13. Homo Touristus (continued)

The guesthouse that Prince Kili had booked us into was not the classiest of establishments. In the morning Pat went to take a shower and a young boy who had seen him leave the room crept in through the door. He approached the table stealthily, his eyes widening at the valuables we had carelessly distributed there. He was unaware of my presence in the second bed, so I had the element of surprise as I sprang up, screaming a string of invective. This advantage was swiftly lost, however, as I tripped in the mosquito netting and sprawled in a tangle to the floor. By the time I had disengaged myself, cursing, the culprit had long fled, empty-handed . He was, I assumed, the same villain who had stolen my watch from the shower the previous night. Considering the punctuality that we had encountered so far in Tanzania, I had decided that this was probably no great loss, but our passports and travellers cheques would have been a different matter.

Prince Kili had arranged our safari through an Arusha-based company called AA Tours, and their representative was only forty five minutes late picking us up from the hotel, which by our recent experiences was not bad at all. He drove us to the AA Tour offices, where we waited for them to collect the other travellers on our safari. This turned out to take longer than anticipated, because, it was explained later, their car ran out of petrol half way, but eventually the other members of our safari were assembled: two Americans, Geoff and Charles, and an English girl, Kate. The AA Tours man gave us a sheet with our itinerary on it for us to peruse.
‘Hold on. This can’t be right,’ I said. The schedule for the third day of our ‘Three Day Safari’ simply read ‘Drive back to Arusha.’
I approached the man at the desk. ‘But we’ve paid for three days seeing the animals, not two days seeing the animals and one day driving back again.’
Kate joined in with my complaint. Soon enough a full scale argument was in swing, with all of us demanding that the third day was spent on a game drive in Ngorongoro Crater, and eventually the man capitulated and altered our itinerary accordingly.
‘Swine,’ muttered Kate. ‘He’s just trying to save on the park fees.’
The drive to Lake Manyara took longer than expected due to a breakdown on route, which, I was not surprised to learn later, would not be our last. The driver Sunguru and the cook George set about changing the tyre, but having done so seemed to have difficulty getting the jack to go down. It was obviously a problem they’d had before, though, because they knew what to do: Sunguru climbed into the driver’s seat and stepped on the accelerator, and the vehicle started to rock back and forth on the jack, until eventually it had enough force to drive right off, the back wheels landing on the ground with a thud and sending stones spinning up behind them.

Over the last few million years, the hidden depths beneath the earth’s crust have been particularly busy in this part of Africa. As well as spewing forth the volcanoes of Meru and Kilimanjaro they have also, further to the West, made Tanzania’s contribution to one of our planets most extraordinary features: The Great Rift Valley, a beautiful scar across the face of the continent. This runs from Turkey down to Malawi, passing through Israel, The Gulf of Aqaba, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania on the way, while a western rift occupies parts of Zaire, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and, again, Tanzania.
‘It’s fuckin’ huge, man,’ said Geoff. ‘I mean, it’s visible from space. There’s no missing this baby.’ He leaned round from the passenger seat, his arm slung across the back of the neckrest. ‘You’ve got movements in the earth’s crust, right, tectonic movements. When they compress, you get mountains, but when they move apart they riiip that shit up.’
I like the word tectonic. It comes from the Greek for carpenter, and I imagine a temperamental old worksmith in the bowels of the earth, bashing around the plates above him with his hammer; when he creates two or more parallel strike-slip faults, the crustal rock in between sinks and the result is a rift valley.
He started bashing around beneath this stretch of land around 40 million years ago, during the Eocene period. But the ensuing geological changes did not create a single, neat valley. They caused thousands of fractures and step-faults, a splintering mass of fissures and cracks; it is all of these in composite, and the plains, escarpments, volcanoes and lakes among them, which make up the Great Rift Valley. And it was into this that our decrepit Land Rover crawled, in search of Lake Manyara.

As soon as we entered the gate to the national park, Charles produced an enormous pair of binoculars and a well-thumbed bird book.
‘I’m a bird-nerd. What you English guys would call a twitcher.’
‘We would?’ said Pat.
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Charles, unhearing. ‘A hammerkop! And look, a ground hornbill!’
Like a boy in a sweet shop, Charles could not turn his head fast enough, there was so much to catch his eye, and he provided a commentary for the rest of us that was far more knowledgeable than our guide’s occasional utterance of ‘Over there. Bird.’ We saw an incredible variety, from big ugly maribu storks, scrawny vultures and soaring eagles down to the tiniest, brightest kingfisher whose colourful feathers I could see gleaming in the sun through my binoculars. As we drove along the dirt tracks that crossed the park we encountered baboons, impala, giraffe, zebra, and majestic, ponderous elephants moving gracefully through the bush.
One elephant crossed the track in front of the car, and turned to look at us with his old eyes. His dry, leathery skin was creased and lined with fine shadows by the afternoon sun, like a relief-map of some vast, dusty land. He seemed to wink at us, then turned and disappeared into the trees.
The hippos were relaxing in their pool, with just their nostrils, eyes and backs protruding above the water’s surface, farting and belching away, and giving enormous yawns.
‘I can see why they’re tired.’ I said. ‘It must be exhausting lying in the mud all day.’
‘No, it’s not tiredness.’ said Charles. ‘When they open their mouths like that, it’s a sign of aggression.’
I took a step backwards.

The lake itself was shallow, due to the current drought, and a million flamingos waded in the warm alkaline water, feeding on the algae that flourished there. A flamingo on his own is a fairly ridiculous sight, with its out of proportion body parts and extravagant colouring, but put thousands of them together and you have a stunning vision: a vast mass of subtle pink, with each bird a graceful component of a soft, shimmering whole.
As dusk fell we headed off to the nearby campsite where George cooked us up some soup and stew, and the rest of the evening was spent at the nearby ‘Red Banana Bar’ for extensive sampling of the appropriately named ‘Safari’ beer.
The following morning I was relieved to be making an early start for the Ngorongoro Crater: the cramped tent I shared with Pat had been fumigated to such an extent by our upset stomachs that remaining inside it was no longer an option. We left Mayara behind us and drove for hours through scorched, barren countryside, as elegant, rugged and red as the traditionally-dressed Masai who herded their cattle along its roads.
Traditionally, the Masai tribe regarded cattle as a gift from God, as they provided all the requisites for living: food from their meat and milk, leather from their hide, spoons from their ribs. Cow’s urine was used for cleaning implements, and dung doubled as polyfiller when repairing the Masai’s huts.
‘Man, they love those cows,’ said Geoff.
The relationship between the Masai and cattle is as strong today, but life is harder now, and many have to supplement their pastoral lifestyle by posing for tourist photographs in traditional garb. Once feared and respected for their ferocity in combat, they are now reduced to bobbing up and down by the side of the road and charging the passing safari vehicles to snap them.
Of course, the Masai were never really as savage as their reputation claimed. They had good PR men in the form of the Arab traders, who exaggerated the Masai’s bloodthirstiness in an attempt to keep out the Europeans and protect their own role as brokers. But it is depressing nonetheless to see them lining the road, pleading with the tourists.

Our destination was one of the largest caldera in the world. Two million years ago a fierce volcano erupted, surging upwards to around the height that Mount Meru stands today. But it lacked the momentum to sustain itself: the pressure dropped and the upper portion of the cone slumped back, caving in on itself. The base of the cone that remained formed an amphitheatre which now acts as a natural sanctuary to a host of wildlife, and the Masai called it Ngorongoro, which means ‘extra down’.
We drove around the crater’s vast, dry floor like an ant crawling across the bottom of a bowl. The sun shone brightly, and the odd cloud shadow dappled the ground and surrounding hills. Three demented ostriches ran in a line through the low, dry grass and a jackal trotted along, looking around him suspiciously. In a clearing of their own, two pewter-coloured rhinoceroses lay in the sun, leaning against one another. Several kilometres away, nearer the crater rim, a trio of lions succeeded in ignoring the surrounding posse of safari vehicles.
The Rift Valley has been dubbed ‘The Cradle of Mankind’ since Mary Leakey found the first hominid fossil in the Olduvai Gorge in 1959, not far from where we were now. The hominids were erect apes, of which there were two kinds, Astrolopithecus and Homo, and it is from the latter that man evolved: Homo Habilis gave way to the larger, more intelligent Homo Erectus, who in turn was replaced by Homo Sapiens. Both Erectus and Sapiens spread to Asia, and from there humanity made its way to Europe, the New World and Australia.
And now, Sapiens’ distant descendants, Homo Touristus, crowded around Africa’s most majestic animal.
‘You’ll find the lions easily enough,’ a backpacker in Moshi had told me. ‘Just look for all the other Jeeps.’
A dozen telephoto lenses zoomed and clicked, like the paparazzi at a premiere, but the lions remained oblivious. The male, who was nearest to me, flicked his tail. His side rose and fell with his breath, like a soft pair of bellows. He didn’t have to move an inch: just lying there he exuded charisma and held his spectators in awe.

It is a common mistake to assume that because the oldest fossils have been found in the Rift Valley at Olduvai Gorge, this must have been the birthplace of humanity. It is easy to picture the gorge as a literal Eden, a womb from which man emerged, blinking, into the sunlight of the plains. But he may, of course, have existed at an earlier time at some other site where we have not been fortunate enough to have clues of his presence preserved for us.
I prefer to ignore this possibility, for I like the idea that I am passing through the land of my earliest ancestors. And the extreme and varied environments of the Rift Valley surely represent a perfect training ground for the rest of the planet. As Sinatra’s earliest ancestor must have grunted, ‘If I can - make it here, I’ll make it - anywhere ...’

That night we slept out on the crater rim, with a guard to protect the camp from any wandering animals. In the morning Geoff and Charles, who had booked a six day safari, set off with George and Sunguru for the Serengeti, and we were collected for our last day by a different driver in a different vehicle, both of which were hopeless. The car had a broken roof and the driver, Louis, was a surly, rude man who seemed resentful at having to be there at all. It also turned out, when we were stopped by park officials, that he had not paid park fees for the day, and so had to report to their offices to pay a fine. We went for a morning game drive to the parts of the crater that we had not visited yesterday, and Louis sulked the whole way, refusing to answer our questions about the animals.
The journey back to Arusha was no smoother. We suffered two flat tyres, and just as we were resuming our journey had to stop and swap vehicles with another ‘AA Tours’ car that we passed heading in the other direction. It was on its way to the crater, but was in an even worse state than ours and didn’t look as though it would last the trip, so they decided to transfer their passengers to our car and leave us with theirs to return to Arusha. Just swapping cars would have been easy enough, but they also wanted to transfer petrol between the two vehicles, which they attempted to do by siphoning it through a piece of tubing. One of the men sucked on the tube until the petrol started flowing through, and then hurriedly inserted it into the other tank.
In order to get more petrol out, however, they decided to tilt the car so its fuel would gather in the corner of the tank and be easier to siphon. They reversed it into a rut until it leant to a sufficient angle.
‘And now it is stuck,’ explained Louis when we questioned the delay. ‘We must wait for someone to come and tow us out.’
The whole situation was a joke, and provided much entertainment for me and Pat and for half of the nearest village, who gathered at the roadside to watch the show.
Just before reaching Arusha we suffered another flat in our new car, and I pulled out the cigarettes yet again while Louis got to work. I never failed to be cheered by the name of Tanzania’s principal cigarette brand, ‘Sportsman’, a title only slightly less ironic than Malawi’s ‘Life’ cigarettes (‘Enjoy LIFE!’ the advert reads, ‘Smoke LIFE cigarettes’).
Once the tyre was changed our car refused to start, but we pushed it along the road until the engine stuttered to life, and eventually we arrived back at the ‘AA Tours’ office, where some tension developed because we all refused to give a tip. Kate seethed at the man behind the desk, listing her complaints, but all he had to say was ‘Do made sure to recommend us to all your friends, yes?’
‘You must be joking!’ she exploded. ‘I’m travelling all the way down to Zimbabwe, and everybody I meet on the way I’m going to warn not to book a safari with AA Tours.’