Taking a Walk on the Wild Side in Tanzania

By: Jeanette Teh

 

With the largest concentration of wild animals in the world, Tanzania is the perfect destination to see “The Lion King” come to life.  This spectacular country is comprised of three vastly different landscapes –from highlands including Mount Kilimanjaro, great rift valleys in the northern and central regions, to islands and rolling plains on the eastern coast.

 

For those who choose to walk on the wild side on a safari tour, northern Tanzania provides the perfect gateway to see the “Big Five” (lion, rhinoceros, elephant, leopard, and buffalo).  Arriving at Kilimanjaro airport, your fellow passengers will likely be those adventurous types seeking to chase the adrenaline rush climbing the majestic mountain, which at 19,331 feet, is Africa’s highest mountain.

 

The town of Arusha, 60 kilometres (about an hour drive away) from the airport, is located just below Mount Menu and is surrounded by several famous national parks, making it the ideal base for your safari adventures.  Arusha has many little markets with friendly locals in traditional African dress balancing everything from baskets of fruit to pails of water on their heads (while anachronistically chatting on their mobile phones) calling out “Jambo” to greet you hello.

 

Lake Manyara National Park

At Lake Manyara National Park, a couple of hours drive away from Arusha, you will be greeted by many,  many baboons so hold onto your hat
s as most jeeps have open top roofs and these cheeky monkeys are eager to grab what they see. The park itself is relatively small (compared to other national parks in Tanzania) at approximately 300 square kilometres. There, giraffes, elephants, warthogs (“Poomba” of “The Lion King” fame), flamingoes, hippopotamuses, impala and dikdik (the latter two are deer-like animals) all call the park home.

 

Maasai Village

 

The route to the Serengeti from Lake Manyara takes you through beautiful plains with mountainous backdrops, dotted with various villages inhabited by the Maasai who are still practicing their age-old customs.  The Maasai are a semi-nomadic hunting tribe (where males are sent out to hunt at the age of fifteen) who also herd animals.

Upon arrival, you will be invited to join the women in a traditional dance and a pleasing rhythmic chant, so be prepared to get your dancing shoes on to stomp away with them!   After the welcome festivities, you will be taken on a tour of the village, starting with their huts made of acacia trees, cow dung, and mud. The huts are tiny, housing two “beds” (with a thin cow skin sheet) and a very small cooking area. The village we stopped comprised of twenty-four huts owned by two men and their twenty-four wives (yes, that would be twelve wives each).

The villagers have no access to water except to travel miles away with their cattle, although more recently, with tourism (they charge US$20 entrance each and sell hand-made jewellery), they are able to pay trucks to transport water to them on occasion.  The humble way of life of the Maasai really makes one appreciate the many luxuries most of us enjoy and take so much for granted.

 

Serengeti National Park

 

Travelling along a very bumpy road, you will arrive at the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania’s largest and most famous park spanning 14,763 square kilometers of protected area, consisting mostly of flat plains, some small forested areas, kopjes (Dutch for “rocky outcrops” which are essentially a bunch of rocks formed closely together, some of which are billions of years old), rivers, and little lakes.  There were also a lot of acacia trees (cutely shaped like umbrellas). The Serengeti, which comes from the Maasai word “Siringet” meaning “the place where land goes on forever”, is sparsely populated with animals at times although there is always an abundance of gazelle fawning about.  The park’s massive size (the Serengeti is composed of seven reserves) necessitates spending a few days of exploration (don’t worry, there is a lovely lodge close by so you will not have to camp amidst the prowling wildlife).
Hopefully, you will be fortunate enough to have an eagle-eyed tour guide/driver to spot and name the animals, especially for those of us who are far less observant who may excitedly identifying inanimate termite mounds, rocks or trees as deer, elephants or storks. We were lucky enough to spot two sleeping lions who then woke up to mate very, very quickly right in front of all these jeeps filled with gawking and camera-snapping tourists, a mommy cheetah and her four adorable cubs walking right by, a leopard in a distant tree eating its kill, lots of zebras, ostriches, storks, hyenas, vultures, baby lion cubs in a distance near Simba Kopjes (“Lion Rock”), colourful birds, parrots, elephants, two hippos fighting, giraffes, a lioness stalking a warthog from a distance as she couldn’t veer far from her little cubs.  On our way out of the Serengeti, we also saw a wildebeest migration from a distance.

 

Ngorongoro Crater

 

On the way to Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest unbroken unflooded volcanic caldera, you will drive by Oldupai/Olduvai Gorge, the “cradle of civilization” where Mary and Louis Leakey discovered the earliest known specimen of the human genus in the 1950’s.

 

The crater was formed two to three million years ago when a volcano exploded and collapsed onto itself. It is 610 metres deep and is just stunningly beautiful, filled with forests, lakes and plains.  The view from atop the crater will simply take your breath away.  The tour company certainly saved the best for last.

The road down to the crater is seriously bumpy and you will likely meet with a mini traffic jam full of excited tourists trying to drive past the Maasai boy shepherds and their herds of cattle who block the narrow roads. After an hour of massive head bobbing, you will arrive at the bottom of the crater, which is about 300 square kilometers in size and home to about 25 to 30,000 animals.

 

Unlike the Serengeti, there are animals everywhere, surrounding your car at times as it is very densely populated. Most of the animals here are grazing herbivores like gazelles, zebras, and warthogs, but we did see a few hyenas, hippos, elephants (which did not oblige us by spraying water at each other or holding each other’s tails in a parade), jackals, and, from a distance, caught glimpses of the elusive black rhinoceros.

 

This article was originally published in 2010 in bazaar.

 

Jeanette Teh is a legal and corporate trainer, adjunct (assistant) professor, non-practicing lawyer, writer, coach, and founder of Kaleidoscopic Sky.  You can find more about her at http://linkedin.com/in/jeanette-teh-601115.