Africa, The Way It Was - Southern Tanzania
Written by Amanda Jones
Special to the San Francisco Chronicle
He was right out of one of those stoic Hemingway tales. Tall, lean, square-jawed, tousled blond hair. Completely oblivious to his good looks. His name was Keith. The problem was the Tanzanians couldn't pronounce the "th," so it came out sounding like "Kiss." This genuinely embarrassed him. Nevertheless, it couldn't be helped. Kiss he would be.
I watched the women in the group straighten when he arrived on the scene. Not that we would do anything about it—we were all married or involved, but it certainly didn't hurt to be entering the wilds of Africa with a guide who fit every stereotype of a bush hero.
I'm often asked if I romanticize the guides I write about. There are two truths to be told in response to this: first, the outdoor-guiding profession simply seethes with attractive men. It's a fact. Secondly, being in the bush is congenitally romantic and thus it is easy for people you like to grow in esteem. Blame it on the vestige in the female brain which responds to a pair of broad shoulders on a man you can trust to fell a charging hippo, fix a broken Land Rover and then talk about Orwellian prose over candlelight at the camp dinner table. Of course I romanticize.
I had come to Tanzania because for years I'd read accounts of the safaris taken by people like Ernest Hemingway, Baroness von Blixen and Prince Edward. They'd struck out into the African bush for months on end, and luxury was not something they were willing to forego in the process. Uniformed attendants poured champagne into crystal glasses; they ate roast beef dinners by candlelight; you could swing a cheetah in their commodious tents, and they never, ever, touched their own baggage.
Of course, those historic figures were out there to kill things, an activity I find incomprehensible. But their adventures sounded so wonderfully indulgent, so naughty by today's come-hither-and-suffer adventure travel standards. It was time, I decided, to do as Hemingway did and seek inspiration in the African bush.
The sticking point was that most of these high-end, old-world safaris took place in East Africa, and each time I'd been there, I felt like I was participating in an ecological gangbang. And then Ian Batchelor, a manager for the Houston based The Legendary Adventure Company, convinced me that Tanzania had more to offer. He swore he could show me virginal places where there would be no L.L. Bean-clad hordes sticking out of pop-top minibuses. No convoys speeding along behind cheetahs desperately trying to creep up on its first meal in days. No traffic jams to get back to camp for tea.
"There are places still so wild they're like Jurassic Park," Ian had emailed me. "And by the way, do you like to walk?"
The one time I'd convinced a guide to take me out on foot in Africa, I'd come within inches of stepping on a cobra. My guide (another heroic sort) had whipped the hat off his head and hurled it, causing the snake to strike at it rather than me. Instead of being chastened, I was exhilarated. I wanted more. But the guide, telling me I was one sandwich short of a picnic, refused to have anything more to do with me.
With the promise of being on foot again, Ian almost had me. There was one more thing. Hemingway didn't go anywhere where there wasn't free-flowing booze, and yet, across the entire African continent, cocktails are invariably a bitter disappointment. South Africa is the only country that produces potable wine, and in most Sub-Saharan countries they have vodka or even gin but never any mixers. By the end of the day you are so desperate you start mixing lousy gin with Gatorade, or vodka with tepid Coke.
Ian's reply came back. "G&T's to be administered nightly. With ice and lime, naturally."
I was off to Tanzania on a "classic mobile luxury tented safari."
It always begins with a tiny aircraft in Africa. If you want to experience real bush you'll eventually have to climb into one. And shortly after takeoff the pilot will doubtless tell you about the plane which slammed into the mountain yesterday. It's a fact, planes crash there all the time. If you don't believe me, just read any Africa-based love story and see how it ends. Personally I think that's part of the reason people go there. Occasionally we need to remind ourselves of how flimsy life really is. It titillates us. Take, for example, the fancy game camp where a tourist was recently killed by a lion while fetching a cardigan from her tent. You would think the place would be deserted after that, but bookings were never better. People flocked to the place.
After two hours of skimming over sun burnt sagebrush, the land below suddenly bloomed into a thriving oasis. A river slipped silver between clumps of dark vegetation, arcing past white beaches. Dry floodplains were dotted with islands of shimmying borassus palms. A single fish eagle wheeled lonely in the sky, the midday swelter having driven most living things into the shade. This was Livingstone country. Empty, vast, with game so unused to humans they stare in amazement before scattering.
We were in Ugalla River Game Reserve, in the Western quadrant of Tanzania, where The Legendary Adventure Company has the government lease on 2,900 square miles of protected land. There were six of us and we were to spend four nights in their permanent camp here before flying out to meet our mobile crew in Mikumi National Park. We would stay two nights in Mikumi before making the long drive to Ruaha National Park, where we were scheduled to spend the final four nights.
Ian Batchelor met the plane. He clenched our hands, his ice blue eyes flicking from face to face, sizing us up, welcoming us in the poker-faced way of so many White Africans. At thirty-three, he had a compact, muscular body, army-cropped hair and a face toughened by the equatorial sun. He turned to introduce Kiss, who jumped from the Land Rover wearing the skimpiest pair of khaki shorts I have ever seen. These two men would be our guides for the next ten days.
Entering camp, Ian shook his head as I reached for my bag. I was shamed, realizing I had flunked the transition into luxury adventure travel. I would need to keep reminding myself of the etiquette...I will never, ever touch my own baggage again.
A dashing African stepped forward, hoisting my duffel onto his shoulder. Even on the most pedestrian of trips I do not subscribe to the noble philosophy of packing light. What, for example, was one expected to slip into for dinner on safari? And as fashionable as it is to mock safari khakis, it's incredibly practical, so I had packed enough to last six months. Laundry, however, turned out not to be a problem. That's another rule of sybaritic camping, thou shalt never, ever, touch your own soiled clothing. I would deposit my attire on the floor every evening and it would return washed and ironed the following afternoon, (I encourage you to take a moment to imagine the effort of ironing in the wilderness). The same went for my walking boots, which were assiduously shined every evening.
"Jambo," the bag wielding African said, his broad smile glowing in the sunlight, "My name is Goodlove."
True to their irreverently poetic nature, many Tanzanians have adopted Christian names like "Precious," "Babyface" or "Million." It remained unclear whether Goodlove was self-named or if his parents had felt it would advance his cause in life.
My tent was 300 square feet with a verandah overlooking the Ugalla River. Inside were two single beds, floor rugs, a writing table, hat-stand, a set of shelves and a rack to hang my little black dinner dresses. A series of switch-operated lights ran off a battery outside. Unzip a doorway in the rear and I could step into my en suite bathroom with thatched walls and canvas ceiling, a cubicle for the long-drop (with Western toilet) and another for a shower stall. The showers were on a bucket-and-pulley system. When I requested it, Goodlove would hoist hot and cold water into the tank outside, which turned on with regular taps inside. Throughout the day, he would bring me pitchers of warm water to wash at the wooden washstand.
That first evening I sat on my verandah and watched the sunset, rosy and gilded. My gin and tonic arrived on a tray, in a real glass, tinkling with purified ice-cubes. I drank it listening to the soft "pfffff" of the hippos as they surfaced in the river, 50 yards from my tent.
I lay awake briefly listening to the nighttime noises: the shrieks of a male baboon, the scrape of crickets, the whoop of a hyena, and the cough of a leopard. And then I drifted off, not waking until Goodlove was standing outside my tent whispering, "Hodi" and bringing me my thermos of hot chocolate.
After breakfast, we piled into the safari vehicles for a drive, jumping out now and then to fondle leaves or peer at droppings. Ugalla was beautiful, but because the game is so wild, not habituated, it is harder to see. This would be our daily routine—get up early and go out for a drive, come back for lunch, siesta while the sun raged at midday, then walk out at around 4:30 in the ebbing heat.
The second afternoon we had set out on foot with Kiss and two African trackers to follow a herd of elephant. It was a nursing herd of about 15 adults with three young—an extremely dangerous group. Elephants are incredibly intelligent and altruistic and they practice the "It takes a village..." method of child rearing. A baby elephant is tiny. Tinier than you could imagine an elephant ever being, and the females cooperate to protect it. Several adult females will group tightly together while the baby walks hidden between their legs. If you come too close, just within whiffing distance, you're likely to get stomped.
Risking the crime of anthropomorphism, elephants are also highly sentimental. Kiss told a story of how he had seen a mother with a calf that had died. The mother seemed to be in a state of grieving shock and would not leave the baby for two full days, trying to raise it back on its feet with her trunk. Other females would come by to stroke her back or stand nearby in what looked liked comfort and mourning. Weeks later, the elephants returned to the carcass, rubbed the bones and then scattered them, as is fairly typical after a death of one of the herd.
Our trackers seemed nervous of these elephants. They stooped often to gather handfuls of dust, releasing it into the breeze to determine its direction. It was swirling around, and if the elephants caught wind of us, we could be in trouble. We backed up, hunkering down in a dry riverbed until they passed by in single file, the old matriarch in the lead.
It was a rush being on foot. You had to be very present, very careful. Although the .416 caliber rifle that Kiss carried could be said to shatter any romantic notion of being back in the food chain, it still felt more balanced than languishing in a vehicle. If something charges you out there, there's not much of an escape. It happens rarely, but if it does, you should pray your guide is a damn good shot.
At the end of each day, we'd shower and dress for dinner. Most of the women wore dresses at this hour, casually elegant, complete with jewelry and lipstick. The men wore long-sleeved shirts and pants. Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres (such as pâté or spring rolls) were served around a campfire. We would then proceed to the dining platform for a massive three-course meal, always beginning with soup, followed with dishes such as chicken provençale and sautéed carrots, and then a dessert like pineapple romanoff. After dinner we'd take our liqueurs and retire to the campfire and play some sort of game. This was not an obligatory activity. The games were usually at the suggestion of one of the guests, and, despite my normal abhorrence of that sort of thing, it was fun. When we played charades, I could imagine a drunken Hemingway doing exactly the same thing sixty-five years ago.
The following morning we decided to go "fly-camping," meaning we would literally walk into the bush and spend the night in makeshift tents in the open. In my previous experience, it wasn't typically comfortable, but was quite adventurous. Before sunset, we walked out of the bush and there, set by a lake, was our fly-camp—Legendary Adventure style. Hassan the cook, dressed in white coat and chefs hat, was crouched over an open fire grilling lamb shishkebabs and tossing a fresh lettuce salad. Netting tents were set up with thick mattresses and sheets. A dining table was laid near the water, and a portable and extremely well stocked bar was erected near that.
"Well," said Ian, turning to me. "I knew there'd be hell to pay if there weren't any gin and tonics." A waiter, resplendent in white shirt and green sash, stepped forward to pour.
Our final morning in Ugalla was spent canoeing on the river. This may sound like a pleasant way to spend a Sunday in the bush, but when the water is infested with crocodiles and mating hippos, the exercise takes on new meaning. Ian, rifle tied on, sat in the rear of my boat, posting one of us in the bow to hippo spot.
"Right," he said, "I know you guys think hippopotamuses are cute, but they're suspicious bastards. They've got an attack-and-ask-questions later disposition. See that mouth, yeah, well it opens up 150-degrees. Cut a man clean in half. It's the lions you're scared of, but hippos kill more humans every year than lions ever do." If we saw a hippo up ahead, we cut across the river and hugged the bank. "The crocs aren't so bad," he continued, "but from time to time you hear about a crazy one who'll attack a boat."
By mid-afternoon we were back in the tiny plane flying southeast to Mikumi National Park. There we would join our mobile camping crew and drive further south to Ruaha National Park. We flew over the Rubeho Mountains, green and lush, smoothly rumpled, like a slept in silk sheet. Beyond that, the land became more typically East African: the harsh sunlight, the dusty earth, parched bushes, and the flat-topped acacias etching dark outlines on the bowl of a sky.
Each time we moved, the mobile crew would pack up and move on ahead, setting up in time for cocktails. The tents in the mobile camp were almost an identical set-up to the permanent tents at Ugalla, only the dressing room, toilet and shower were in separate canvas partitions at the back of the tent. Dinners were served in a dining tent, silver service, and candlelit, with linen napery.
We spent two nights in Mikumi and saw hordes of wildlife—buffalo, giraffe, elephant, wildebeest, impala, hartebeest, hyena, warthog, waterbuck and more. But we still hadn't seen any large cats. I know it's politically incorrect to admit it, and I know when you're in Africa it's the less-heralded species that are supposed to really move you, but I love large cats, and it isn't quite Africa without seeing at least one.
"We'll see some," Kiss assured me. "Just wait until Ruaha. That's the finest place in Tanzania. It's the real thing." Kiss, I knew, would recognize the real thing when he saw it. He was a well-bred South African farm boy. The kind of kid Laurens van der Post wrote about. Roaming the veldt barefoot, learning bush wits from the tribal Africans, speaking Zulu and Xhosa. He was raised to revere nature, catching snakes and wrestling baby crocodiles for fun. He truly thrived in the bush, and resented ever having to go back to town.
A long, hot day cutting through the bush and we arrived in Ruaha. In every direction flaxen bushes stretched to a ring of mountains, blue-gray and hazy. There were thousands of ancient baobab trees, with their bloated bellies, smooth, luminous bark and twisted limbs. The plains were alive with zebra, giraffe and impala, and the bushes rang with the songs of hornbills, francolins and kingfishers. Camp was set up under the canopy of a colossal sausage tree overlooking a dry riverbed.
On the final morning of the trip I was still feeling disappointed at not having seen a lion. with eerie insight, walked over, looked at the sky and said, "Don't worry. We'll find a lion this morning."
We drove out in a Land Rover with two large sunroofs, meaning we could stand up with our torso sticking out, or sit on top, in order to spot game. Not more than ten minutes outside camp, Kiss slammed on the brakes and hissed, "Get inside, move slowly. Lioness." She was no more than twenty feet from the vehicle, muscles taut, tail twitching at our approach. Lions don't usually go for vehicles, but it has been known to happen when humans start leaping about fooling with camera gear.
"Quick movement " Kiss explained, "is very threatening to a lion. It's all about timing when it comes to defense. They're not going to hang around while you make the first move."
The lioness had taken down a young giraffe. The frenzied giraffe mother had driven her off and was standing over her inert baby, trying to revive it. The baby was mortally wounded, but not yet dead. Hooded vultures circled above, and, off to the right, hyenas were slinking in. We were so close I could see the disbelief and desperation in the mother's eye. What was happening seemed brutal.
"Look at the lioness," Kiss whispered, "see her belly." It was cavernous. "Look over there." She had two small cubs with her waiting in the bushes. "It may seem cruel, but if she can't kill this giraffe calf her own young will die."
When the giraffe mother suddenly ran off, the lioness approached and savagely ripped at the baby, grunting to signal the cubs to join her. It was very hard to watch. The tiny giraffe thrashed its legs and lifted its head off the ground, as if in a last effort to follow its hopeful mother while the lions dismembered it. Their eyes on their meal, they did not see the female giraffe galloping up once again, bellowing in rage, hooves lashing out. She'd gone to seek reinforcements, or at least it looked that way. A herd of giraffe now stood nearby, watching intently. I never thought I'd see a giraffe intimidate a lion, but a vengeful mother knows no fear. The lioness, recognizing this, turned and fled.
After a tense hour, the giraffe turned away and the lioness ran back in, gathered up the now dead baby and dragged it into a thorn bush. The theater of survival was finished and I had seen my lions.
That evening we packed up the requisite alcohol and drove to the top of a hill for sunset. The view was magnificent, and the failing sun dusted the land gold. I sat on a warm rock and contemplated the setting, a glass of South African wine in my hand, my notebook abandoned in the grass. I looked over at Kiss, busy studying something through his binoculars, and wondered if he knew exactly how lucky he was to call this his day job.