Africa is too big for words.

At least for English words. Maybe the Africans have figured it out – Serengeti means “endless plains” in the Maasai language, and that’s exactly what the Serengeti is. But endless with huge vistas, and wildlife that simply defies description – tens of thousands of zebras, wildebeest and gazelles grazing a landscape just outside your tent that is earth’s last vestige of the Pleistocene. It’s too big for words. Even the plains of Montana don’t come close to capturing it. It’s where we evolved as humans and you feel that in every part of your soul. You have to go there to understand.

And so we did. On December 26, 1999 we flew to Amsterdam, overnighted, and then flew another 12 hours to the Kilimanjaro Airport near Arusha in northern Tanzania. Arusha is a nice third-world town, maybe 140,000 people with a few paved roads and a few hotels. We were met by our Tanzanian guides, Onesmo Ole (son of) Kishapuy and his crew. We overnighted in the Dik-Dik Lodge (the Dik-Dik is a small antelope), then made our way to a small airport where we climbed into a bush plane and flew two hours to a grass field in the Serengeti. There we were met by the rest of our crew and our adventure truly got under way.

For the next two weeks we traveled with our group of twelve trekkers and our Tanzanian friends in Land Cruisers and shank’s mare (with donkeys for the gear), staying in a combination of rustic lodges, stand-up tents, and pup tents with strong flaps to keep out hyenas and leopards as we searched for exotic animals and exotic people. We found them all.

The first three days were spent cruising the Serengeti in Land Cruisers The Serengeti is a national park, which in Africa basically means there is at least some attempt to stop commercial poaching (Tanzania does it better than most.) Here is where we saw most of our game – elephants, lions, cheetahs, jackals, hyenas, gennet cats, herds of grazing animals (wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, hartebeests, kudu and on and on), giraffes, monkeys, hippos, cape buffalos, dozens of species of birds – pretty much everything you think about when you think of Africa. Except here the animals are out in the world where God put them, instead of in zoos.

We stayed in tent camps – great food, considering the environment! – and went to sleep to the roar of lions and howls of hyenas. (It took a couple of nights to get used to that…) The stars at night were unimaginably bright in this wilderness hundreds of miles from electric lights. When we got up in the morning there were often zebras grazing next to the tent – and there were literally tens of thousands of them on the plains every day.

The Serengeti has extremely fertile soil for grass and is where many eastern African animals migrate to have their babies just before the rainy season, so practically every female grazer was pregnant. We watched a baby zebra being born the day before New Year’s Day. (We named her Milli Z for Millennium Zebra!). It was a tough birth – the baby had a hard time getting out of the amniotic sac even with the mother’s help – and the rest of the herd moved away because births attract predators (mostly hyenas and jackals, sometimes lions and leopards). If baby grazing animals can’t run within five minutes of birth they’re pretty much goners – we saw a baby Thompson’s Gazelle get torn apart by jackals, hyenas and vultures. But in this case it turned out OK, and Milli Z and her mother rejoined the herd. The “herds” in the case of zebras usually included giraffe families – it isn’t clear what the giraffes get out of it, but the zebras get a lion early warning system!

We left the Serengeti on New Year’s Day and drove across country to the famous Ngorongoro Crater. On the way we stopped at the Olduvai Gorge, a part of the Great Rift Valley that runs the length of Africa where the archaeologist Mary Leakey found the skeleton of “Lucy,” the earliest known hominid fossil. Olduvai itself is the site of the famous Laetoli footprints of three homo erectus people, probably two males (one walking in the steps of the other) and one female. They walked in volcanic ash, which was later covered by another eruption and left undisturbed for about 3 million years. It was unbelievably evocative to see this on the first day of the new millennium and to feel the long shadow of our evolutionary path. I think even the most diehard creationists might re-think their position if they could experience what we saw and felt.

The next two nights were spent at the Serena Lodge built into the wall of the Ngorongoro Crater, an extinct volcano about 20 miles across and 3,000 feet deep. The Ngorongoro is a complete ecosystem where the animals are protected and where a limited number of tourists are allowed to go visit them. We spent a full day down in the crater in Land Cruisers (no walking, too much risk of disturbing the animals and/or getting eaten!) seeing almost every kind of animal Africa has to offer. Again, the feeling of having “been there before” was very strong – makes you believe in New Age ideas like genetic memory.

After the Ngorongoro we set off for Maasai country. The Maasai are Tanzania’s dominant people. They have a tradition of cattle herding (cattle are all-important – they are food, money, status, everything) and war against other tribes to get their land. They are tall, beautiful, dignified people who dress in red robes (women in red and blue). They live on family farms – bomas – with houses made from cattle dung and corrals made from 18’ wooden poles (to keep leopards out) and 8’ thorn bushes (to keep lions out.) A typical boma might have three families - a man, one or two of his brothers, their wives (2-3 each depending on wealth) and lots and lots of kids (because of the high infant mortality rates.)

Young Maasai men become “warriors” when they are circumcised (14-17 years) old, and until they are in their late twenties their jobs are to herd the cattle and protect the boma from attack. To do this they rely on the Maasai spear – a weapon with a blade on one end, a metal spike on the other and a short wooden handle in the middle. With this the warriors are expected to fight and kill lions at close quarters. (And as one of the Maasai elders said, “that’s not easy – the lions dodge!”) In former times they also warred against other tribes to get their land. In these days, however, that’s no longer allowed and so the Maasai are no longer expansionist. What that implies for their culture long-term is unclear, but it probably means the end of their traditional way of life. As Onesmo (our lead guide and a Maasai himself) said “in a hundred years the Maasai will only be in books, and I’ll be there too.” Touching, a little sad, but life goes on.

One afternoon when we were camped in a forest near a boma we were visited by a group of warriors and young girls who wanted to dance for us. They lined up in two lines, warriors on one side and girls on the other, and while the girls chanted the warriors danced. Of course we couldn’t understand the words but the sentiment was clear – “I am young, I am beautiful, I am strong, look at me and admire me for what I am.” The men would jump a couple of feet into the air with each beat of the song. It touched something very deep in all of us. The pictures don’t adequately convey the feeling, but if you want to see it as it was, rent the video of “The Ghost and the Darkness” (a pretty good movie!) where you’ll see Maasai dancing just as we saw them.

We really admired the Maasai. Westerners would regard them as poor people practicing subsistence agriculture, and by Western standards they are. But they have kept their culture and their pride and they are doing basically OK, something that cannot be said for many indigenous people in developing countries who have lost their old culture, have not adapted to the new one, and are stuck between in terrible poverty and despair. The Maasai are an intact people and proud of who they are. And what you learn in places like this – and what we wished every American could experience – is that wherever you go, people are mostly just people, getting along, making a living, trying to make things better for themselves and their children, and doing their best to enjoy life. Even when we were so far into the back of the beyond that some of the local people had never seen whites – they kept touching our skin to feel the body hair they don’t have – there was no real sense of strangeness, just people. There would be fewer wars if that were better understood.

The next part of the trip involved leaving the Land Cruisers behind and setting off across the mountains to Lake Eyasi on foot. We were accompanied by a few warriors from whom we rented donkeys to carry our camping gear, and by Ole Dorup, a Maasai elder who was one of the most elegant men we’d ever met. He spoke quite good English that he had taught himself from books Onesmo brought to him. We were also accompanied by a ranger with a machine gun, who was there to protect us against animals (mostly buffalos and elephants) and, I suppose, roving bands of poachers (which we fortunately did not encounter.)

We camped several nights in the deep bush sleeping in small tents. During the day we hiked up and down hills, mostly between 6,000 and 12,000 feet, so at the end of the day we knew we’d exercised! For a few days we had the company of a pitiful goat who spent its time bleating for its left-behind friends. The bleating came to an end when the Maasai smothered the goat, drank its blood (the Maasai eat almost nothing but meat) and roasted the remains. Interesting – I’d never before hiked with someone I was going to eat.

Eventually we arrived at the Lake Eyasi camp where we met a band of the WaHadza Bushmen. The WaHadza are among earth’s last hunter-gatherer tribes – there are less than a thousand of them left. Anybody who has watched that wonderful movie “The Gods Must be Crazy” has seen the Bushmen, speakers of the San “click” language. They are a very primitive people, essentially a stone-age culture, who live from hunting (bows and arrows) and gathering (fruits, nuts, roots) and don’t have permanent homes. They are Africa’s (and therefore earth’s) first people – resident long before the Bantu, whom we think of as “the Africans,” migrated south from above the Sahara. Their body and facial characteristics are very different from modern black people, and there is a sense of mysticism and magic that is palpable. The Bantu felt it too, which is one reason they exterminated most of the Bushmen when they moved south, before whites came along to finish the job.

The Bushmen follow the game, living in caves, hollow baobob trees and occasionally, when times are good, straw huts that are left behind when the band moves. The band we met consisted of about 20 people, men, women and children. Our “host” was a young man whom we called “Julius” who spoke both San – “click” - and Swahili, and served as our translator. Julius was probably the most productive hunter the band had and was therefore a very important person indeed – he kept his band alive. He used a variety of arrows, many poisoned – he said one of them could kill an elephant if he hit it in the right place and followed it for a mile or so. Arrowheads were wood or stone, occasionally metal when he could trade for a piece of wire that could be beaten into an arrowhead with stone tools. (When I got back I sent a dozen steel broadhead arrow points to Onesmo to give to Julius the next time they found each other – I couldn’t imagine a better gift!)

We spent a day with the WaHadza, practicing archery, answering their questions (one of which, from the women, was “how do you deal with breech birth?”) and dancing. We saw a 3-day-old baby whose mother alternated between holding him and leaving him on the straw to go foraging. I’m sure their infant mortality rate is staggering - malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and dehydration all contribute (AIDS does not because they are so isolated.)

The WaHadza too are a “whole” people, but unlike the Maasai they aren’t going to make it. The world has changed too much, the game isn’t as plentiful, and like the rest of the hunter-gatherers they are going to pass into history very soon. But we were all there once too – our ancestors hunted animals and grubbed for roots. So it isn’t really sad, just an inevitable part of change. We felt very privileged to see this last vestige of where we came from.

And then we went home, driving through mud, grass and “tracks” until we came to Arusha where we found some asphalt, our lodge, and our airplane. We had a final good-bye dinner before getting on the plane, and it was a beautiful, sorrowful farewell to people we had come to love and will probably never see again. We have managed to stay in touch with Onesmo, Kambona and some of the other Tanzanian guides through e-mail – the Internet goes everywhere! – and I think that will continue. Electronic communication really does bring people together in a way that mail never did.

We took a lot of photos, a few thumbnails of which are included here. They were taken with a 35mm camera using a 300mm image-stabilized telephoto lens and a 2x tele-converter. In Africa you can’t have enough telephoto - many of the shots are very long-range, and of course you don’t want to get too close to dangerous animals. The image stabilized lens allowed hand-held 600mm shots without blur. The original photos are all in .jpg format, which allows efficient compression (at the expense of quality, the originals are much sharper but also much bigger) and can be read by almost any Windows or Mac image viewer. Let us know if you’d like to see them and have the bandwidth for the download. Don’t expect to see National Geographic-quality work – nothing gives you a greater respect for real wildlife photographers than trying to do it yourself!

And that’s how we spent our Christmas vacation, seeing wonderful things and meeting wonderful people. We hope you have enjoyed reading this sometimes-rambling narrative as much as we enjoyed the experiences that produced it!

Jim and Barbara