Foxlily

During several hours in the Shake and Bake (my nickname for the Land Cruiser, as it bumped along Tanzania’s hot, dusty roads), we climbed into the highlands along the Rift Valley, finally fetching up at Gibbs’ Farm, near Karatu.  On the road, inhaling red dust, I was finally able to get a cell phone signal  and call home.  It was enormously comforting to find that all was well.

Gibbs’ Farm is a former coffee plantation, first established by the Germans when Tanzania was their colony, then purchased by a former British army officer after World War II.  The food at Gibbs was fabulous, much of it home grown; the gardens exquisite; and the lodgings comfortable and charming…even with the bush babies galloping over the roof all night.  But the place made me uneasy for reasons I couldn’t quite place.

My impression did not improve when my digital camera was stolen from my purse there, as it hung on the back of my chair in the well-appointed dining room.  Luckily, I still had my 35 mm film camera and was able to continue taking pictures for the rest of the trip.  I genuinely hope that the person who took the camera—I believe in retrospect that I know who slipped it from my bag during dinner, after creating a diversion involving an unordered glass of wine—got a good price for it, and used the money well.  I also appreciate the thief’s having left my passport and other valuables untouched.

When I told the manager about the theft, he insisted that there was no theft, and that I must have lost the camera.

He ignored my insistence that I had last seen the camera at the dining room table, only moments before it went missing, and that I discovered it was gone almost immediately after the diversion about the unordered wine.

The manager offered to send staff members to my room to “search” for the camera.  He would not, however, agree that I could stay in the room while the search was performed.  If I had agreed to this, it might have resulted in the return of the camera, for which, I presume, a “ransom” tip would have been expected.  I did not agree to it, because I was furious at the manager’s pretense. I refused to follow the false premise to cover the theft, and worried that other possessions might disappear during the unsupervised “search.”

So the camera was gone.

I do remember with pleasure the woman at Gibbs’ Farm who made beaded skirts–beautiful work.

Leaving Gibbs’ Farm, we drove upcountry to the rims of the Ngorongoro Crater.  The crater is a vast unbroken caldera, is a bowl of sweet-grass paradise full of wildflowers and animals.  The two days we spent there were among the best of my life.

At Ngorongoro, one awakens to the sound of bells, and, rushing out to the balcony, sees the Masai herders in their red shukas, driving their goats and cattle to pasture.  The crater takes its name from the sound of those bells.

The lodge, built of stone and wood and barely noticeable on the crater rim, is at about 7500 feet—about the altitude of Flagstaff, Arizona.  The crater floor is 2000 feet below.  One winding dirt road leads in, and another leads out.  Inside is Lake Makat, a soda lake that attracts flamingos, jackals (which like to eat the flamingos) and old hippos that have been run out of the herds that inhabit the spring-fed, papyrus-fringed pools in other parts of the crater.  Lake Makat had also attracted the President of Finland, who was there with his entourage; we were impressed, but the jackals, flamingos, and old hippos were not.

We saw many lions in the crater (mating, dozing, or cooling themselves in the grass), as well as cheetahs and serval cats; wildebeest, gazelles, impalas, ostriches, hyenas, warthogs, cape buffalo, zebras, and bat-eared foxes.

For a long time, we watched a male kori bustard in mating display, looking rather like an inflated post with feathers.  The female he was trying to impress was completely oblivious, but since the male can keep up his blustery performance for hours, perhaps she eventually took notice.

In the evening, back on the rims, I sat on the balcony of my room and watched clouds form in the crater below, until the nothing was visible beneath them, and a rainbow shimmered overhead.  I ran out of color film in the crater, which turned out to be a gift—the rolls of black and white I shot recorded some of the best photographs of the trip.

Leaving Ngorongo, we stopped at Olduvai Gorge.  From its looks, the gorge could be in Arizona or Northern New Mexico.  I was less interested in listening to the lecture about the Leakeys and their archeological discoveries than in observing the Masai children who gathered to watch us while our drivers changed a punctured tire on one of the Land Cruisers. These children seem thinner and poorer than those we had seen near Tarangire and Amboseli.  The land is higher, drier, and colder here, so perhaps they are less prosperous. None of these kids looked too healthy, and one had a blank eye.  All the boys wore the traditional red plaid shuka, a three piece robe secured with a belt, though the boy with the blank eye seemed to be missing pieces of his outfit.  The girls had the typical scarified faces and elaborately notched ears with heavy beaded earrings dangling from both the tops and bottoms.  Perhaps because their life in the bush is so hard, they learn to make a ceremony of pain.  Both girls and boys are circumcised in adolescence.  After their circumcisions, the boys leave their villages for independent life in camps with other boys of their age group.

The young men we’d seen by the road at Tarangire had just entered this phase, and would spend several years as morani, young unmarried men.  The morani resume wearing their usual red robes once their wounds from circumcision have healed.  They grow their hair long, and dress it with ocher, tallow, metal amulets, and multiple tiny braids.  Eventually they marry as many wives as they can afford, with the bride price paid in goats and cattle.

Masai women do most of the work, building the houses of mud and cattle dung, hauling water, firewood, and children, and preparing the meals.   We were unable to converse with the few Masai women we encountered; the English-speakers, it seems, were always the men.  They are very fit people, with elegant shapely heads easy to see in young adults, who shave their hair close to the scalp.