The Fabulous Life of Ponteuf

Walking with Lucy

The drive from the Ngorongoro Crater to the Serengeti Park is long and dusty and for a very substantial part, it can only be described as boring. The approach to the park gate is via a seemingly endless expanse of short grass plain which, in the dry season, is a blend of grayish yellow and brown and lots and lots of dust. Even with the top cranked down tight and the windows rolled up the dust manages to wiggle its way into the Land Rover, and it was hot; finally Jill and I gave up and left the back sliding windows open, eating the dust of passing trucks and our own that seemed to boil up at every rut in the road, of which, needless to say, there were many. The trees and kopjes were far in the distance and the animals were few and far between, often no more than a small clump of Tommies or an ostrich on the horizon.

The morning had already revealed itself to be spectacular, regardless of the current scenery. Almost immediately after leaving the lodge we stopped at a Masai boma just off the crater road. From the ridge above, it looked like no more than a circular wall of sticks, a slightly darker brown smudge in the larger gold and tan landscape. The closer we got the more it resolved into a quite large, quite high circle of pieces of wood sturdier than sticks but not exactly logs, much higher than we could see into and clearly spacious. Once we climbed out of the Rovers the residents began marching and chanting, coming out to meet us in waves. A group of 8 or 10 would walk out, singing, moving in a half march, half hop-step-shuffle dance in an irregular circle around us, then move back into the boma. This process repeated for quite some time as we stood around feeling out of place and guilty about taking photos, even though Willie had assured us that it was fine.

Their robes were saturated reds and blues and purples, strikingly vivid against the lightness of the landscape and the darkness of their skin, and most wore beaded jewelry around their necks and wrists and ankles. After the initial dance was deemed complete we were herded into the boma itself where we all clustered together, unsure of what to do next. The tall boma wall is lined with round, gently domed huts completely covered in cow dung plaster with small oval entrances no taller than a child. The center of the boma is filled with a smaller version of itself with a higher dirt and dung floor – this is where the livestock are kept at night. For our visit it was empty and the outer wall was hung with beadwork – our very own Masai store.

The Masai had, by the time I finished taking stock of where I was, divided by gender and formed semi circles; it appeared more dancing was beginning. Without warning one of the women approached our group, took Bonnie by the hand and led her forcefully to the women’s arc. The woman placed a white beaded collar necklace over her head and then, holding her hand tightly as if Bonnie might bolt if she let go, she began to jump, clearly indicating that Bonnie should jump in time with her. While we giggled nervously and took photos, the women chanted and Bonnie jumped for what, I would learn, seemed like a never ending amount of time before she was bowed to and led back to the safety of our group … and the next victim selected. One by one we all were led out and bounced, and while the women had a formal process, the men had it easier. Mike and Scott just joined the circle of jumping men and gave it a shot. Mike did quite well, but the pictures show him straining to get 8 inches off the ground while the Masai warrior next to him has effortlessly gained two feet of air.

After the dancing was (finally) complete we were officially welcomed to the boma and free to wander around at will. Snooping through someone’s bookshelves when alone in a room isn’t very difficult, but doing what amounts to the same thing in someone’s home while they watch is a different feeling entirely and although we were encouraged to walk around we all stayed clumped together, a small herd of white sheep. Eventually a few men asked smaller groups of us to see the insides of their houses and we stooped through the entrance and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. The wind was blowing sharp but the house was warm and comfortable, if a bit smoky from the constant cooking fire and a bit whiffy from the manger at the doorway. Divided into two bedrooms, a communal sitting room around the fire and the aforementioned manger, the hut was surprisingly sturdy and pleasant. The walls and ceiling were woven sticks and bamboo and our host told us that a roof lasts 10 – 15 years. About what ours do, we told him. Clearly, modern technology hasn’t improved on that statistic much.

Being in the hut, in the boma – it was an interesting juxtaposition to the modern hotel we’d slept in the night before. Existing mere miles from each other, the two were worlds apart. Thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of years of technological evolution separate the boma, which has probably been in use in more or less its present form for that long, and our hotel, a place we think of as superior. The Masai know all about the hotel, yet they still choose to live in a hut that wouldn’t have looked advanced to early man. It is a concept that is hard to grasp; for all my desire to live more simply, I don’t have an inclination to move to a cow dung hut, yet I see something wonderful in the continuity. How little have we changed, really, from our ancestors once they took that first upright step and used tools to make their lives a little easier?

The Oldupai Gorge seems, on the surface, a bit odd as a tourist attraction. The museum is housed in a few concrete block buildings and the view over the gorge is just that – a view. In a cosmic sense, it struck me as visiting the hospital where you are born. Sure, the building is the same, and there’s the room where your mother labored – but being there doesn’t give you any visual image of yourself as a child, doesn’t inform you of who your parents were at that time in their lives, doesn’t confirm or deny the stories you’ve heard repeated. Still, there was something very powerful about being at the hospital where humankind was born. Certainly, we have no way of knowing where Homo Erectus first stood upright, or where Homo Habilis first used tools, but the gorge is as close as we can come to the birthplace of our species, and standing on the spot where Mary Leaky found Australopithecus in 1959 gave me, to put it simply, the shivers.

From that vantage point you can clearly see the five layers of rock that make up the site; clearly see how far back our origins go in that rock. Australopithecus shares the same fossil record with Homo Habilis and their layer of rock indicates a time when the area was a major water source, rich with plant and animal life. As for the skull itself - who he was, what he was doing there, how he died – these things are as out of reach as hearing your own first cries, and yet standing there, I felt more connected to my past as a human than I ever have, or that, I suspect, I ever will. I understood myself as part of a greater evolutionary path, and I wondered where we might go from here.

Not far from the Oldupai Gorge is the Laetoli Trackway, older than the fossil record at Oldupai by more than 1.5 million years. The early man who lived at Laetoli did not make tools – his descendants had a million years to wait for that discovery.  He did walk upright though, and left behind a record of himself and two others that even in reproduced form, stopped me cold. Through a layer of freshly fallen ash the three hominids walked, leaving us, today, a 3.6 million year old stretch of footprints that look no different than the tracks I make in wet sand. The familiarity of the prints and the immensity of time from their creation until today shocked me. If those prints belong to an ancestor who was a million years from creating crude tools, where will my million year descendants be? One thousand years ago, man was building the great cities of the Roman empire, beautiful and shockingly advanced. Since then we’ve slipped backwards, shot forward… and in the past hundred years we’ve discovered flight, computers, space travel and terrible tools of destruction, but I don’t think we would bother to build a city as beautiful as Ephesus. Where do we go from here?

Our guide to the gorge fed us as many facts as he thought we could handle – he must get used to seeing the glazed eye look of overwhelmed hominids every day. I was fascinated by all of it and found myself wanting to be out there in the hot sun, digging for more evidence. Someone asked about Lucy – was she found here as well? No, he told us, she was found in Ethiopia, and then he relayed a bit of information that will always stick with me, I think because I find it somehow cosmically significant in a way that probably marks me as a little more than a little crazy. Lucy, that small, clearly human, clearly female ancestor of ours, was so named because when the first bit of her was uncovered, when her bones felt direct sun light for the first time in more than a million years, the Beatles were playing in the background. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Whoever she was, I like to imagine that Lucy would have liked that.

Just another beautiful day in paradise… part the second

Clearly, I was on an Africa high. The rhinos started it, and as we bounced out of the crater at top speed, running against the clock, an elephant ambling across the horizon escalated it. That first night, sitting on our balcony with the darkened crater below us, I got choked up just talking about how thrilled I was to be there. I think at that point I just gave in, relaxed, and let myself enjoy it… which is the only reason I can come up to explain my willingness for 6am Jambos for the coming week.

Our second day was spent entirely in the crater, and the Willie, Willie, Samson trio was much more relaxed about our timing.  We were allowed to stop and stare as long as we wanted, and we did. The light and air were fresh and clean in a way that I don’t know I’ve ever felt as we drove into the crater, and the early morning hours were good for hyena spotting. The other truck had one cross in front of them dragging a bone – we watched as one slunk warily to a stream, drank and waded in the water and then edged back up to the top of the bank. Once she satisfied herself that we were not a threat (the Rover hadn’t moved in nearly a quarter of an hour) she perked up and dog trotted away, crossing right in front of us.

Hyena and jackals were an unexpected pleasure. I hadn’t cared if I saw them, and I’d never really given them much thought, but I found them entertaining. Watching them interact with each other and with other animals (as we did that morning as two male lions halfheartedly guarded a kill) was fascinating. At the same time cowardly and vicious, they circle whatever kill has been made, waiting for their chance to take it over, snarling at each other and shrinking from the lions. The jackals were bolder, darting in for a mouthful of wildebeest whenever they thought the lions were sufficiently distracted. Smaller and therefore further down the food chain, they ran the gauntlet of both hyena and lion, but somehow they managed, their little dark backs looking like they wore an extra coat that might slip off as they ran. The hyenas arrived in a steady stream and formed a loose ring around the lions but never really made a move. They would inch closer and closer, the jackal weaving in and out of the line and tightening it, like sewing up a hole. As the hyenas moved in, the outer ring of vultures that had formed hopped forward as well. I was rooting for the hyenas, really – they had superior numbers and could have stolen the kill, but they never rallied together. Willie thought I was odd – not too many guests, he said, have a soft spot for the hyenas.

Our first cat turned out to be the one that would prove most elusive for the rest of the trip – the cheetah. There were two, a fair distance from the truck. Brothers, Willie said. They were alternating between napping and sitting up scanning for lunch, and we were lucky enough to pull in as the second one sat up and stayed long enough for photos. Pictures and tv don’t capture just how well the spots and waving grass blend together, and seeing them wasn’t easy. Not for the first time would I wonder at the exceptional eyesight and uncanny animal knowledge that allowed our guides to find us animals we could barely see after they had been all but circled for us. Those “find the hidden animal” drawings of childhood were much harder in real life.

A giant congregation of Land Rovers showed us the way to our next cat – at one point, there were 27 trucks jostling for space around the small pride of lions. Lazily stretched out on a rise were three females, two together and one a short distance away. As we watched (through my very clicky camera lens, I am afraid) a young male rose out of nowhere in the grass and strutted up to join the girls, surveying the lot of us in trucks as though we were fleas before he flopped down for a snooze. Being a lion, we would learn, is very hard work indeed, and with two notable exceptions I never saw one that didn’t look lazy and half asleep.

As we waited our turn and slowly moved in closer to the center of the trucks, I realized what all the commotion was about – under the back bumper of the central truck was another lioness, holding playgroup for three cubs. Spots still in evidence, they sprawled in the shade, looking for all the world like dirty, well loved stuffed animals. When the truck they were under turned over its engine to pull away, the indignation was clear on all four faces. Two flopped about, looking for shade in the lioness’ shadow and climbing on her lackadaisically. The third decided he was going to explore and fix this shade problem and set off with a purpose. I don’t know if he decided the shade was second rate or if he was a little too far from mom, but it wasn’t long before he was back and climbing on her like the others.

We were close to those lions. It was amazing to see them without a pane of glass or a moat between us, and even more amazing was their complete lack of concern at our presence. Most of the animals treated us as though we weren’t there. Only a few times did we interact in any way with the wildlife, and when we did, heartrates went up, at least on our side. These cats, though, just didn’t care. The zebras and tommys and wildebeest around the hippo pool did, and as we were checking out the hippos we watched the hooved creatures trying to decide if a drink of water was worth the risk. Since there were two more lions hiding in the grass on the other side of the pool, putting the feline count in an area about the size of a city block to ten, I can’t say I blame the ones that shied away.

The camouflage of the lions is, like that of the cheetah, a visual illusion of the highest order. That tawny fur is the same color as the dried grass and once they sink down, only the twitch of a dark edged ear gives them away. We often discussed that one could be five feet away and we would never know until it was too late. Sometimes we would be watching one about 20 feet from the truck and someone would gasp – in fact, there was one half the distance from us, completely hidden.

We saw so many things that day that I lost count. Besides the “big names” (the cheetah, the lion, the cape buffalo, the elephant, the rhino (yes, we saw rhino again, twice, thus marking us as the luckiest safari ever) we saw thousands of zebra, wildebeest, gazelles. I had no idea of the sheer volume of animals. Late in the afternoon we came upon the crater’s entire troop of baboons, clearly using the road to get somewhere en masse. We exercised our right of way and drove through and past them, then stopped, looking back. A stream of baboons was coming towards us, a river of motion. Females with babies holding on, sometimes one on the back and one on the stomach. Young males playing and fighting. The dust they kicked up was tremendous, and I kept expecting them to turn away, or leave, or stop, but like a small, hairy but determined army, they marched onward, veering off just at our Rover and heading into the brush. A few large males stopped to stare us down, letting us know in no uncertain terms that they were severely irritated with our presence. Looking at those baboons and making eye contact was eerie. They had a sentience that I didn’t see in any of the other animals and while I didn’t feel kinship, exactly, I certainly had a shiver of recognition. We drove away before all the baboons had passed, and in my head I imagine that they are still coming, an unending stream of almost humans, headed somewhere with a purpose.

The birds were impressive, too, and large. Ostriches, strutting along the horizon, contrasted sharply with the golden grasses and made a typical African silhouette. Crowned Cranes, sunbursts of gold on their heads, flew overhead in elegant formation, bodies so big I wondered how they stayed aloft. The Cory Bustard, the world’s largest and heaviest flying bird, stood for photos but refused to take flight and the soda lake housed a flock of flamingos that made a swipe of pink in the distance. The little brown hammerkopf was sunning near his monstrous nest (honestly, an ostrich would fit, if he could get up that high in the tree) and the Secretary Bird, so named, I assume, for its startling resemblance to a prim spinster secretary in a 1950’s detective movie stalked the tall grass. Birds… there I was in Africa, looking at birds. I couldn’t help it – I’d never seen anything like them.

That was the essence of it, really. I’d never seen anything like any of this. It was all new, all fresh. All my assumptions had been, in some way, false or colored. The things I thought I would want didn’t matter, and the things I was sure I didn’t care about – well, the birds took care of that.

As the clock crept towards one, we seemed to be heading to the shadier side of the crater. Passing a picnic area crammed with people eating box lunches we continued on into a small forest of acacias looking for “somewhere more private.” Rounding the corner we came upon a full table set with linens, a grill and buffet table, a bar … and an entire staff. Willie, who had been asking all morning if we were ok with just cookies for the day, was visibly pleased with his surprise, and we were all blown away. Pinch me seemed to be the prevailing sentiment, and a valid one. The yellow barked acacias formed a cathedral around our hollow, lacy foliage casting filtered light down to the surprisingly green ground. A thick stand of elephant grass, higher than Mike’s head by twice, backed the buffet table, and birds swooped in and out of the brush.  As we sat down, Scott remarked that he’d always thought that the formal meal in the bush idea was British and overblown, but now that it was happening to him, it seemed like it had a lot more merit. Halfway through only my first full day in the bush, I had to agree that a lot of things had more merit in the doing than I had ever expected in the dreaming.

Not for the faint of heart . . .

Following this link http://ponteuf.typepad.com/LionKillsGazelle.avi will take you to video shot from the top of our land rover.  In it, a lioness stalks and kills a gazelle.  The file is approximately 31MB, so it may take a while to load.  If you're web savvy, why not right-click and "save target as" to save the file to your computer?  This'll help with our monthly bandwidth allowance if you think you might watch it twice.

Just Another Beautiful Day in Paradise (the first in a series)

I have a confession to make – I’ve never really liked wildlife shows. All those beautifully filmed, movingly scored documentaries on the Serengeti? Frankly, I’ve always thought they were boring. Coffee table books filled to the brim with nose to nose animal photos? Yawn. The mystical, awed tone narrators use when describing the interconnectedness of all things, from the smallest ant to the largest elephant? I’ve always thought it was overblown.

Africa set me straight.

Lest I sound like I didn’t want to go on safari, or I wasn’t excited about the prospect, let me clear the record: I did, and I was. But it wasn’t, in my head, so much about the animals or the ecosystem as it was about the experience, the otherness, the far-from-homeness. I expected, of course, that the animals would be abundant, and magnificent, but I didn’t anticipate the way being there would make me feel. I didn’t know how small I was, or how fragile the world is, or how far from where it started our own corner of land has strayed. I didn’t know that safari, the Swahili word for journey, would be just that.

Day 1: The drive from Arusha to the Ngorongoro Crater is long and might have been monotonous but for the almost continuous stream of Masai in brightly colored robes herding animals across the Steppe. We rode (with the only other couple on the safari) in the Land Rover that, over the next week, we would spend far more time in that we would in bed. With seating for four, plus the driver and a front seat passenger, the Rover was dirty and a little frayed inside, and at the outset I wondered if that was a bad sign; once I had made one trip into the dust bowl of the crater, I never noticed the state of the truck again – it was almost always cleaner than I was. The back seats merge to form a bench, raised one step higher than the floor of the two bucket front seats, the windows open to let in more dust and the roof magically pops up, allowing all four adults room to stand in the back and an unimpeded view of the scenery.

Land Rover number two carried Bonnie and three other women, plus Willie Hombo (our head guide) and Samson, the driver. We had Willie K at the wheel, and we were running late. There was a game drive planned for the afternoon, but all vehicles need to be out of the crater by six or there are steep fines, so the check-in/eat lunch/gather equipment part of the day was rushed. The rim of the crater is at 7000 feet, the floor at 5000 – and the road drops, more or less, straight down. On one side is a track the Masai use to bring their cattle to the soda lake and on the other the trail the wildebeest follow during migration. The road (if you’re being generous) provides more bumps than most roller coasters, and we all flew off our seats on the way in and out.

As we descended, the first thing we saw was a herd of zebra and wildebeest, milling aimlessly. They were far enough away that even with my long lens they looked like specks, but I got excited. These were REAL wildebeest and zebra, and I wanted photos. Marvel & Scott, riding with us, laughed. They’d been on safari once, and they told me to wait, just wait. We’d get closer. Clickclickclikclick. Clearly, I wasn’t waiting. We stopped for the view and in a bush by the side of the truck was a pair of the most brilliant yellow and green birds. Bee eaters, Marvel said. I laughed that I didn’t care about the birds, and got a knowing smile in return. Just wait, she said. Just wait. In Africa, you may find that you care about the birds.

Game viewing feels something like a treasure hunt. You have some idea of what is out there, what you’d like to see – but there are no guarantees. Just because rhinos live in the crater doesn’t mean they’ll be near the road. Sure, there were lions sunning themselves yesterday, but today they could be out of sight. Tanzania (unlike Kenya) doesn’t allow off-roading, so all the vehicles have to stay on the established paths. Good for the animals, not always so good for the game viewing. It wasn’t long before we were all caught up in the excitement of spotting, everyone pointing out each new animal – and quite a few animal shaped rocks.

The wildebeest and zebra took no effort – we drove right through the group of them. Zebra have better eyesight and eat a different level of grass than the WBs and where you find one, you’ll almost always find the other. Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles were everywhere too. I had considered the antelope/gazelles “throw away” animals until I saw them in person, whole herds of perfect markings and swishing little tails. The warthog appeared and became an instant favorite; a sturdy little pig, almost officious in his movement, always acting with purpose. Their tails are like the radio antenna on the Rovers and are a barometer of mood. A concerned wartie keeps that tail up and stiff while he trots; as his alert level drops the tail sways more and more.

I think most safari-goers know about the Big Five – and know that expecting to see them all is often a pipe dream. The elephant, cape buffalo and lion are a pretty good bet, but the elusive leopard and quickly disappearing rhino are seen much more rarely. Going in, I knew my odds, and I was pulling for the leopard. If I could just see a leopard, I’d be happy. Rhinos? They were out there somewhere, I supposed. If I saw them, I saw them, if I didn’t, well, I’d seen them at the Wild Animal Park. Rhinos, then, were Africa’s first object lesson.

Crackling and talk on the radio indicate that some other guide has seen something of significance and a fast and wild ride to a new viewing spot is imminent, but on our first afternoon we hadn’t learned the ropes, so I was a bit indignant when we started rushing past the zebra and the pack of hyena lolling by the water about three city blocks from the truck. As we headed towards an open expanse of grass, we saw large dark shapes taking form. The closer we got, the bigger they got – finally the Rover rolled to a stop and, covered with dust and excitement, we all popped out the top of the truck. Browsing not more than a couple of hundred feet from the road were four black rhinos. Four. We were all awed. Even me. As I looked through my camera and clikclickclicked, I realized I was holding my breath. Were these rhinos real? Was I really this close to four of the very few rhinos left in the wild? I, who was vocal about not caring if I saw rhinos, felt the prickle of hot tears. There they were, living, breathing – and here I was.

I felt a fierce urge to protect those rhinos - keep them safe, tuck them in at night, feed them treats – but I knew that their appeal was their very wildness, the fact of them as independent, untamed, not-put-there-for-my-pleasure-at-all rhinos. Like Mike, I think I had expected safari to be a large, well stocked zoo. I would see the animals, we would tick them off the list and that would be all. The rhinos opened my mind and opened my heart. I couldn’t be a skeptic or a cynic in that Land Rover, even if I tried. Living in a civilization as ordered as ours, in a city as arranged as Los Angeles, I think I had forgotten a little about reality. Wild animals were wild … not the “Animal Actors” from the four convenient times a day show at Universal Studios. None of this was for me, it would happen with or without my presence. Understanding that was, somehow, the lifting of a burden, and a shift from thinking about myself in the situation to just experiencing things as they happened. I was, for the first time in ages, living in the moment, it was wonderful – and I had the rhinos to thank.

MS: Another day, another Ocean

Sitting here in Captain Ali’s pub on the shores of the Indian Ocean at Dar-Es-Salaam, I sit contemplating the end of my safari.  Was it my first choice of places to go/things to see?  Not really.  I went into it thinking it would be cool for the first day or two, then be like a really long trip to the zoo without ice cream.  I was right about the ice cream.  All the rest; dead wrong.

Something you don’t see in America is the food chain from top to bottom.  When was the last time you took the trash out at 11:30 on a weeknight and felt the cold fear that a roaming bear would take a swipe at you?  Aside from being chased by a skunk once, for me the answer is never.  Not so in Africa.  Our camp was in the Serengeti, a collection of luxury tents around a central dining tent: Plush by anyone’s standards of camping.  On this particular morning, we had been woken (Jambo = Hello in Swahili) and were up for a balloon ride across a portion of the Serengeti park.  The day before had been quite momentous – a female lion had used our land rover as strategic cover and ambushed a gazelle about 20 feet away, breaking its neck and eating it with little time lost.  It was a moving experience to say the least – to see the lack of real effort on the part of the lion was astonishing.  Most lions I saw had a harder time keeping cool in the noon sun than this one had killing a gazelle.  Anyway, back to the 4AM Jambo: as we walked single file in the dark to the waiting land rover, I realized how simply a lion could have bolted from the brush and incapacitated me.  In America, the top predators have been killed or at least know to stay away from humans.  Not so in the Serengeti. 

Later that afternoon, the rains came.  From the ground came ants, followed by other insects and rodents feeding upon the ants.  I looked out upon the valley in front of me and realized that my non-permanent camp would be gone in a few more months and things would play out here as they had for the last 5000 years or so.  I haven’t been in a place so unspoilt by humans in quite a long time.  If for nothing else, Safari gives you perspective that’s hard to find anywhere else.  For me, that was a pretty magical sequence of events.  Having visited Oldupai gorge a day earlier only reinforced the fact the we’d been here a long time and the majority of humanity’s accomplishments and changes to the Earth have only been around for a relatively short time.  Later we were among a forest of Baobob trees with average ages of about 4000 years.  It’s so rare to see a landscape that has been untouched by progress, fire, flood or catastrophe for so long.

The safari lasted 10 days – 2 in the Ngorongoro Crater, 3 in the Serengeti, 2 in the Selous (Southern Tanzania) and 3 in Ruaha (also South) and it was an amazing experience.  To go on Safari represents a significant chunk of change, but it is quite an amazing experience and one that I am extremely glad to have had.

With Apologies to Paul Simon

Nights in Africa are different. The sky is darker, the air softer and danger (not a common companion for us at home) far more real. The further we’ve come from Arusha the more intense have the nights become, as though moving south has removed us even more from civilization, though what passes for it nearer the equator is tenuous at best.

Our very first night was balmy and disorienting, but the greatest danger we faced was altitude – at 5000 feet, Arusha isn’t exactly LA, and we were fish out of water. Safe in our little stone house we pulled the mosquito netting tight and slept.

The Serena Lodge at the Crater felt like a hotel – a resort hotel with jaw dropping views, yes, but still a hotel. The room faced the crater, but the walkways felt civilized. The most exotic thing we encountered was a shy little dik dik in the brush below our balcony. I walked back and forth to reception alone, and while I loved the feel of the air (brisk and clean at 7000 feet) and the rich, slightly spicy scents, I never felt even a shiver of fear.

The Serengeti Camp changed things. We were outside the legal park boundaries, but the lines are drawn by men on a map and mean nothing to the animals, who go where they choose. Our tents were double ply – an outer pavilion over an inner tent – but the sense that anything could come charging in was real. Don’t wander from camp at night. Don’t stray off the path. Maintain normal noise and conversation when walking and definitely don’t leave shoes outside the tent – hyenas are thieves.

Suddenly, we were in the wild. It smelled different, it looked different and most of all it sounded different. Sitting at the fire pit, we heard lions roar. Since Willie had performed, with great drama and thumping of chest, a preview of the lion song over dinner, we knew what we were hearing. Half the group immediately retreated to their tents. All through the night, the mournful cry of the wildebeest lulled us to sleep, punctuated by the calling and laughing of hyenas on the hunt. Snorting impala move through the area and sometime around four the first night, before the morning birds had begun to sing, something killed something else.

Another night, I heard the distinct sounds of hyenas around our tent, looking, perhaps, for a nice pair of Tevas. Snug in our bed, tent flaps zipped but curtains cautiously open, we felt secure – as long as the rumors that predators have developed prehensile thumbs or a cooperative relationship with monkeys proved false. Rain tapped the roof, sunsets glowed vibrant purple and the savannah went on about its nightly business, oblivious to our presence.

Here in the Selous, things have intensified again. The camp is set on the edge of a lake within the reserve – no boundaries, drawn or fenced, are between us and the wildlife. Tents are on raised platforms with cement floors and thatched roofs and screen sides; when the wind blows, the long creamy muslin curtains billow. There are two decks, lake views and bats between the tent and the thatch.

Here, we don’t walk alone, even during the day, and at night, no wandering at all. The trek to the bar for g&ts and back from the restaurant after our nightly feeding is escorted by ascari – night watchmen. Where the rangers in the Serengeti carried a bow and arrows as they patrolled our camp, the ascari carry guns. Before we step off our porch, we call one and stay safely under the eaves till he arrives. The tents come equipped with whistles to be blown if “something happens” – a “something” I take to mean “a large animal invades the tent.” Large animals are everywhere – we saw an elephant eating the palm tree not 30 feet from our bed this morning, and one neighbor was spied upon in his outdoor shower by a giraffe.

Tembo and Twiga notwithstanding, the hippos are the most noticeable neighbor. They leave the water at night to feed, calling to each other in an unmistakably demanding snort. I can hear one now, chomping through the underbrush. All these animals (and more we haven’t seen) wander through our camp at will, so I’m grateful of the impassive and steady shoulders of the Masai ascari walking in front of me after dinner. Flashlight in hand, he scans the path as we walk and though we can hear hyenas calling to hunt and oomphing hippos, we see nothing more threatening than twiga poop and arrive home without incident.

As I walk, I look up, at a sky so dark and so thickly filled with stars that I can’t come up with a better description that that tired saw of diamonds poured over back velvet. The constellations are so different that I could be looking at some other planet’s night sky, and I can only guess at the stories man has assigned these celestial patters in his search for larger meaning. Running across the blackness is a smudge of white – not cloud, not distinct form… now I understand why we call it the Milky Way.

All stargazing is looking into the past – but I’m seeing not just the history of the stars themsleves. The sky used to look like this to humans all around our small planet - the Milky Way visible, the stars bright and so plentiful that it must have been impossible not to stare. No wonder man made up stories, prayed to the gods and dreamed of flight. The Masai have always walked under these stars, the explorers navigated by them and ancient astronomers puzzled them – and every night, here, they rise above the shadowed figure of the ascari, walking us to safety under African skies.

Selous Afternoon

The cicadas whine, a shrill buzzing that fluctuates but never ceases, a sound that maintains it pitch high above the lower murmur of the breeze in the palm fronds. A water bird calls and something in the brush answers with a chirp. A cluster of impala cross the green swath nervously, and on the far bank a hippo grazes, a solid black form beneath the silhouette of a palm tree. In the lake the hippo is a graceful shape, rising and falling against the water level with nary a ripple - on land he is just a shape, and a solid one at that, not to be bothered.

The air is warm and the breeze soft. I’m sitting at the writing desk on our raised back porch, a screened and curtained tent at my back and a leather blotter under my journal. Before me unfolds a tiny bit of Africa – dried earth scattered with drier bushes gradually transforming into a delicate green that bleeds into the edge of an every shrinking lake. This is dry season, so the lake and its creatures are further away than they might be at another month. I couldn’t get much closer to Hemingway if I tried, though a gin and tonic might help my cause.

Regardless, I can’t write – I’m distracted. There are too many bird noises. I hear the wasps buzzing past, see the small bird picking among the tree an elephant knocked over. I keep glancing at the spot, 50 yards away, where the troop of vervet monkeys played this morning. The palm tree that was feeding an elephant when I woke at dawn keeps rattling appealingly. Is the elephant back? I’m keeping an eye on that hippo, too, lest he move or do some other trick while I’m not watching. There is evidence of giraffe scattered all over the ground, so I have to check on the acacia tree occasionally – that rustle could be one stopping by to snack, delicately stripping leaves with that long, dark tongue.

I have to be down at the dock by 3:30 for a float on the Sulawesi Lake, to eye the hippos and be eyed by the crocs, but I could sit here forever and listen to birdsong and smell the burned grass. Hemingway had it right, coming to Africa. I don’t think much has changed here since then – I had a ‘proper’ bush breakfast served by men in turbans just the other day – but I also don’t think he got much writing done. The natural world here is too distracting; the birds call too loudly. The company of intimate strangers beckons over the clink of ice in a gin and tonic, and the story, it goes unwritten.

The Biggest Balloon in the World

In the Serengeti, we fall asleep to crickets and wake to birdsong. Light isn’t the determining factor; even in soft gray, the birds are singing. When our four am Jambo! rang through the tent walls, those crickets were still chirping, and even the prospect of hot tea on the porch and an adventure wasn’t enough to erase the sound of the crickets.

Bundled into more clothes than we really needed, we bounced along in the safari equivalent of a troop transport (large, boxy, and damn stuffy in back), headed for somewhere within the Serengeti proper. Out of the darkness loomed animal shadows – a hippo reared up and over a bank trotting towards more grazing before the sun turned him into a pumpkin. Three leonine shapes wove through the grass – headed, perhaps, towards the glowing eyes surrounded by a great mane that we flashed past next? Muffled forms of gazelle huddled together warily. By the time the first fingers of dawn were tickling the horizon, we were deep into the park, turning into an open field and jostling, for the first time, off the road.

The increasing light showed large soft forms lying on the plain; my ears heard birds and agreed with my eyes that morning was coming. Out of the truck we were herded, and over towards those giant billowing shapes. At the small end, a basket, neatly divided into 8 compartments and a middle section filled with tanks and equipment. Our dapper and accent heavy captain separated us into groups and assigned each twosome a cubbyhole, into which we would need to crawl in and lie down – the basket was on its side like some low tech space capsule, and we’d need to hold on for take off. Paired with someone from our safari, I reassured her that she shouldn’t worry, that I trusted the Germans. When my knees go to jello minutes later, she kindly returned the sentiment.

We were told to stand back while the fans were moved in to really fill the balloons, and as we waited the sun made even more progress. By the time we were snug in our basket it was light enough to see my white knuckles as I clenched the rope handles. A few short blasts of heat and we were right side up and allowed to stand, then silently, effortlessly, we started to rise. As the ground began to fall away so did my fear, replaced with euphoria. So this was flying!

We skimmed quite close to the ground for a while, spotting gazelle as they bounded away from us. Following the other balloon, watching it was like watching a mirror – green and khaki stripes floating above a green and khaki landscape, growing every brighter in the intensifying morning light. Finally we started to rise, the silence interrupted by the whoosh of the burners pushing hot gas into our balloon. Over a hippo pool, their dark backs glistening in the sun. Along a river, lush with (incongruously, to me anyway) palm trees. Animals drinking at the bank looked up nervously. The hippos, never nervous, splashed a bit, showing us more features than the blob of ears and eyes we had seen from the road. The sun rose, we rose and I imagine I can see the curve of the Earth as it spreads out below us. The vastness of the Serengeti becomes real, a map made incarnate.

Further along, we sailed over a twiga, who, having none of us, flipped up his tail and ran. Two hippos rushed along a tributary below, churning up the water as they careened along. Over breakfast the head pilot will tell us that hippos used to chase the balloons, but at the time we think these two are nothing but comical. Vervet monkeys sit at the very tip top of the acacia tress, and they watched us pass with interest – how did those larger monkeys manage to get so high? An elephant, rarely threatened by anything, decided that two large balloons, clearly bigger than him, were a challenge and a problem. Ears extended, he backed away as we floated over, then trumpeted his challenge. Even from such height, we are impressed.

The landing, though smooth as silk, came way too soon, and before we knew it we were toasting our successful flight with champagne and headed to a bush breakfast, all linen and china and copious amounts of mimosas. The stillness and awe of the flight took time to shake off – like a dream, it had an intangible beauty, a soft quality that no matter how closely I tried to hold it, I knew would slip away and become more of a memory of feeling than of reality.

The representatives of the balloon company who had come to camp the night before to prep up and have us sign the all important waivers had boasted that we were flying in the biggest balloon in the world. Truth in advertising is an elusive beast, but the size of the balloon wouldn’t have mattered - we had slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of god.

A Rich Man has more than 50 Cows

Landing at the Kilimanjaro Airport last night was unique – as we began our descent, we looked out the window and saw … nothing. There was a glow of lights from a few small settlements and the long orange line of runway lights. The only similarity I could come up with was landing on an island at night – the patch of light is where you know the plane is headed, and all else is inky black. It was so dark that when the plane touched down none of us were expecting it; without the familiar glow of other runways, hangars, freeways and street lights we couldn’t tell how close we were to the ground.

The drive from the airport to the lodge was dark and foreign. Though we’re used to right hand drive at this point, we weren’t expecting Samson’s disregard for lanes. Nor were we used to seeing the tiny villages we passed through – a cluster of buildings, one pump for gas, maybe a fluorescent light in the middle of a vacant lot. People were walking along the road, bicycling on the shoulder… the cars seemed to belong less than anything else we saw. I know the year, and I know that people here have, in many cases, cell phones and televisions, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had time traveled to a completely different age.

Our drive this morning from the lodge to the Ngorongoro Crater had much the same feeling of dislocation. We crossed the Masai Steppe and saw many young Masai herding their family animals to grazing and water. Their vivid robes stand out against the bleached yellow and ochre of Africa in the dry season. The goats (tails up) and sheep (tails down) blend in with the landscape – the Masai exist on top of it, like someone has photoshopped them in. They are so bright, so exotic (to this western eye, anyway) that they seem unreal, a prop. As though people who visit Africa are supposed to see them, so obliging men dress in robes wrapped around the shoulders, carry clubs and knives and stand by the side of the road for the day, returning at night to their modern existence.

Maybe that’s the thing I’ve not yet been able to get my head around. This is their existence. If it is modern, it is only so in the sense that it coexists with us, in the same year. These people are still living the same way they always have, and by always, I really do mean always - as long as there have been a people who named themselves Masai. The boys begin herding the animals at 5 or 6. The girls begin learning to balance heavy loads on their heads at the same age. The couple we rode with today was telling us that they had spoken to a Masai guide whose parents had told him that airplanes came out of the sky from the gods, and were somehow (incongruously) related to dogs and cats. This is an existence where truly, no tongue in cheek, a rich man is one with more than 50 cows.

MS: New Adventures in Bad Steak

**keep an eye out for the special "Maver Speaks" posts - this is the first in a series**

We visited a chain restaurant this evening; a South African chain – the Spur Steak Ranch. Billed as “South Africa’s Family Restaurant,” each Spur is independently owned, operated and named. All share the Indian logo and the surname “Spur Steak Ranch,” but they differ in first names – ours was the “Montego Spur Steak Ranch.” Most names have something to do with a foreign conception of the American West – Santa Ana, Colorado, etc. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but Montego sounds awfully Jamaican. That aside, the restaurant is decorated as if by someone who has never been to the United States, nor has seen a Western. Perhaps they read about one somewhere and proceeded to mix metaphors with abandon – imagine a Chili’s or TGI Fridays decorated by someone who had the restaurant decoration scheme passed down through generations of oral tradition. At the spur this adds up to cowskin booths below pueblo walls, serapes and cleverly designed dreamcatcher specials boards (featuring a Plains Indian in front of totem poles) suspended from the ceiling. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a spaghetti western – a foreign perspective on an American theme.

As the Indian, Mexican and Cowboy themes clashed for dominance, our waiter arrived with our faux wooden menu boards promising juicy, tender AAA steaks served with a variety of sauces, including the nefarious “Monkey Gland” sauce, which seems to be a real customer favorite. One of the novelties of the South African steak house is the hot stone method of serving your steak. I had read veiled references to it in the in-flight magazines between Joberg and Cape Town and was itching to try it. I added a side of Monkey Gland for character and awaited the arrival of my sirloin. The MG sauce preceded my hot stone sirloin by several minutes, so I subjected it to some rudimentary taste tests. It contained neither monkeys nor their glands; rather it was a semi spicy, thick BBQ sauce with bits of onion floating in it.

Then the hot stone was set before me. Imagine a rectangle – half of which is an exceedingly hot stone, the other half made up of a completely raw steak next to some fries and rings. Chuckling for a moment at the fuss of producing a raw steak on the same tray it was to be eaten on (touching the already cooked fries) would cause at home, I oiled up the stone and threw the steak on it. The stone was hot – by the speed the steak cooked, I’d estimate around 600 degrees F. But, since I was in charge of cooking the steak, it came off perfectly rare! Now this, I could get used to – no more overdone steak! Of course, the ability to ruin the steak is entirely in the customer’s hands. It’s kind of like buying a dry aged steak at Whole Foods in Pasadena – you can pay the same price per pound as you would at Morton’s for a dry aged steak, but you get the pleasure of overcooking the steak without the option of sending it back. Brilliant!

The steak itself? Well, a quick word on prices. Burgers cost about $6, the steaks were about $2 more. With that in mind, my expectations were met. This wasn’t prime beef, but it had great flavor and for the price, was a bargain. Then the wonderful strangeness of the place kicked back in to overdrive. Many tables away a birthday was being celebrated. Ever been to a restaurant where all the waiters gather to perform a birthday song? Think, “I don’t know, but I’ve been told . . . someone here is getting old. Sound off . . .” Now, imagine it being sung out by native Africans. It might have been the malaria meds, but for me the incongruity is hilarious. As I walked past “Salad Valley” on the way out, I spotted a small casket on a hand cranked rotisserie. I believe this is to make sure Iron Eyes Cody turns over in his grave as you leave.