“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.

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.

Still, we hadn’t slept through all of it.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.