A false sense of security

Hi all,

We know it has been a long time between emails. We are currently having a great time in Iran. It’s a beautiful country filled with some of the nicest people that we have met on the whole trip. This is not the axis of evil..... they recycle here!!!! For those of you who don't know, we will be coming home in August. We found out that Cindy would lose her residency and thus her green card if we stayed out of the US for more than a year. But we have worked through the disappointment and are looking forward to coming home.

"I think they have moved on" I said in a whisper to Cindy. She just put her hand on my arm and silently willed me to shut up. While doing research about Africa for this trip I had read an interesting bit of conventional wisdom about camping in the national parks. It is an unwritten rule that stated if you don't go outside of your tent at night; the animals will not come inside. I remember laughing about it at the time, but I was not laughing when I heard the loud growl of the pissed-off lion currently walking near my tent. The sound was like nothing I had ever heard before and my mind clung to the thought that if I just stayed quietly in my tent, he would keep up his part of the bargain. The thin canvas fabric giving me a false sense of security.

We were on a camping safari in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. We arrived in country days before. It was an 18 hour bus ride from Kampala Uganda, through Kenya and then finally to our destination in the town of Arusha. The main business in the town is safaris and hustling tourists in one form or another. We were told there are over 250 safari companies in town. When we arrived we where met by the usual array of touts or flycatchers as they call them. They descend in a swarm to the newly arriving busses, so thick that you have to push and swat them away just to be able to get your bag off the bus and give yourself some breathing room. I had learned from past experiences with long overnight bus rides that I do not deal kindly with their sudden assault when I am that tired. I let Cindy do all the talking and soon we were in a taxi heading toward our hotel and I had managed not to strangle anyone.



The touts were back the next day as we walked into town in search of a safari company. They attached themselves to us at the edge of town and followed us like a gaggle of ducks following their mother as we walked the streets. No amount of polite refusals to their offers to buy trinkets could make them go away. Occasionally cindy would turn to them, put her finger to her lips and say "shhhhhh". Surprised, they would all get quiet for a few minutes, silently following in a little procession. Soon they would get up the courage and start yapping at us again. "Shhhhh", Cindy would say and the whole cycle would repeat itself. By the afternoon, we had booked a 5 day camping safari to a few of the national parks in the area.

We started by visiting a small tribe of Bushmen near Lake Eyasi. They speak a "click" language and have been living in the area for over 10,000 years. They live in the open bush in crude huts made with a loose weaving of sticks branches and small patches of animal fur. I would not really call it a shelter. It was more like a "defined space" for each family. The women wore only a cloth or animal skin covering around their waists and some handmade jewelry. They looked just like the pictures you have seen in national geographic. One of them had a newborn baby. Through the guide we asked how old she was. They had no idea. Time was not something these people measured.

The men had all gone hunting for the day but had left one hunter behind because they knew that the tourists were coming to gawk at them. While we took pictures and snooped about their campsite, he busied himself by sharpening his wooden tipped arrows. The interpreter did not have a name for him and just called him "this one". He wore only a pair of cut off jean shorts that he had slit into vertical strips at the bottom to form an ornamental fringe. His ownership of them was no doubt the consequence of some foreign donation program. You cant go anywhere in east africa without seeing the influence of an NGO. Their early misguided efforts to help people out by giving them everything that they needed, instead of training them to fend for themselves, has had a profoundly bad effect on the country. They have created a culture of people expecting something for nothing from every foreigner that they see. The saying "Hey Mazungu - give me money" is heard everywhere. The NGO's have learned somewhat from there early mistakes but I still think they do more harm than good.

Just when I thought that our hunter was just putting on a show for us and was truly shooting arrows at nothing, he took off across a gully and started shooting into a tangled mass of branches. We walked over and saw that he had shot some poor creature that was hiding in a tree. The branches were so dense that at first I could see nothing. "This one" pulled out 4 bloodied arrows and then reached in and extracted an animal known as a Genet. It's a small spotted cat with a long striped tail.

After posing for a few cheesy pictures with his kill, the bushman pulled a long straight stick with a blunt end from his quiver of arrows. He then split a branch in half so it was flat on one side and placed it curved side down over some animal dung. By putting the blunt end of the stick on the branch, and spinning it between his hands, he quickly created hot embers that ignited the dung. More branches were added to make the fire bigger. The whole operation took only a few minutes.

To our amazement, "this one" then threw the cat directly on the fire. After all the hair had burned off and the carcass had blackened, he made a cut around the ass of the animal, grabbed the skin and with a swift tug, pulled out its intestines and various innards. He then slit it open at the belly, removed the rest and separated out the heart to cook and eat separately. Strangely as a vegetarian, none of this made me the least bit squeamish. After a thorough cooking, he cut off pieces and offered them around to eat. I declined but Cindy gave it a try. She said it tasted very gamey and fatty and was almost like chewing on rubber. She found that she had to swallow it whole to get it down and the aftertaste stayed in her mouth for a long time. As is custom, "this one" ate only some of the meat and saved the rest to take back to the tribe. The liver was kept and used to rosin his bow string and the tail was tucked under his belt to be later used as decoration on the bow.

We camped that night nearby and set off in the morning for the vast open plains of the Serengeti. The wildebeest migration was in full swing and the herds were so large that their numbers were impossible to estimate. They covered the grass lands like a carpet and the view of them stretched as far as the eye could see on both horizons.

We were now in the thick of lion country and the rustic campsite had no fences around it. There was supposed to be running water to the toilets but an elephant had torn up the pipe a while ago. There where two 10 x 12 ft fenced in enclosures within the site. One for the cooks and the other for the campers to dine in. The tents were set up in the open. Nailed to a tree was a sign that simply stated "Do not get out of the campsite. Animals may attack". Check I thought, I won’t cross the dirt road. That will keep me safe. And if a lion comes into the campsite, I will try to remember not to give him table scraps.

That night was uneventful although at one point our guide, who had the tendency to disappear somewhere into the bush every night and get majorly drunk, approached us gibbering excitedly that he had seen two lions mating on the road near out campsite. We piled into the truck, played a game of ditch the tailing rangers (Its illegal to go on a "night drive"), and found the lions post coital relaxing in the grass and smoking a cigarette. That night we fell asleep to the sounds of them growling in the bush.

It gets dark early near the equator and so bedtime has a tendency to be soon after sunset. On the second night we were awakened at 10:00 pm by the sound of lions near the edge of the camp. The amorous cats were at it again but this time wanted an audience. It was too close for comfort for most of the campers and the guides tried to chase the lions away with their safari vehicles by honking at them and revving their engines near them. It was funny in the sense that these were the same vehicles that the lions largely ignore during the day as we chase them around the grasslands trying to get our "trophy pictures".

In time the lions left but most of the campers moved their bedding into the fenced dining area. Cindy and I were tired and hoping that they would not be seen again, went back to our tent to sleep. Fitfully. Of course they were back two hours later and this time, were pissed off at the trucks and were wandering around through the middle of the campsite.

After some time we heard the gunning of the vehicles herding the lions farther and farther away from the camp. Some discussion ensued and Cindy's survival instinct finally won out over my need for comfort and we grabbed our sleeping bags and mats and climbed into the nearby enclosed safari jeep. After a few hours of no sleep I returned to the tent. The lions never returned.

The next day we were up early looking for tracks in the dirt. We had not seen how close they came and were anxious to see if we were in any real danger. The prints 15 feet from out tent were a little too close for comfort. We met a guide days later who was camping in the same site the last time lions had entered. It was 1996. So this was not a usual safari experience. At least we didn't have to push against the side of the tent like he had to keep the lion on the other side from collapsing his tent, like he did. We wanted a great safari... I think we got it.