There and Back Again: the World Travels of a Watson Fellow: Safari!! Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara & Tarangire National Park

August 14-16, 2013: Safari

At first, I wasn’t planning on doing a safari while in Tanzania because it seemed like a huge expense and totally irrelevant to my research. I was also having a tough time finding a group to join and considered scrapping the idea all together. Miraculously, things worked out and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. We went to Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire National Parks. We saw lions, giraffes, baboons, zebras, gazelle, impalas, warthogs, water buffaloes, wildebeest, ostrich, dik dik, hippos, elephants, one rhino, mongoose, jackals, hyenas, and flamingos. The only animals I felt like we missed out on were leopards and cheetahs, both of which are extremely difficult to spot. Some general safari reflections: nothing like being jarred out of your post-lunch food coma by an elephant spotting. Baboons are the most entertaining to watch; they’re ugly, loud, and confrontational and like a train wreck – you can’t look away. Lions are lazy and really like oversized house cats: napping, yawning and licking themselves incessantly, basking in the sunshine. They are also kind of overrated. A lot of animals are unattractive (e.g. baboon butts, all wildebeest look old with shaggy gray beards, and the rhino looks like a dinosaur). Hippos are pretty elusive creatures when they’re just hanging out under water and the rhinoceros was amazing but too far away to really see. Impalas and gazelle remind me deer back home and the dik dik is the smallest antelope in the world (I think my cats back home, Hamilton and Oliver, are larger than the dik dik). Overall, safari was an incredible experience. The landscape didn’t look real – like driving down into Ngorongoro Crater, it was as if someone had painted the scenery. The crater really is as magical as all the guidebooks and people say. However, it was also the moment of extreme in authenticity. Part of the safari package (in addition to transportation, all meals, housing etc.) was a Maasai cultural visit/boma tour, which proved to be awkward and uncomfortable. It felt exploitative, inauthentic, and forced. Each safari vehicle pays $50 (or is it $50 an individual? People kept telling me different things) to watch them dance and give us a tour. The girls in my group (including myself) even danced with them (When in Tanzania, right?), which was awkward as they placed their necklaces over our heads and we feebly attempted to raise our shoulders and jump in unison with them. We toured a home, saw the cattle pens, and visited a kindergarten school. They tried to sell us jewelry (for 4x the amount I paid when I stayed in Longido). It felt like a zoo, like we were watching animals at Sea World put on a show. We couldn’t possibly have formed relationships with these people in the short time we visited, yet they showed us their home, such an intimate part of their lives. Then we felt guilted into donating to the school and buying the jewelry, which I firmly said no to. I much preferred visiting the Maasai village outside Longido where I met the women and men. I learned their names, helped prepare dinner in the boma kitchen, and learned how to milk the goats and cows. I didn’t mind buying jewelry from them because I Felt like I had come to know them. In contrast, this safari experience was so contrived. They put on this show any time a car of tourists comes (probably upwards of 10 times a day) and it seems like they keep the cattle penned instead of grazing them and the children pretending to learn by singing songs and counting in English in the school house instead of actually attending school. It makes me question the ethics of cultural tourism, its efficacy, and genuineness. Otherwise, safari has been amazing. The animals we’ve seen are straight out of the Lion King and I just wish my family could be here to experience it. It feels like the type of once in a lifetime occurrence that one should take in and share with those closest to them. Instead, I am with a group of total strangers – but an awesome group, thankfully. We are almost perfect evenly spaced out in age: a 20 year old Chinese girl, Jane, from Malaysia who is studying culinary arts and is in Tanzania for a month on holiday, myself (22), a 25 year old Danish girl, Viktoria, who is studying development is in interning at a consulting firm in Nairobi, a 26 year old American, Kerry, who is a masters student in linguistics and education (enrolled in a university in Beijing) and doing her fieldwork/research in Maasai schools in Tanzania, and another Danish guy, Jenz (visiting Viktoria), who has an interest in cradle-to-cradle/circular economy and will start his job in marketing in September. I was a bit nervous that I would be with either all old people or couples (I’m not sure which is worse, probably the latter). But this couldn’t have worked out better - we are an eclectic group to say the least, but we’re also all young, single, and so excited to be on Safari in Tanzania. On our first day, Lake Manyara was okay. We saw an elephant right away but the park is very small and also wooded In parts, so we didn’t see nearly as many animals as we did in the crater. However, we did see the sulfuric hot springs, which formed as a result of the Great Rift Valley. And the second day in Ngorogoro Crater was magical. It was almost as entertaining, however, to watch the mass of land cruisers follow each other around like an army of ants, congregating at different sites – where lions lounged in the tall grass or where the rhino wandered in the distance. And we would all stop and look on together – a mass of tourists (maybe forty vehicles crowded at one site) with foot long camera lenses and high tech binoculars. It was an absurd and slightly alarming sight, but strangely calming once all the driver guides cut the engines. Human beings all looking on together at the same natural wonder, trying desperately to capture this fleeting moment and all of its wild glory in a photograph. But nothing, not HD video, could accurately embody the rawness and pulse of life present in the crater. It’s one of those things where you have to be there to fully comprehend its awesomeness. And it’s also interesting as one form of life simultaneously reveres and subjugates another, one deemed inferior in some way. I felt this with both the animals and the Maasai. How much the villagers were exoticized, as they put on a show of “tribal barbarism” as some might perceive it, those having had no background knowledge of the pastoral lifestyle or Maasai customs. However, we’re all human beings striving for the same goals in life: good health, happiness, prosperity etc. And although these take on different forms and we exist in seemingly disparate spheres, we are not of separate species, as we all belong to the human race. Instead of humanizing the Maasai, the village visit animalized them. And the problem of poaching is sickening. One night over dinner, our group discussed at length the current state of poaching affairs in Tanzania. According to our driver/guide Paul, poachers operate systematically like the mafia. Some park rangers and government officials are also in on the corruption and take bribes, looking the other way. Poachers can make something like $800,000 for one rhino horn, which mostly gets shipped off to Asia on the black market where people consume them as medicine or believe them to be an aphrodisiac (hello Viagra?!). I know I am no position to judge other cultures and demean their belief systems but the thought of someone beheading a rhino and stealing the horn and skull, only to leave behind a still twitching carcass makes me sick. It’s evil, money driven, and corrupt. I also don’t know how much I Agree with hunting exotic animals in general (e.g. legally with a permit). The thought of rich foreigners paying $50,000 + to come in and kill often rare game for recreation feels wrong to me. And I am not sure if the issue of poaching is solvable until the issue of corruption is corrected for, which seems a long way off, since it’s so culturally engrained here at almost every level of society.