A Safari in Tanzania

Every single moment was a highlight, but some of the best things were:
Lions that crossed the road right in front of our jeep, and then sauntered down the hill and climbed a tree.
A visit to a Masai town where we watched dancing and were invited to sit in the chief's wattle-and-daub hut.
The first glimpse of Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest intact caldera, teeming with wildlife (the elephants are just visible from the rim).
A blood-red sunrise over the dusty Serengeti.
The thousands upon thousands of birds on Lake Manyara: flamingos, pelicans, egrets, and the fantastically ugly marabou cranes. If you like birds, don't miss Lake Manyara.
Animals everywhere! Lions, cheetahs, baboons, zebras, elephants, buffalo, crocodiles, hippos... thousands of them!
Luxurious game lodges where the monkeys patter across the roof like Santa's reindeer and buffalo occasionally stray onto the lawn.
Our guide, Yusuf, who was remarkably knowledgeable and tactful: he was just as good at taking care of us as he was at pointing out wildlife.

Quick Tips:

Learn some Swahili! It's a surprisingly easy language.

Find a reputable safari agency; it can save you a lot of legwork. You don't save much money by going solo, and you need a guide to get into the biggest parks anyway, so there's no reason not to. But don't go with a disreputable one!

Bring a sweater and warm socks. The elevation is high, and it can get COLD.

Buy your drinks (water, beer, wine, soda) at stores in town instead of at the hotel -- it's cheaper, and you'll be able to keep them in the jeep cooler. (Though don't go getting drunk on safari! That would be silly.)

Bargain hard for everything.

When you find something you want to buy, go ahead and buy it. Shopping opportunities are pretty thin in the Serengeti. If you're spending any time in Dar, you'll have a chance to buy anything you missed, but if you're just out on the safari circuits, there isn't much point in holding off. (Unless you think you're being overcharged, of course.)

Best Way To Get Around:

Hire a good four-wheel-drive jeep and, preferably, a driver-guide. They know how to find the animals, and unless you've already been trained in this habitat, you probably don't. Our jeep seated six people comfortably. While only five seats are window seats, that's OK, because the roof opens, and when you're standing, everyone has a good view.

There are some larger buses that carry big groups into the parks. They looked like a bad idea to me: too big for a lot of the roads, and since they didn't have open tops, passengers had to crowd together at whatever side was looking at the animals. I wouldn't take the bus if I had another alternative.

There are good maps available at the large souvenir store just south of Arusha.

The Ndutu Safari Lodge was our favorite of the places we stayed on safari.

The lodge is located well off the beaten track even by Serengeti standards: it's not near a year-round watering hole, and to reach it we had to bounce over almost 40km of mediocre track. During the migration, the bare land we drove through is apparently full of wildebeest, but we saw few animals on the plains on our way in. The main sight was the saltpan of Lake Ndutu, a vast, white flat which fills with water in the rainy season. It looks like the surface of the moon: beautiful, but inhospitable.

We felt that this was unpromising for our hotel, and when we arrived at the low, unostentatious buildings, we were not reassured. But no sooner did we get out of the jeep than our minds began to change. We were met as usual with the welcoming glass of fruit juice, but this was the first hotel to also give a glass of juice to our guide. This, we thought, was promising, and we were right.

The spirit of welcome pervades the Ndutu Lodge. It is a remarkably peaceful place, and set up to give its guests comfort and privacy. The tastefully decorated rooms are in small bungalows, two private rooms with bath per bungalow. Unlike most lodges we saw, there is no wall around the buildings to keep out large animals. Each room has a private porch facing towards the lake; when you sit on the built-in bench on your porch, you look across a narrow lawn, past a sign reading "Danger: No Walking Beyond This Point," across some tall grass, and then on straight into the wild. It’s a heck of a place to watch the sun rise.

The food at Ndutu (included in the rate) was particularly good. Dinner was served family-style, with large platters brought to our table. The cuisine was that unusual genre, good English cooking: meat, vegetables, and an excellent vegetarian gratin, with rhubarb pie for dessert; it was all very British, but far tastier than any English food I’ve eaten in England. Breakfast had a cold buffet component, which included some wonderful, spicy fruit compotes, as well as a full English breakfast.

There are other amenities, too. The gift shop is by far the best-stocked and most reasonably-priced of any we encountered. There’s a campfire behind the dining area, around which we sat with our Kilimanjaro beers or gin-and-tonics ($2) before dinner, defending our bowls of peanuts from hungry little birds. And as we sat there watching the stars come out, one of the waiters came to tell us that there was a genet (a kind of wildcat with a very long striped tail) sitting on one of the rafters in the bar. It comes in most evenings, he said.

We were sorry to leave. But on the way back through those bare plains we saw a cheetah.

The Tarangire Wildlife Lodge is located in the middle of the Tarangire National Park, above a watering hole in the river. It's a palatial building, a luxury hotel in the wilderness. Unlike many of the lodges in the national park system, the lodge really lives up to the luxury hotel billing: the floors are polished stone; the decor of the public spaces is elaborate; there's a gift shop stocked with wooden carvings, fine jewelry, hats, photo books, and a few shelves of pricey toiletries; and in the large, elegant rooms, the mosquito nets drape around the double beds like shower curtains, leaving a giant insect-free box.

Unlike all the other lodges we stayed at, dinner at the Tarangire Wildlife Lodge was served at the table rather than at a buffet. There was a four-course menu, with several choices for every course but the soup, which, as I remember, was excellent. The lodge is run by an Indian company, and is clearly influenced by the Indian idea of luxury, which is to say that there's a great deal of emphasis on attention in the service and butter in the cooking. I'm in favor of both. Breakfast was on the buffet model. My favorite aspect was the omelet station.

The dining room, like all lodge dining rooms, has a stunning view; this one over the water of the Tarangire River. This is nice in principle, but we didn't get much benefit from it, as we were out in the park during most of the daylight. I suppose there must be a wonderful view on full moon nights, though. There’s also the usual bar with the usual array of drinks (not included).

Our accommodations (for six adults) were in two three-person suites. Each suite had a main room with two double beds, a mirrored dressing table, and huge French doors opening on a balcony looking out over the park. There was a gorgeous marble bathroom with a giant shower, and a smaller entry room with a hard single bed draped in a cone net. We would have preferred doubles, but we’d booked late and had to take what we could get; in this case, it was very comfortable, and almost as good as having private rooms.

At night, while we were at dinner, someone went to our room and sprayed for mosquitoes, and drew the nets around the beds. It’s the most practical turn-down service I’ve encountered.

Lake Manyara National Park is usually added to safaris as an afterthought, to pad out the main attractions and the Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks. The reason for this is probably that most people on safaris just want to see large mammals: lions, elephants, giraffes, and so on. These are harder to spot at Lake Manyara, because, unlike the other parks in the Northern Circuit, it's wet year-round, so that it can support dense foliage, which, in some places, makes it impossible to see more than a few yards from the road. We saw some elephants and hippos while we were there, but we never caught a glimpse of the famed, tree-climbing lions (though we saw some in Tarangire). We didn't care, because what Lake Manyara does have is a tremendous population of smaller animals, and the largest number of bird species I've ever seen in one place.

The drive to the lake was exciting; we passed lone elephants and giraffes munching on the trees, baboons loitering like surly teenagers in the road, and a troop of shy, chirpy blue monkeys. As the road began to follow a stream, the bird-life got denser, and we saw lots of the splendid sunbirds, as well as several species of toucan-like hornbills. Two kinds of kingfishers, one sapphire, the other emerald, dipped into the stream, and an African hoopoe flashed by. White cattle egrets trotted after some zebras, and oxpickers, with red and orange bills, sat on the backs of hippos. Swallows chased after the mosquitoes, and black glossy ibises shone like oil slicks.

And then we got to the lake and entered bird heaven.

There's a gravel car park where you can get out of the jeep at the edge of the lake. The water of the vast lake begins a few feet from the edge of the gravel, weedy and odiferous, and about 20 yards away sit the beginnings of an apparently endless carpet of birds: white pelicans and pink pelicans sitting motionless on a sandbar, cormorants, sandpipers in the mud, dozens of kinds of ducks, hideously wattled marabou storks with six-foot wing-spans, a thousand gray herons stalking fish, yellow-billed and saddle-billed storks and spoonbills stirring up the bottom, and a pink stripe of flamingoes along the horizon. One lone fish-eagle circled overhead; I can't imagine why there weren't more predators, maybe they were all full. There were Egyptian ducks, looking like they've been tastefully painted, and dark and light ibises looking like Egyptian wall-paintings. Distant impala and buffalo grazing on the reedy shore were shadowed by cattle egrets.

Lake Manyara was the last park we visited. After all our encounters with lions and cheetahs, we had expected an anti-climax. We were wrong.

Space is limited in a safari jeep, and the small airplanes that do the hops from Dar to Arusha have strict weight limits. So here are a few thoughts to help you decide what to bring and what to trim.

Clothes:

People wear khaki on safari for a reason: everything you wear will get dusty, and bright colors can scare off the animals. If you’ve got two complete changes of safari clothes, one to wash and one to wear, you’ll be fine over the day, though of course, a third shirt always comes in handy. Remember, no one’s going to be looking at you when there are lions around. Lodges have laundry service.

In the evenings, it’s nice to have something to change into. Unless your traveling companions are picky, one slightly nice outfit will do for dinner in the posh travel lodges.

The lowest point of Ngorongo Crater is 3,315 feet, and you’ll be up at the rim, which is more like 6,000, and windy. Bring a warm sweater, a windbreaker, and socks. If you can handle the fashion faux pas of socks with sandals, though, and you’re not doing a trekking component, you might as well leave the hiking boots at home. There’s almost nowhere in the National Parks where you can walk.

Some lodges allegedly have swimming pools. We never saw one, and our bathing suits only saw action on Zanzibar, but we were there during the dry season.

I was very, very sorry that I’d forgotten a hat. A scarf is useful if you’ve got long hair – those jeeps get windy. Sunglasses are necessary (especially if you wear contacts; the sunglasses help keep the dust off).

Toiletries and Medicines:

Anything you don’t want to do without, you should bring. You can buy toothpaste and deodorant at some lodges, but there are no guarantees. It’s very important to bring Imodium so that you don’t end up forgoing a day’s safari in order to stay near a toilet. Don’t forget the sunblock and bring twice as much bug spray as you think you'll need.

Other stuff:

The best camera you can get your hands on.

The best binoculars you can get your hands on. Ours doubled as a telephoto lens for our digital camera, but that’s because we couldn’t afford a really, really good camera.

The Safari Companion by Richard Estes. A charmingly written, well-illustrated book on animal behavior that explains what all those zebras are actually doing. It’s fascinating. Of course your guide will be able to tell you a lot about animal behavior, but this book will help you get much deeper into the information.

A good field guide to birds and animals. We used the Audubon Field Guide to African Wildlife, which covers birds, mammals, and reptiles for the whole continent. That sounds like much too broad a book, but an amazingly high percentage of Africa’s wildlife is present in Tanzania. Naturally, though, we saw a number of species that the book doesn’t cover. Again, your guide will have a lot of the information in the book, but I found it useful: it’s easier to learn the difference between impala and Grant’s gazelle if you have photos of them next to each other.

A journal/sketchbook. I had very little time to draw, but did a lot of writing – often semi-legible lists of sightings, noted down while the jeep was in motion. I brought watercolors, but had no time to use them; I think most itineraries are too packed to allow much drawing.

A lot of pens. Children will ask you for them. School equipment is always welcome. If you see one of the local schools, you’ll wish you brought a whole textbook library to give away.

What not to bring:

Anything valuable besides the camera and binoculars. (Why would you?) Bulky sweaters, as you’re better off with lightweight layers. Multiple pairs of shoes; you’re going to be sitting in a jeep all day, so one comfy pair of sandals will do. It’s unlikely you’ll have a chance to do a lot of reading unless you’ve specifically planned your trip to involve long stopovers.

I brought trail mix thinking I'd need it. I was wrong; the hotels provide enormous (if non-delicious) lunches every day.

There are two ways to plan your safari on the Northern Circuit. You can do it ahead of time, finding a company through guidebooks, recommendations, and the internet, or you can just turn up at Arusha and look around there. Each of these techniques has advantages and drawbacks. Planning ahead makes it more likely that you'll get bookings at the lodges you want (they fill up during high season), but can be scary, since it involves a certain leap of faith in the company's honesty and competence. Showing up in Arusha and looking allows you to check out the company more thoroughly, but it may take a while. The town itself is unpleasantly touristy, and you'll have to sort through a lot of competing offers of dubious quality.

We had a very limited amount of time for our safari, so we decided to make arrangements before arriving in Arusha. We started by deciding what kind of safari we wanted; we made a list of the parks we wanted to visit; and we decided on staying in lodges rather than tents.

We wanted lodges for two reasons: the more comfortable beds and air conditioning. The beds were fine, but in early August, air conditioning turned out to be both unavailable and unnecessary; from that point of view, camping would have been no problem. Otherwise, the decision rests on your budget and your preference in ambience. The price difference between the two is about $35 per person per day, $125 in lodges versus $90 camping. The lodges are, for the most part, large, luxury, or semi-luxury hotels, with grand buffet meals in cavernous restaurants and fleets of servants to carry your luggage for you. The campsites are campsites, with very basic plumbing facilities and no fences around them, so that, in principle, lions can wander into your camp at night. If I had it to do over again and all my traveling companions were up for it, I'd go for camping, which is a much more immersive experience.

Whether you go lodges or camping, food is provided. Vegetarian food is no problem in the lodges (there was once nothing on the buffet, but I asked and they brought me a curry, which was better than anything my carnivorous companions had). Kosher food should be OK too, depending on how strict you are; you can go veggie if you want to be on the safe side, but Tanzania's a Muslim country, and the Muslim dietary restrictions on meat resemble the Jewish ones. (I'm assuming that the locally available meat is all halal. If anyone knows I'm wrong, please tell me!)

Once we'd decided what we wanted, choosing a safari company turned out to be surprisingly easy. We checked some guide books for listings of companies in the low- to mid-range budget, and checked out their web pages. I emailed the companies with descriptions of what we wanted, and sorted them out based on how they responded. Some never answered or the email bounced, and some offered only set itineraries or tours with larger groups; these we threw out. Some were fully booked (we were doing the planning three weeks before the trip). Only one actually responded to everything I'd asked about in my email and offered complete information on pricing and itineraries. So that was the one for us: Nyika Treks, which you can contact through http://www.nyikatreks.com. We found them to be very professional and reliable; they answered our e-mails promptly and our questions completely.

Whatever you choose, you'll absolutely have to have a four-wheel vehicle, and a guide is required to enter Ngorongoro and Serengeti National Parks. Prices may be negotiable, but only up to a point, as there's a large park entry fee (up to $50 per person per day).

So that's the practical order of how you choose your safari. But the other thing that matters most, the thing that provides you with the questions to ask your safari company, is the choice of itinerary. There are a number of parks in the area of Arusha, each with a different character. In the course of a five-day safari, we went to Tarangire, Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara; this was a pretty intense travel schedule, as the distances between the parks take a while to cover. Most tour companies will suggest that you do something similar, a sort of tasting menu of the parks, but if you want a more leisurely pace, it's perfectly possible, and I thought it could be really nice to build in a few longer stopovers, which would allow you to spend one morning looking at the vista in a lodge or several hours watching the same group of animals (lions hunting, for example).

Each park has its own specialty. Tarangire is a plains ecosystem around a permanent river, and is supposed to be good for elephants. The Serengeti is a vast, vast plain teeming with pretty much every kind of wildlife. To get there from Tarangire takes most of the day, as the road passes through Ngorongoro Park, so it's important to spend two nights in Serengeti if you want to make the trip worthwhile. Ngorongoro Crater is spectacularly beautiful and has one of the densest populations of animals; it's also the only park in which it's possible to see rhinoceros (we didn't, but people do). It's also the most touristy of the parks; if you're bothered by seeing other jeeps, make your stay there a shorter one. Lake Manyara is known for its tree-climbing lions (we didn't see them there, but we did, surprisingly, in Tarangier) and one of the best bird-watching spots I've ever seen. There's also Arusha National Park, which we did not go to; I'm told that it's less touristy than most (as proven by the fact that we didn't go?), which sounds appealing.

We almost didn't visit the Masai. I get shivers when I think of it.

The second day of our safari was mostly driving: a long day in the jeep going from Tarangire to the Serengeti, a trip which takes you via the top of the Ngorongoro Crater. The one highlight of the day was to be a stop at Olduvai Gorge, the site where the Leakey Expedition discovered the earliest human remains. My father-in-law is a biologist, and the rest of us are interested in science, so we were very excited by the idea of getting a good look at the Gorge. We toured the museum, which costs an outrageous $10 per person extra, but contains casts of the famous footprints preserved in volcanic ash which the Leakeys discovered about forty miles away, as well as early hominid tools, a timeline of human evolution, and an extensive exhibit on the lives of the Leakeys themselves. It was all very well done, and we were delighted with it -- until we learned that by touring the museum we had missed our chance to hike down into the gorge itself, which it's only possible to do before 3:00 PM. This made us grouchy and resentful, and we piled back into our jeep feeling that our guide, Yusuf, hadn't understood what we were after. So when we pulled up a few miles away at an impenetrable-looking fence made out of thorn bushes, where Yusuf told us that we should pay another $10 each to a wizened old man in a red shawl to tour a Masai boma, we felt that we were being taken for a ride and almost didn't go in--it was a funny combination of reluctances, because we didn't want to be exploited but also felt that we were probably exploiting the Masai.

But I've studied the Masai, and my mother-in-law isn't one to miss a chance to see a new culture, so four of us decided to take the tour. We paid our money to the ancient headman, which he stowed somewhere under his red robes; he was in his seventies, entirely bald, and wore several bead bracelets along with an enormous digital watch. He brought us into the boma, explaining what we were looking at in Swahili, which Yusuf translated.

The boma consisted of two large circular thorn fences (that's eight-foot piles of thorn bush made into a fence), one within the other. The larger one was the perimeter of the village; the inner one was to contain the village cattle, although since we were there during the day all the cattle were out grazing, tended by the young boys. Between the two fences were the houses: oval structures about six feet tall, and made out of sticks plastered with a mixture of earth, ashes, and cow dung. The chief invited us into his: it was separated into four rooms with screens of woven sticks. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, and an entryway -- all in a space about six feet across. We sat in a circle around the fireplace, each in a different room but all within arm's reach of each other.

We asked the chief about what changes he'd seen during his lifetime. His answer: he learned about cloth for the first time when he went to school; before that the Masai wore skins. Salt, sugar, and tea were also innovations. We noticed that there were two plastic washing tubs and four metal bowls in the house; other than that and the plastic beads the Masai had woven into necklaces, there was nothing to tell us we hadn't slid back six thousand years. (Well, nothing but the fact that the Masai only came to Tanzania about 200 years ago.)

When we entered the boma, the villagers all gathered to sing to us. (They'd clearly been doing this routine for a while.) The women -- about fifteen of them, with blue capes over their red cloth wrapped around them as dresses, and wearing enormous, elaborate padlock-shaped bead earrings and necklaces which stood off their necks like the rings of Saturn -- formed one group, singing a ululating music and dancing a bobbing, ducking sort of dance, which they invited first me and then my mother-in-law to join. Meanwhile, the young men -- only about five of them were around, tall, draped in one piece of red cloth, with elaborate matted hairdos and carefully chosen bead jewelry -- formed a smaller circle and began their music and dancing, a deeper bass singing punctuated by occasional sudden, very tall solo leaps straight into the air and a loud thump on landing.

Who knows how long we stayed looking. Who knows what year it was when we were there. Who knows if it will ever change. It was tremendously moving; OK, it was put on for the tourists, but it felt amazingly authentic. It was exactly the dances as they’re described by the early European colonists; the dogs asleep in the small shadows were the same dogs; the flies (which were everywhere, on everyone’s faces) were the same flies, the smell of earth and wood smoke and age was the smell that has always been there.

The final piece of the tour was the village school, a thatched hut with nothing to seal the walls – just sticks holding up a roof, filled with wooden plank benches, with one ripply blackboard on a wall. We spoke with the teacher, who told us (via Yusuf) that he taught preschool, teaching the kids the alphabet and some simple phrases in English and Swahili (their native language is Masai). Although it was a Sunday, some kids were rounded up to perform for us: they shouted a welcome in English and sang the alphabet song, then craned their necks curiously to watch us as we asked questions: how long do they spend at this school? (Ages 5-7.) How long do they go to the next school? (ages 8-9, usually; it costs money after that.) What do they do for books? (The children are issued or buy books; they have them at home now.) Would you like these pens, and hey, we have some simple books in Swahili we bought to teach ourselves with, would you like those too? (Yes, please, thank you.) It was terrifying to think of how impossible it would be for one of these children to get a decent education, but on the other hand there was an exhilarating sense that here was a traditional tribe succeeding preserving its way of life. Goodness knows what the individuals would prefer; they didn’t tell us and we couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask.