2017/09 Part 3 Ngorongoro - Mon pm Drive to lodge |
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Dear All,
This is part 3 of our journal and it describes our first few days in Tanzania at the Ngorongoro Crater and Oldupai Gorge. At the end of part 2 we had crossed the border into Tanzania and said goodbye to our Kenyan guide Nzuki and hello to our Tanzanian guide Ayoub.
Monday September 18th continued
We had switched vehicles too. Instead of the Toyota van we were now traveling in a Toyota Landcruiser. Although it was superficially similar to the Landcruiser 
Troopcarrier we used to have in Australia, this vehicle began life as a flatbed (ute, pickup); the chassis was extended by about two feet and a large Tanzania-made safari body added. Like the van it had a roof section that could be raised for the clients to stand up and shoot pictures without any glass in the way.
We had about a four-hour drive via Arusha to Ngorongoro so we weren’t going to see much of the park before nightfall. The road was quiet though compared to our drive out of Nairobi so Ayoub was able to keep up a commentary on Tanzania and the countryside we were passing through.
The countryside was dry, almost a desert, in the rain shadow of Mount Meru, an old and dormant volcano that dominated the skyline. At around 15000 feet, it was enough to block the trade winds coming from the southeast off the Indian Ocean.
It was too dry here for elephants and was only lightly populated by humans, mainly Masai. The Masai men are polygamous but the wives own the houses. If a man visits a wife, then it’s normal for the kids to go away to another wife so he isn’t disturbed. Children are shared. Brides are bought from their fathers, as many as a man can afford. Some men can’t afford a wife until middle age.
We noticed that the fields were lined with what looked very much like Arizona’s century plants, a kind of agave. After about thirty years these plants throw up an impressive stalk of flowers, which eventually turn into miniature plants and take root. And then the adult plant dies. Ayoub identified them as sisal, planted here for erosion control. At first I thought this was an outstanding case of convergent evolution but have since found that the sisal agave was introduced to Tanzania in the 1800s. There were prickly pears around too, also introduced. There is no native cactus outside the Americas, but aloes and euphorbias fill the same ecological niche in Africa.
We saw beehives hanging from trees. This is the beekeepers’ defence against the honey badger, which stuns the bees with its skunk-like scent and takes their honey from ground-based hives.
There were baobab trees, similar to Australia’s boab. And beautiful African tulip trees, also popular for Australia’s gardens but very invasive in the wild.
I asked why the republic of Tanzania had changed its name from Tanganyika, its Swahili name at independence. Ayoub said that it was a merger of two names, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. A couple of years after Tanganyika’s independence in the 1960s, the neighboring islands of Zanzibar, which had been a British protectorate, became a self-governing country. The population promptly deposed the Sultan of Zanzibar and the Arab government that had wielded local power for 200 years and formed a Revolutionary Council. In a rare move, the two countries merged to establish stability and mutual protection in a time of great unrest.
Ayoub took a shortcut around Arusha to avoid its traffic and we ended up at the Coffee Lodge, a gated hotel complex. We had a buffet lunch there in the gardens, surrounded by flowering shrubs and shaded by enormous trees. Ayoub ate elsewhere, a separation of guide and customer that we’d have to get used to. No different really from a guided trip in North America where the guides often prepare meals for their clients.
Inside the complex was a jewelry shop specializing in tanzanite. Luckily Sandie already has that gem in her collection. Ayoub said that the discovery in the 1960s of the first tanzanite, just 20 miles away from Arusha, has helped boost it from a small town to the country’s third largest city. (Dar es Salaam is the biggest.)
We passed a market, chaotic to our eyes, but I’m sure all the locals knew who was selling and who was 
buying. The goods were spread on the ground, not something you could do in our soggy part of the world.
We were passed by this van with the message “Trust No Body”, funny as we’d just seen a similar van with the message “In God we trust”. It wasn’t clear though whether that message was religious or just a declaration of preference for American dollars over the local currency. Although we’d bought Kenyan shillings in advance nobody seems to trade in Tanzania shillings, which are currently around 2000 to the dollar. We were hoping to use dollars if we had to buy something.
The other vehicle in the picture is a tuk-tuk, a motor tricycle with an attached body. Most are passenger 
vehicles but some have cargo trays behind the driver.
We’d seen some red bananas at the market Ayoub bought some bananas for us to try. The red ones are quite similar in flavor to the Cavendish bananas imported into North America, but the chubby little yellow ones, called apple bananas I think, are quite delicious with a hint of pineapple. We ate a lot of those!
We stopped at a Cultural Centre for a break. This is an impressive building with artisans working inside, surrounded by walls of masks and shields and art. This is a European-style shop for tourists who aren’t prepared to go to the markets and haggle with the locals. Sandie was intrigued by the guy carving pieces of malachite, another mineral found in Tanzania, but we managed to escape without buying anything.
We skirted the edge of Manyara national park. Home to a large alkali lake and enormous flocks of flamingos, an interesting spot, but we couldn’t go and see them all. There are over a dozen parks to choose from in Tanzania and even more in Kenya. With a lot of help from Elvira at Tano Safaris we’d picked five of them and squeezed our visits into a twelve day trip.
We filled up with petrol in Karatu at a busy service station. The locals were filling their tuk-tuks and safari guides were filling Landcruisers and similar vehicles. We passed a long line of tuk-tuks at the roadside, presumably for sale or rent.
Then we were climbing up through tropical forests. When we entered the Ngorongoro park, officially a conservation area, the road became gravel and steeper as we climbed up to the rim of the crater.
Ayoub stopped at an overlook of the crater for us to see where we’d be spending the next 
day. The crater was formed by the collapse of a giant volcano that had blasted out most of its magma interior, so technically it’s a caldera rather than a crater, but the world knows it as a crater so I’ll stick with it.
The crater is at about 6000 feet and the crater walls tower nearly 2000 feet above it so we were standing at close to 8000 feet, and it was cool despite being almost on the Equator. From what we could see, the crater floor, about ten miles across, was a mixture of dry savannah, woodlands, and lakes, while the crater wall opposite was dense forest.
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Ngorongoro Crater view (0.46) |
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We arrived as dusk fell. Ngorongoro’s Serena Lodge is perched on the edge of the crater, at around 7500 feet. The reception area is high above the rooms and the dining areas, 
connected by a long and wide staircase. We couldn’t see much in the dark, but my impression was of very solid construction, with massive wooden beams and of walls clad with dark, round rocks. Our room had a balcony, with a view of the crater but we never got to see the crater floor in good light.
Just as we were going in for dinner a group of the staff gathered around a table to sing what was probably the Swahili equivalent of Happy Birthday. The singing was excellent, very harmonious, and definitely better than the Olive Garden’s! We were very sleepy though, barely able to eat dinner. Sandie went to bed but, fortified by coffee, I did the usual downloading and updating, pausing occasionally to climb back into the chair I’d fallen out of.