a rock outcropping that visitors are encouraged to climb. From the top of it, it’s clear what those Maasai name-givers were thinking. In every direction stretched a featureless, flat expanse of grassland. It looked dry, the color of sand, as the rains stopped a good 6 weeks ago. But otherwise, it was indistinguishable from an ocean.
The only way visitors may explore the park is in a 4WD vehicle driven by a licensed guide. With Frank at the helm of our Land Cruiser, we only had a couple of hours of game-drive time on Thursday afternoon (6/20). But in short order, we came upon a couple hundred zebra grazing together. We stopped to photograph a solitary hippo ripping off great mouthfuls of tall grass; they usually do this only at night. We snapped at warthogs and giraffe and a huge group of elephants. And as the sun was sinking, Frank spotted a distant tree where a leopard was lounging — the last remaining member of the so-called Big Five that Steve and I still had not seen (the others that we’d already checked off being elephant, rhino, buffalo, and lion).
On our last day with Frank, we rose before dawn. Game driving is a strange pastime. You bounce and rattle over the dirt trails, and by afternoon, every encounter with another vehicle means immersion for several seconds In a thick cloud of yellow dust. For me, going out first thing in the morning feels thrilling and fresh, but after hours and hours, it can start to feel a little tiresome. To avoid that, I’ve found that the best approach is to surrender to the flow of it; turn off any thought of passing time; remind myself that it’s all about the journey (the safari), not any destination. Each time you come upon a particularly beautiful vista or a particularly arresting group of animals, if feels like a surprise gift.
Hippos and wildebeest aren’t among the Big Five, but they were my biggest game-driving gifts Friday. Before this trip, I never associated hippos with the plains of the Serengeti, but it turns out there are bunches of them in the national park, and they’re easy to find en masse. Around lunchtime, Frank took us to a particularly notorious pool where what looked like several hundred hippos were crammed into a pool about the size of a football field. It was a staggering sight — a mega-mosh-pit of hippos sleeping not only side by side but on top of each other. The penetrating stench of concentrated hippo urine and dung hardly bothered me, I was so mesmerized by the animals’ comic postures; by the constant splash of water kicked up by their stubby tails; by their alien honks and growls and blurps.
A small section of the amazing hippo mosh pit
The wildebeest were another matter altogether. We weren’t just looking for any specimens but, rather, for wildebeest engaged in the great annual migration that the species is known for. These animals have made a stupendous recovery, increasing in the past 50 years from only about 125,000 to the 2 million estimated to exist today. The sight of hundreds of thousands of them moving across the Serengeti plains is said to be one of the greatest spectacles of nature.
The problem is that, because it’s a natural phenomenon, it doesn’t run like an airline. Where the mass of the herd may be in any given week may shift from year to year, depending on the rainfall. Knowing that, I months ago resigned myself to the possibility of seeing little during the two days we would be in the park. Still, my fingers were crossed.
The reason we rose so early Friday is because Frank had conferred with some of the other drive/guides, and he thought our best bet was to head west to an area known as the Musabi Plain. We drove and drove, and for a long time we saw only scattered clusters of wildebeests. But finally we turned a corner and came upon something that looked like a freight train but soon became recognizable as wildebeests, galloping in a line that stretched as far as the eye could see.
We watched them for a long time and continued to stop and see more as we drove on. In some spots, we found thousands of them, scattered in every direction, mostly grazing but in some cases kicking up their heels in frisky displays. Mixed among them were zebras, who tend to migrate alongside; apparently they have good memories and are gifted at remembering the migration routes, while the wildebeests have a mysterious genius for knowing when to move. At one point, we seemed to see this in action, as the pack of grazing wildebeests thickened and then began, once again, to surge onward.
It reminded both Steve and me of drawings we’ve seen of the American bison moving across the Great North American Plains. There were 20 million of them at one point, before our forebears wiped them out. Frank said what we were seeing this morning was the stragglers. The majority had passed through several weeks earlier, and had we been there then, we would barely have been able to see the grass for all the animals.
I’ve seen a fair number of World Heritage Sites and natural wonders. The Ngorongoro Crater is both, and now that I’ve seen it, I have to rank it near the top of my personal rankings.
When we were on our descent into Moshi a week ago, I didn’t recognize the crater out my window. It looked like an extinct volcano, but a very old and eroded one. The strange part was the caldera, which instead of being rocky or filled with water, was verdant. Steve, sensibly, figured out what we were seeing. On Tuesday, after leaving behind the Hadza hunters, we returned to our lodge at Lake Eyasi, ate breakfast, and departed. After about 3 hours and various check-ins at the national park headquarters, we arrived at the road that would take us down for a close-up view.
I wondered if I would be disappointed. As you get closer and closer to it, the crater floor looks enormous. A large salty lake fills part of it, and a huge portion of the rest is grass which only a month or so after the rainy season was already turning yellow. Large patches of deeper green spread out in various spots, but even after we reached the bottom of the road, I saw no animals. At first.
Then it began. First we drove past a herd of zebras. Then waterbuck and wildebeest. Grants and Thompson’s gazelles. Elephants ambling along with the easy confidence that they, after all, were the kings and queens of the beasts. We saw lions, too, snoozing in the sun like house cats, paws in the air, bellies absorbing the warm rays. With the top of our Land Cruiser popped up, we stopped again and again to stand and take photos, gaping at the sight of a distant black rhino, hippos copulating in the lake, Cape Buffalos and warthogs and jackals and ostriches, grazing, moving through the grass. “It’s like the biggest wild animal park on the planet,” Steve commented. But it’s one where the lions and leopards feed themselves every night.
Drowsy lion with copulating hippos in the background
It’s spectacular, and the pleasure continued after we climbed back out of the crater with sunset approaching and checked into our hotel. Perched on the rim, our room had an enormous window that commanded the scene below. At almost 2000 feet above the floor, we couldn’t see any animals, but knowing they were there thrilled us. We slept with the curtains open, and I awoke well before dawn, in part because I wanted to see the magical vista slowly take shape outside our window again.
We got more of a taste of it Wednesday morning (June 19). Although originally scheduled to hike around the Empakai Crater, we rebelled at the prospect of another 6-hour drive (to and from it) over spine-jolting roads and instead opted to do a 2-hour hike on the Ngorongoro crater rim.
The short drive to that made us feel like we were in Scotland, not Africa. Temperatures on the rim range from cool to downright chilly, and a dense mist was swirling. We met our ranger/guide, who was armed with the ubiquitous AK-47, and as we set out on foot, we pumped him for info on what we should do if we ran into an elephant, a Cape Buffalo, a leopard. (Answers: a) run off the path down the hillside; b) lie flat in a trench, where the the curve of the buffalo’s horns would make it hard for him to stab you to death (apparently they do not stomp people); c) pray that the gunshots would scare the big cat away.)
We did see plenty of evidence that elephants were around: a place where one had dug into the dirt with its tusk for vital minerals, footprints, huge piles of elephant dung that the guide said had to have been deposited earlier that morning. Later in the hike, we found even fresher piles; they were all but steaming.
Fresh elephant dung (next to hiking pole tips)
It was a bit creepy. But the guide had his gun, and the only creatures we ran into were birds and cattle being herded by their Maasai masters. It struck me that this was our last walk of the trip in a dense and beautiful African forest. I’ll miss them; dream about them. But tomorrow morning, we set off for the great plains of the Serengeti.
When our Land Cruiser overheated Monday, Steve’s instant comment was, “It wouldn’t be a safari if there weren’t car trouble.” In fact, we’d already had some of that. In Uganda, as we set out on our chimp-tracking adventure, Robert’s car lost power. But he calmly got out, diagnosed the problem (a clogged fuel filter), turned it upside down (to somehow bypass it), and we drove on. On the way to our Kili hike, Manuel’s radiator boiled over just as we reached the parking lot, but he nonchalantly filled it up with cold water and got us home without incident. So when our Land Cruiser’s heat gauge shot into the red zone shortly after our departure from Tarangire National Park, my first thought was that a splash of water might fix things right up. But this turned out to be real trouble — a busted water pump.
That’s not fixable when you’re stuck on a narrow shoulder in the middle of Nowhere, Africa. Instead our driver/guide Frank’s solution was to call the Pristine Adventures office in Moshi and have a new vehicle sent out. This ultimately took almost 5 hours, during which we screwed around with adding water to the radiator (futile), ate our box lunches, and limped to a junction where Steve and I could sit at red plastic tables advertising Cocal-Cola and pull out our iPads. I felt cranky and annoyed, and with the hours slipping by, I suggested maybe we should change our itinerary; forego the grueling 3-hour journey to Lake Eyasi and skip our hunting session with the Hadza tribe, in lieu of going directly to Ngorongoro Crater. While Pristine dithered, I distracted myself by writing reviews of some of the hotels we’ve stayed at for Trip Advisor. Then I remembered I hadn’t yet read the National Geographic article about the Hadza. Steve read it back in December of 2009 and couldn’t stop talking about it then. When, planning this trip, I heard that it was possible to visit some of these people, I’d signed us up and brought along a copy of the article. But only when I finally read it yesterday did I recover my senses (and some of my good spirits). The article made it clear just how rare and extraordinary the Hadza are, worth driving through the night to meet, if necessary.
It wasn’t necessary, as it turned out. Once the new vehicle arrived, Frank drove hard and got us to our tented safari lodge on Lake Eyasi a good hour before sunset. The lodge was beautiful; the food excellent. We set our alarms for 5 a.m. and by 5:35 were driving off through the dark to pick up our local guide, a Datoga guy name Kastuli.
The reason Steve and I were so excited about meeting the Hadza is because they represent some of the last remaining true hunter-gathers on the planet. Last year when we were in Ethiopia, we visited stone-age tribes in the Omo Valley, but as exotic as they were, they stay in one place and subsist for the most part on food that they grow or trade. The lifestyle of the Hadza, in contrast, is the life that humans lived for 99% of their time on earth. Women gather fruit and seeds and edible roots and other plants, while the men hunt just about everything that moves. They throw up simple huts made of brush where the women and children sleep, but when the pickings get slim, they move on. According to the Geographic article, of the thousand or so who survive, only about 250 continue to live by hunting and gathering, remaining stubbornly disdainful of the government’s efforts to get their kids into school and their adults out of the bush and into 21st-century-style hovels. They love their lives, anthropologists attest and the Geographic reporter confirmed. They work only 4- 6 hours a day, spending the rest of the time napping, goofing around, making simple handicrafts out of porcupine quills, bone, and purchased beads (the women), and smoking tobacco and marijuana (mostly the men). “Marijuana is illegal in Tanzania, you know,” Kastuli said. “But the Hadza, they don’t care. They could be meeting the president of the country, and they would smoke.”
The proximity of the modern world has influenced them. Within the last dozen or so years, most have switched to wearing some Western clothes (rather than exclusively animal skins). Hadza men still skin their animals, but they do it with steel knives instead of the stone ones they used not long ago. And within the last few years, a few groups have begun welcoming foreign visitors. In exchange they receive some compensation (primarily social services such as medicine when they get sick) and the women get a chance to earn cash from selling some of their handicrafts.
This was what we had signed up for. It was billed as a chance to “hunt with the Hadza,” but for the first hour or so after we arrived, we just hung around. The three adult Hadza men were sitting by a fire, and as the sun rose, a handful of women and kids drifted into the clearing. Kastuli told us that at the moment, this group included about 16 individuals. Other groups scattered around the countryside might contain 20 or 25. But they’re all very small, and individuals or families often switch from one group to another. According to the Geographic, men and women tend to engage in “serial monogamy,” being with one partner for a while and then breaking up to team with someone else. Often the women initiate the breakups; they apparently endure little of the subservience or abuse so common elsewhere in the world.
Hadza women and children
Kastuli’s outgoing friendliness overrode his limited English. He speaks a certain amount of the weird clicky Hadza language too, and so he was chatting with the group members as well as with us. He learned that the men had recently killed a couple of kudu. Strips of dried meat from that outing were hanging on a line. About 7:20, Kastuli announced that it was time to go hunting, and I assumed the Hadza guys would basically give us a hunting demonstration — shooting some arrows, demonstrating a couple of stalking moves. But no! The the three of them took off, trailed by the group’s tribe of 10 scrappy mutts, and as we scrambled to keep up with them, it soon became clear that they were following a routine they’d practiced since childhood.
It’s hard to describe how much fun this was; what an adrenaline rush. I’d been slightly nervous about the possibility of stepping on one of the black mambos, adders, or other snakes that live in the bush here. Indeed, this particular Hadza group has tacked the skin of a two huge (15-foot long) pythons on a baobab tree in their little compound. We’d heard that one of those pythons had eaten one of the camp dogs and the Hadza had taken revenge by killing and eating it. But the ground where we were following the hunters was reasonably clear, and I was watching where I stepped.
A bigger challenge was to avoid being snagged by the millions of acacia thorns lining the pathways, and the biggest challenge was keeping up with the 3 hunters. Steve and I are reasonably fit, and the bushmen looked like they were just strolling briskly, but they moved so fast! They’re trim as gazelle; with muscled arms and legs that look like carved ebony. Sometimes they walked side by side, joking and chatting, but then they’d suddenly fan out, squatting, aiming, shooting. We kept falling behind them, but I think they were slowing their pace so we could catch them, and within minutes, they called out a report of their first kill. We found them under a huge acacia tree, poking sticks at a branch high overhead in an effort to dislodge one of their hand-made arrows one of them had sent clean through a quail. They got it down, and showed us the bird, still conscious, looking around with a bewildered expression on its face. The guy holding it twisted its neck, tucked it under his belt, and went back to the hunt.
A half hour later, when I suggested we had better start back, they had killed 4 more birds: a couple of doves, another quail, and a big plump hornbill. The Hadza acted like it was all the same to them, though Kastuli was a little disappointed they hadn’t bagged a bigger animal, a baboon, say, or small antelope. But we were thrilled at what we’d seen and at what followed. We hiked back to the clearing and at the campfire, they plucked the feathers from all the birds, stuck them on sticks, and roasted them. Then they shared them, even tasty bites for us. This is their way. Though they have almost no material possessions, they share what they hunt and gather. I find them paradoxical; a charming blend of communism and anarchy, with no leaders, no priests, no clocks or calendars. “Individual autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza,” the Geographic article says. “No Hadza adult has authority over any other. None has more wealth; or, rather, they all have no wealth.” What they do have is what so many of the rest of us have lost: plenty of leisure, enough to eat (but not too much), strong and supportive communities. I don’t want to become a Hadza, but I salute them.
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