Holy everloving shit, I’ve never seen so many giraffes in my entire life.
Already flying into Tarangire national park in Tanzania, with a redheaded English aviatrix at the stick, we got an idea of what would await us. She insisted that, occasionally, the guides waiting to pick up tourists at the rough-hewn airstrip didn’t do much of a job in the way of clearing out elephants loafing about, and that she’d had to power through more than once to escape angry bulls pissed off at the small plane. I got to ride in the cockpit, which was a particularly neat experience. Whee, vroom!
We have a habit of riding our guides pretty hard whenever we hire one, but Dominic was a trooper. For three days straight, he drove us up and down Tarangire, starting at the amazing Swala tented camp. “Tented” in this case being a pretty liberal use of the word, as each of the individual accommodations had all the luxuries of a permanent high-end hotel room, with the exception of the black-faced monkeys goofing off on the roof, and the elephants ambling by in the morning on their way to the watering hole in our back yard.
The service was outstanding, from the professional waiters and not-particularly-talkative Maasai Askaris (in traditional blanket garb and assegais, in addition to tennis shoes and flashlights) whom we were obliged to call upon for an escort to and from our room anytime after dark, to the trio of managers who’d meet us with hot towels and smiles after a dusty day in Dominic’s battered open Land Cruiser. The latter was a really small effort for them, and yet made the lodge feel much more welcoming, like every arrival was that of an appreciated guest.
Only the request to not submit ladies’ undergarments for (free!) laundry (“due to cultural considerations” / “our all-male staff”) was a bit out of character, and even then, more amusing than anything else.
The restriction on walking around after dark seemed like a fairly sensible one, given that we spent half of a night being kept awake by a particularly annoying leopard skulking around behind our outdoor shower. Or, the sixteen lions one of the guards spotted walking through the camp the night before that.
We’d picked Tarangire as a wildlife safari destination as it didn’t look as obnoxiously crowded as Ngorongoro/Serengeti or any of the Kenyan locations, offered a particularly good selection of animals to see (partial list below, please excuse spelling), and let us stay at a hotel that, while still providing the kind of luxurious digs that are a pleasure to return to after a day of annoying the hell out of elephant herds, don’t require the sale of a kidney for mere mortals to be able to afford a few nights there.
The only times when we did run into larger groups of other tourists during our stay there (for most of the time we even had the jeep and guide to ourselves, and when we had fellow passengers, they were a pleasant and appreciative German couple who spent most of the time oohing and aahing at the insane number and diversity of animals running around) was at a picnic spot, watching leopards being lazy in trees, and at a river crossing where a pair of lions were mating every few minutes.
The picnic grounds were mostly tidy, if populated by particularly aggressive and grabby monkeys, but offered a magnificent view of a river crossing where colossal herds of wildebeest, elephants, zebras, and warthogs would collect to water.
Watching the lions do the nasty (over and over and over again — apparently they go at it for 4 days straight) was one of the more spectacular highlights of an already highlight-filled trip. When one of the drivers jamming up the river crossing next to the cats burned out his clutch and quickly exited his car to attach a tow rope, he confirmed what our guide had mentioned about the animals and cars — they don’t see jeeps as anything of particular interest, which is what lets people get so close to them, but the moment some pink blobby thing on two legs exits, boom, the hackles go up and the pink blobby thing is no longer a mildly annoying-but-tolerated pest, but dinner delivered to the beasties’ doorstep.
And then, the moment the driver jumped back in the car (after a cacophony of Kiswahili warnings from the other guides), the couple went right back to coupling, prodded on by two jeeploads of Italians shouting VAI VAI SEXY SEXY! You can’t possibly claim that lions are endangered if they can reproduce under such conditions.
The leopards were something really special in an already amazing experience. Apparently, people visit several parks for days without seeing any — we saw two, including one perched on a branch (like a lazy house cat — the inter-species resemblance is uncanny) with its prey, a duly savaged impala, occasionally flicking its tail and slinking over to another part of the tree. They’re beautiful animals, and I can understand the hordes of people trying to get a good picture of them whenever they see one. To Tarangire’s credit, all traffic is tightly restricted to the limited dirt tracks, which I imagine restricts the impact of large crowds on the animals (who generally ignore you anyway.) One man we encountered, clumsily wielding an enormous 800mm prime lens out of the roof of his jeep, had the right idea — no problem with picture shake or pixelation for him, although according to him, “it’s a great lens but you can’t carry it anywhere.”
One of our mornings consisted of an early (we generally couldn’t believe how insanely early we both got up and ate dinner compared to our usual decadent Parisian schedule) walk with an “old fart” (his words) originally from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. He chain-smoked, treated his likable young Tanzanian park ranger colleague with more than a bit of condescension, and was generally pretty kooky, but did a masterful job of getting us to two watering holes from downwind where the animals couldn’t get a whiff of us. The experience underscored the animals’ distrust of anything on two legs — to quote our tracker guide (who spent a disconcerting amount of time poking around in animal poo), “we’ve been eating them for thousands of years”. He had some great tips, though — animals are alert to motion and contrast, rather than shape, and if you approach them in a group and only leave the upper half of your body visible, they won’t really know what to make of you.
During our hike, we came across what appeared to be poacher tracks, which was moderately exciting — our guide made the point that this was the sort of experience that makes walkabouts, no matter the expense to willingly paying tourists (supposedly to cover park fees and the cost of the ranger accompanying us — again, a great guy), worthwhile, since from jeeps it’s not possible to pick up the footprints of illegally encroaching hunters. That made me feel a little warm and fuzzy, let no self-righteous environmentalist claim that I’m not doing my part to preserve nature, and yes, I’m feeling particularly smug right now.
Our last evening was particularly memorable, insofar as we already risked returning back to camp late. Since a lot of animals are nocturnal, apparently driving with lights or at night is not kosher due to the distress it causes them. Dominic’s Formula One impression to get us back in time put paid to that notion, though. Despite a promise to myself to not take too obscenely many photos (since I already had about 80,000 giraffe/zebra/wildebeest/buffalo/warthog/elephant/you/name/it shots), I nonetheless found myself frantically seeking boring zebra pictures to delete. In the space of no more than half an hour, our guide managed to take us through a steadily building crescendo of amazing animal sightings, of which the family of cheetas snacking on something dead were only the start. Several dozen cape buffalo really close to the road, a massive troop of baboons running ahead of us, a large male waterbuck leaping across the road right before the car, and a bat-eared fox sitting right by the roadside, probably too startled to figure out that our speeding jeep might even conceivably constitute a threat, were only part of the scenery. Bumbling into the midst of a, by the sound of it, extremely pissed off elephant herd the next day, nicely wound down the fun.
I can’t imagine doing this trip on a budget tour in a large jeep full of backpackers (although a snorkeling guide we encountered off Zanzibar later insisted that she’d had a bully time on hers), sleeping on rudimentary campsites — the countryside is dusty as all hell, and I’m still cleaning the fine red dirt out of my camera equipment. Likewise, I don’t think I could muster the endurance required for some of the multi-camp, multi-park safari trips some of the tourists make; it’s just too damn much work. Rather, stick by my original plan of coming back to a civilized base every evening, setting up my telephoto lens with a tripod and remote control, and lazing around on the porch while having a drink and getting in the rest of a day’s photo hunt.
Swala Sanctuary Lodge
www.sanctuaryretreats.com
And of course, the chest-thumping list of what-we-saw, look-at-me:
The Beasties:
Here is a partial list of some animals we saw, in no particular order, and probably repeating, and definitely occasionally misspelled (Dominic-the-guide had a bit of an accent, plus it’s not so easy to understand exotic animal names when tearing along in a bouncing jeep, not to mention Karin’s writing in said bouncing jeep, which is a whole lot more legible than mine would be under similar circumstances). Quite a few of them we probably don’t bother even mentioning more than once, like the black-faced monkeys or Impalas, since there were so many of them to make them more a part of the scenery than anything else…
Day 1:
Ground hornbill
Leopard (male)
Red buck
Saddle-billed stork (female)
White-headed buffalo weaver (one of the “smallest 5″)
Warthog
Kudu
Giraffe
Buff-crested bustard
Bush chicken (guinea fowl)
Zebra
Elephant, with babies, whee!
Impala
Dik-dik
Waterbuck
White shrike
Antelope
Long-tail shrike
Spark stallion
Termite
Day 2:
Elephant
Batla eagle
Black-faced monkey
Brown-snake eagle
White-browed concal
Van der Decken’s hornbill
Magpie shrike
Crested Francolin
Bush baby (just me, ha ha, thank you Melembuki the heroic Maasai with the flashlight)
Ostrich
White-bay bustard
Yellow-colored lovebird
Marabu
Vulture
Bat-eared fox
Cape buffalo
Ox pecker (on buffalo)
More elephants with babies, between 1-7 days old
Warthog (small and big)
Black-backed jackal
Grant’s gazelle
Cheetah
Egyptian goose
Lion (male and female, mating, VAI VAI SEXY SEXY)
Ibis
Oliver baboon
Lilac breasted Rala
Wild dog (super duper uber-rare, lucky us! Woof!)
Still-bock
Ostrich
Coke’s Hardebeest (Cogoni)
Giraffe
Zebra (loads and loads)
Hamerkopbird (huge nest, small bird, size isn’t everything)
Red-beaked hornbill
Wildebeest (hanging around with zebras)
White-backed vulture
Day 3:
Iland
Dwarf mongoose
Giraffe
Zebras (even more loads)
Martial eagle
Coke’s hardebeest (with young)
Brown-snake eagle
Namapua dove (the smallest dove there is, apparently)
Bush baby (the other kind, looks like a squirrel, without the huge cute eyes)
African fish eagle
Antlion
Day 4:
Kudu
Juvenile tawny eagle
Bat-eared fox
Banded mongoose
Leopard, with kill
Lion (female)
Striped wildebeest
Waterbuck
Giraffe with babies
Elephant (doing a downhill marathon, with babies)
Silver-beaked hornbill
Secretary bird
Jackal
Bushed mongoose
Gnus, gnus, gnus in the “small Serengeti” area
Warthog (just a baby one)
Vulture with nest and young chick
Cheetah (3 of them, eating, mmh)
More buffalo
Day 5:
Elephant (nearly attacking us, the angry little shits)
Buffalo (more than you can shake a stick at)
Ostrich (we’ve stopped counting)
Giraffe (ditto)
Impala (not even worth the mention anymore)
Warthogs (fighting!)
Goliath heron
Fish eagle (juvenile and adult)
Black-shouldered kite
Grey heron
Adada Ibis
Core bustard
Spur-winged goose
