'Tis the season

I have to admit, the Holiday Season takes on new meaning here, in a place with so many silent nights, midnights clear and redeeming graces, not to mention little boys drumming.

As is our custom, I have spent a lot of time thinking about all that I have to be grateful for this year. This is a very short list of the many wonderful things that have made me smile on my walks into work in the morning:

- My Mom, for being so supportive, accessible and understanding when I do stupid things
- Former coworkers for urging me to keep a website (nee "blog") while in Tanzania
- Brian H, my dear friend, for buying me this site, which I am having such a wonderful time keeping updated
- Live from Kigoma readers, wherever you are, for your kind and encouraging messages (Martina, are you out there?)
- Monty, the monitor lizard in my ceiling whose presence never ceases to comfort me
- Snakes, for not biting me
- Lake Tanganyika, for being the best place I have found yet to watch the sun set
- The birds whose serenades calm me at the office - sometimes it seems the more tense I get, the louder and more beautiful they sing
- and the many wonderful family members and friends who write to me - both emails and real mail - to make me feel like I'm really not so far away at all.

So, with my stocking hung on my closet with care, I am poised to have a wonderful Holiday in the little (or not so little) town of Dar es Salaam (which rather fortuitously means "city of peace"). And as I watch stars shine above the highest boughs, you can bet I'll be having a very merry little Christmas, in part thanks to you.

And as for my Christmas Wish? Well, I'm already living here.

The long road home

Moments before we got stuck in the mud

While it took us about 11.5 hours to reach Katavi on our way down, it somehow only took 8.5 hours on the way back, and I have the welts on my bum to prove it. I guess there are advantages to having Spanish men drive when there are Spanish women in the other vehicle. We flew with such velocity that when we hit pockets of mud it would cover our vehicle, causing us to drive blindly until the wipers could clear our view.

Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote this about the Serengeti:

“…As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here.”

When I first read this passage, I circled it in my copy of The Shadow of the Sun, thinking it was one of the most beautiful and original observations I had read about nature.

Beautiful it is, but I realized on the road to Katavi just how naturally this cascade of thoughts can fill your mind in unspoiled landscapes. Our road was often the only sign of civilization, and it winded through seemingly endless woodlands, with vistas hiding tantalizingly behind the trees. And then occasionally the trees would break and a valley would spread at our feet, with tree canopies extending as far as the eye could see. There were mammoth rocks, patches of grassland, and at their banks, the Malagarasi River.

This world “barely born” seems perfectly without sin. In the presence of this landscape, one can imagine any number of the continent’s stories coming to life: Karen Blixen soaring in Dennis Finch Hatton’s airplane and saying “Yes, I see;” humankind waking to stretch its first legs; unimaginable beings from times gone by lifting their heads at waterholes to roar at the sun. It was overwhelming to see that this landscape still exists; it was an Africa that I thought - and feared - survived in books alone.

I learned last week that there are plans to significantly improve this road, perhaps even pave it. In fact, we had seen evidence of this in the piles of gravel and road crews we occasionally encountered on our journey. This is in addition to plans to create and pave yet another road that will slice through the ecosystem.

I fear what this new chapter will bring for the landscape. After all it has seen – climate changes, species come and gone, the tectonic shifts – I wonder what the knell of the diesel engines will bring.

As we drove home, I thought about what it will mean if humanity returns to the land that once cradled it. Have we learned our lessons, or will we simply bring our sins back to the land from which we came?

World without sin

A funny thing happened on the way to the post office

I once explained the interior of the post office to a friend: high ceilings with eucalyptus-trunk scaffolding and piles of boxes and mail everywhere, stacked high on desks and floors, in wooden sorting containers and falling off of shelves. It looked to me more like the set of a situation comedy than an actual place of work. As my friend said, "it sounds like the type of place you would find Lucy and Ethel looking frantically for a box for Rickie," and honestly, I can't think of a better way to describe it.

One time I went there to get a package and they invited me to help dig through the wooden sorting containers to look for it. We couldn't find my package on that trip, but we found one for a colleague of mine. "May I take it to him?" "Sure!" they said.

This morning I stopped by, knowing that my packages from Mom and Lee for the Holidays should have arrived by now. And there they were, just on the other side of the wire cage of the package room. "Ipo!" I exlaimed. "They're here!"

"Yes, but to pick-up your packages," they explained, "you need to go to your office and get the receipts, and then bring them back to us." "Hakuna matata," I said, no problem.

Unfortunately, at my office, there were no receipts to be found. I dug around for a while before heading back to the Post Office. "Hamna receipti," I said in Swinglish. "Labda hapa?" Maybe they're here? They dug around for a while before issuing new receipts. See, that wasn't so hard, I thought.

Now for step two: "Take these receipts to the Port Authority," they said, "and bring back a customs officer with you." Caveat lector: the men at the post office did not speak English, at least not with me, so it's possible that I misunderstood them, but I thought the instructions were pretty clear and I hopped in a taxi and headed to the Port, where my driver stopped at the railroad tracks as if they were a brick wall. I walked into the Port where I was greeted by five men sitting outside talking amiably. Surely one of these men could help me.

"No, you need to go to the Tanzanian Revenue Office," I was told, "first floor. We just do customs for export goods; they do imports." Well that makes sense. So I walked back across the railroad tracks, hopped into the taxi and headed to TRA, my cabbie grinning the whole way.

The first floor at TRA told me to go to the second floor, where I found people jamming to the same music on the radio as my cabbie. The customs guy was there, available, friendly and potentially helpful. Finally, a stroke of luck! He stared at my receipts and explained that he could not help me, at least not on Thursdays. He handles packages on Mondays and Fridays, between eleven and one. "Come back tomorrow," he said, "that's Friday."

So after going from the post office to my office to the post office again to the port and then to TRA, I was now hopping back in the taxi to return to my office empty-handed, wishing someone would have explained all of this to me a little earlier in the day. But I guess in situations like this, what is one man's misfortune is a cab driver's good luck.

Don't eat me - I'm a vegetarian

Four trees

When I took Hunter’s Safety, they taught me not to point a weapon at anybody. I was therefore surprised when our guide in Katavi National Park climbed clumsily into the back of our vehicle with the barrel of his Russian Kalashnikov riffle swiveling in all directions, at various moments steadying on me and my fellow passengers.

“Are we going hunting?” I asked with casual American sarcasm. “No, this is for the walking safari,” he said. I took this to mean that he understood that the only way I would be getting out of the vehicle while in the park was at gunpoint.

Or so I thought. But before I knew it, I was piling out of the Land Cruiser and onto a plain full of hippos and other creatures that are faster than me. I tightened my shoelaces and tried not to show fear - not sure if hippos can sense fear like everyone says, but pretty sure my Spanish friends could.

In front of us was a river. Beyond the river were a hundred hippos at least. "Isn't that the creature everyone says is the number one killer in Africa?" one friend asked. "They sure run fast," another observed. I swallowed hard.

But between us and the hippos was something far more disconcerting: about a dozen crocodiles fought in the water below the embankment on which we stood, a couple less than ten feet away. “Boy, I have to stand back pretty far to get a good shot with this telephoto lens,” I said, beginning my retreat. Our guard pulled out his camera phone, snapped a few shots and texted them to his friends. I took it upon myself to be responsible and alert of our surroundings, checking all 360 degrees for danger and occasionally the sky above.

We were scheduled to take a longer walking safari that evening - you know, the time when most predators wake-up and start hunting. By this point, I was a little skeptical that our guard wouldn't pull-out his cellphone instead of his Kalashnikov if lions began to circle. I decided to have a heart-to-heart with him out back. “I think we should have a second guard tonight, you know, it’s a big group.” “Nah, we don’t need it.” “But don’t you ultimately think that’s up to us to decide? We’re willing to pay the extra $10 for another guide.” “Nah, I’ve done this before, we’ll be fine.”

He couldn’t be persuaded, his ego bolstered by his second-hand riffle which, if maintained as well as the National Park's bandas, would be more useful for hitting the animals with than shooting them.

The walking safari that evening really was lovely. There is something about the Tanzanian landscape that you can only experience on foot: the aromas, the crunch of the grass under your feet, and the bugs you would never see from the seat of your car. I was totally enchanted. And somehow the whole experience felt relatively safe, in part due to the fact that our guide had us walk no closer than 100 meters to the forest, so that we could see the animals charging toward us in the seconds before they attacked. “Walking near the forest can be dangerous,” he said, “very dangerous.” I was happy to see him taking such precautions.

And then it started raining. And soon thereafter, it started pouring. “Follow me!” he said, running toward the trees, throwing all precautions and rules aside. It was suddenly every man for himself in the rain. He led us along the edge of the forest, and this led us to a road which led into the forest, which then led us to our vehicles, into which we quickly piled.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones who wanted in from the rain. Tsetse flies filled our Land Cruisers, and somehow managed to cling to the outside of the vehicles as we careened through the forest. They bit us on exposed skin and also through our shirts. We were smacking the windows and swatting the air furiously. “It’s like a horror movie,” one friend said. “Tell the guide to start shooting at them,” another suggested. “He says he only has five bullets,” yet another replied. Oh great, now he tells us.

Every moment of the trip was incredible. The bandas in which we slept were in the National Park, and I would wake to the sounds of hyenas howling and hippos munching grass nearby. And that is the best part of any safari: you never know what you will see or hear and when. You can turn a corner and bam: there are fifteen elephants. But around the next corner, there may be nothing at all. And you can go hours without seeing anything, only to wake in the night to find that the wildlife has found you.

Hippo at dawn

Morning stroll

Herd of hippos

It's hard to believe they can get so big by primarily eating grass

Before the rains came

A beautiful metallic scarab (dung) beetle goes on the defense after
a friend flicked it off a backpack

Pretty bird

Now you see why their necks are so long

Relic of the dry season

A spotted hyena spots us

Crocodiles having a good time, crocodile-style

Crocodile food

Can you find the chameleon?

Eye of the crocodile