I stayed in Kitundu Guesthouse in Arusha, on the road with the quiet shop with the cold-beer-and-Brexit. In the morning I was ready and waiting outside at 8.30am for 9.00am, as instructed by my safari tour operator. I then naturally spent thirty minutes berating myself for having been so naively conned out of $820 by a non-existent company, and I knew that when I’d go round to the little office opposite the bus station shortly, instead of the walls being covered with certificates of recognition from the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators and photos of happy customers with the employees as I had seen yesterday, it would be an empty shell with a single piece of paper slowly fluttering to the floor, like something out of Hustle. I paced up and down fuelling my paranoia, and at 9.00am exactly, my safari jeep rolled up outside the guesthouse. It seems I have yet to adopt the problem-free philosophy of Hakuna Matata.
I had joined a group to minimise the costs and maximise the craic, and had been put together with a group of Spaniards who had all come down from Mount Kilimanjaro two days ago. They had climbed Kili in five days instead of the planned six, because their airline had overbooked their flight and they’d lost a day in Madrid. They were all exhausted from their exertions but looking forward to the animals as much as I was. We stopped at a little shop on the way out of town to pick up last-minute supplies, and having been told that would be no beer opportunities in the campsites, I duly stocked up on two six-packs of trusty Kili beer, which rolled and bounced around the floor of the jeep getting warm and frothy, much like myself, until we arrived at the campsite that night where I discovered that there was a well-stocked bar. Still, better safe than beerless, and the next campsite might not be so well-provisioned.
Our destination that morning was Tarangire National Park, renowned for its population of around 3,000 elephants, which was the animal I was most excited about. I was not disappointed. But the first thing we saw, about five minutes into the park, was a lioness' lunch. Upon closer inspection the meal had once been a zebra, although the remaining members of the herd seemed more concerned that their route to water was threatened than the fact that one of their cousins was being skinned and tartared.
There were impala, gazelles, and zebra everywhere, and I was amazed by how much more beautiful they all were in the flesh. The zebra were often accompanied by wildebeest, whose excellent sense of smell complements the zebras’ ability to hear predators. There was a family of snouty warthogs by a vivid green pond, who must have farted unexpectedly because all the wildebeest pronked out of the water together in fright. Lunch was shared with a naughty vervet monkey who audaciously stole my banana skin and then sat flashing his bright blue balls at me. I later read that the vervet monkey's genitals turn blue when aroused so perhaps the thievery was a simian form of flirting.
We drove on past some long-legged giraffes and herons wading in a small stream, and then we arrived at the almost dried-up river bed to see a large herd of elephants walking slowly upstream. There were many baby elephants, a few middling elephants, and lots of big elephants. They walked very slowly and the whole herd must have taken about forty minutes to pass us and leave the river bed to go into the forest. I didn’t think anything could top that but when we returned past the zebra tartare to leave the park, the lionesses were sprawled upside down and snoring inelegantly in the shade, their bellies grotesquely rotund and the remainder of their meal picked down to a single cartoonish ribcage.
Our stop that night was Panorama Campsite, and it was far from basic. My tent had already been set up for me, and was housed in a little wooden hut overlooking Lake Manyara, known for its flamingoes and our destination at the end of our safari. Inside the tent was a small wooden cot with a mattress, and outside there was not only a bar and a mess, but also wifi and much-needed electricity sockets. After our cook, Athumani, had served us an excellent three-course dinner of soup, fish satay and rice, and fruits - no zebra - a local group of musicians and acrobats performed traditional Tanzanian dance.
One more adventure awaited: my evening shower. I had been warned by the previous occupant that her experience had been “difficult”, and I understood what she meant when I turned the handle and nothing came out of the shower head. Leaning down, I found a tap about thirty centimetres from the ground. Feeling as enormous as Alice after she consumed the Eat Me cake, I sumo-squatted a foot from the ground, inwardly thanked my gym trainer for all the reps of lunges and squats, and performed a series of acrobatic ablutions that in Rio would have scored me a solid 10 points for difficulty and at least 8.5 for execution. When I turned off the floor tap and straightened out my spine, the shower head suddenly burst into life and let forth water in a great ironic stream.
______
More on Tanzania (chronological order):
Arusha, Tanzania - my first visit to sub-Saharan Africa
Tarangire National Park - meeting the elephants
The Spanish Sausage Plague - disaster strikes the Spaniards
Sunrise in the Serengeti - the plague lifts
Ngorongoro Crater and the elusive rhino - we look for rhinos and stare hard at a rock
Lake Manyara and the Last Supper - a little Swahili goes a long way
A goddamn flight on a goddamn plane - karma strikes a rude man as I head to Istanbul
I had joined a group to minimise the costs and maximise the craic, and had been put together with a group of Spaniards who had all come down from Mount Kilimanjaro two days ago. They had climbed Kili in five days instead of the planned six, because their airline had overbooked their flight and they’d lost a day in Madrid. They were all exhausted from their exertions but looking forward to the animals as much as I was. We stopped at a little shop on the way out of town to pick up last-minute supplies, and having been told that would be no beer opportunities in the campsites, I duly stocked up on two six-packs of trusty Kili beer, which rolled and bounced around the floor of the jeep getting warm and frothy, much like myself, until we arrived at the campsite that night where I discovered that there was a well-stocked bar. Still, better safe than beerless, and the next campsite might not be so well-provisioned.
Our destination that morning was Tarangire National Park, renowned for its population of around 3,000 elephants, which was the animal I was most excited about. I was not disappointed. But the first thing we saw, about five minutes into the park, was a lioness' lunch. Upon closer inspection the meal had once been a zebra, although the remaining members of the herd seemed more concerned that their route to water was threatened than the fact that one of their cousins was being skinned and tartared.
There were impala, gazelles, and zebra everywhere, and I was amazed by how much more beautiful they all were in the flesh. The zebra were often accompanied by wildebeest, whose excellent sense of smell complements the zebras’ ability to hear predators. There was a family of snouty warthogs by a vivid green pond, who must have farted unexpectedly because all the wildebeest pronked out of the water together in fright. Lunch was shared with a naughty vervet monkey who audaciously stole my banana skin and then sat flashing his bright blue balls at me. I later read that the vervet monkey's genitals turn blue when aroused so perhaps the thievery was a simian form of flirting.
We drove on past some long-legged giraffes and herons wading in a small stream, and then we arrived at the almost dried-up river bed to see a large herd of elephants walking slowly upstream. There were many baby elephants, a few middling elephants, and lots of big elephants. They walked very slowly and the whole herd must have taken about forty minutes to pass us and leave the river bed to go into the forest. I didn’t think anything could top that but when we returned past the zebra tartare to leave the park, the lionesses were sprawled upside down and snoring inelegantly in the shade, their bellies grotesquely rotund and the remainder of their meal picked down to a single cartoonish ribcage.
Our stop that night was Panorama Campsite, and it was far from basic. My tent had already been set up for me, and was housed in a little wooden hut overlooking Lake Manyara, known for its flamingoes and our destination at the end of our safari. Inside the tent was a small wooden cot with a mattress, and outside there was not only a bar and a mess, but also wifi and much-needed electricity sockets. After our cook, Athumani, had served us an excellent three-course dinner of soup, fish satay and rice, and fruits - no zebra - a local group of musicians and acrobats performed traditional Tanzanian dance.
One more adventure awaited: my evening shower. I had been warned by the previous occupant that her experience had been “difficult”, and I understood what she meant when I turned the handle and nothing came out of the shower head. Leaning down, I found a tap about thirty centimetres from the ground. Feeling as enormous as Alice after she consumed the Eat Me cake, I sumo-squatted a foot from the ground, inwardly thanked my gym trainer for all the reps of lunges and squats, and performed a series of acrobatic ablutions that in Rio would have scored me a solid 10 points for difficulty and at least 8.5 for execution. When I turned off the floor tap and straightened out my spine, the shower head suddenly burst into life and let forth water in a great ironic stream.
______
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More on Tanzania (chronological order):
Arusha, Tanzania - my first visit to sub-Saharan Africa
Tarangire National Park - meeting the elephants
The Spanish Sausage Plague - disaster strikes the Spaniards
Sunrise in the Serengeti - the plague lifts
Ngorongoro Crater and the elusive rhino - we look for rhinos and stare hard at a rock
Lake Manyara and the Last Supper - a little Swahili goes a long way
A goddamn flight on a goddamn plane - karma strikes a rude man as I head to Istanbul
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