Get your safari on

Last week Rose and I returned from a 10-day trip to Tanzania. It’s taken me some time to get back into the flow of things here in Kigali, catch up on email, and generally readjust to a life that doesn’t involve sleeping five feet from the beach. In short, the trip was amazing. We spent three days on safari in Tanzania’s Northern Circuit, took a 9-hour bus ride across the country to Dar Es Salaam, ferried over to Zanzibar, and then hung out on the beach for seven days. As we like to say in Rwanda: nice time.

After catching an early morning flight from Kigali, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro on our descent into Tanzania but the cloud cover was too thick. The safari company’s Land Cruiser was there to pick us up when we landed at Kilimanjaro (the driver was even holding a nice hand-written sign that said “Nicholas Cain X 2”). Our first stop was the city of Arusha, where we met up with our friend Ben Lawless, a fellow former paralegal from DC who was wrapping up a 4-month-long pre-law school jaunt around the world. After collecting Ben we were on our way to our first safari stop: Lake Maynara National Park. Over the next two and a half days, we meandered through Lake Maynara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire National Park. Elephants plodded, rhinos lumbered, lions dozed, giraffes postured, and hippos harrumphed as we bounced along in our car, amazed at how close we were able to get to the animals. The animals were always framed by stunning vistas of the surrounding landscape. The crater—savannah on the floor, jungle-like near the rim—was particularly special, and it was where I had most of my “I feel really lucky to be doing this” moments. Our driver usually turned off the engine when we approached a group of animals, and when other vehicles weren’t around, the only sound would be the breeze and an elephant swinging its trunk, a wildebeest grunting, or a zebra clopping along in the grass.

In addition to the obvious perk of seeing wildlife in their natural habitat, being “on safari” provides some interesting people watching, too As often happens when you take Westerners out of their natural habitat, our fellow safari goers wore some absolutely outrageous clothing. Apparently, when people come to Africa to look at animals from the comfort of a car, in parks where you aren’t allowed to get out of the vehicle, they think they have to stop at REI and buy mounds of khaki vests, ridiculous hats, and convertible pants. When we saw one especially colonial troupe, Ben said it looked like the people raided the basement of the British Field Museum to come up with their outfits. Probably not too far from the truth. Not surprisingly, there was a direct correlation between the absurdity of a group’s get-up and the luxuriousness of their safari vehicle. Pay more for your trip, look more like a fool.

Because the crater and the rest of Tanzania’s Northern Circuit are such popular destinations, there were lots of other people driving around with their heads sticking out of their cars. In the crater especially, each time we stopped in front of a rare animal, we would inevitably joined by as many as seven other vehicles. This didn’t bother me nearly as much as I expected it to and I spent a lot of time pondering the sociological implications of the whole safari experience. We came across families, groups of students, older folks, almost all of them white (I only saw one African family in a safari vehicle during the whole three-day trip). Some people spent most of their time with their camera in front of their faces, while others chatted away loudly every time their car stopped in front of a group of animals, tainting otherwise peaceful moments of immersion in the natural world. Allusions to Thoreau aside, the people watching was often as interesting as the animals themselves.

Zanzibar deserves its own blog entry, and I hope I’ll have time to get to that soon.

You can see all of the pictures from the trip on my Picasa page. I made a separate album for the Tanzania trip.