East Africa – Arusha and the edge of the Ngorongoro Caldera – Tony Park

Posted on 1 February 2010

“The best pictures you take are the ones that you store in your mind,” said our Maasai driver-guide (as they’re known hereabouts) and cattle expert, Godwin.

We were standing at a lookout high above Tanzania’s famed Ngorongoro Caldera (one of the first things we learned from Godwin was that this natural arena is a caldera – craters are only in active volcanoes) and I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my gut there was no way I was going to be able to take a picture that could convey just how magnificent this place appeared from up above.

To back-track a bit, Mrs Blog and I had survived the drive back from Tsavo East to Mombasa, Kenya, and said goodbye to our friends and our less than impressive guide, Safari James, at Mombasa Airport.

Safari James crowned his stellar performance in Tsavo with a scenic tour of Mombasa’s open sewers and garbage dumps on his own special short cut to the airport. He needn’t have bothered as we were three hours early for our flight (attempts to convey this to him – that there was no rush – were met with the same smiles and blank stares we’d had when requesting more information about East African birds and mammals).

From Mombasa we flew Kenya Airways to Nairobi and from there we took an international flight in a Precision Air twin-engine turboprop aircraft to Kilimanjaro International Airport, near Arusha, Tanzania.

The only thing worth mentioning about this flight (we couldn’t see cloud-shrouded Kilimanjaro) was that it was the first and only time I’ve seen a scheduled flight leave half an hour early.

I had assumed that the pilot saw a window of opportunity and decided to take off sooner than planned once he knew all his passengers were on board but I later learned from a Tanzanian that Precision Air flights have been known to leave ahead of schedule with or without their full load. The woman in question had once shown up at Kilimanjaro International 90 minutes before departure to find the plane was already boarding!

Things didn’t get off to a great start in Tanzania.

The immigration rituals included a little added extra of a health official checking all passengers had been vaccinated against yellow fever and that their vaccination record books were in order. This is essential for entry to Tanzania, and it pays to check your expiry date, even if you’ve had the yellow fever shot (one woman on our flight was last seen angrily awaiting a booster shot at he airport).

I have a couple of cardinal rules when traveling, which I try not to break:

1. Don’t eat seafood more than 100km from where it’s been caught;
2. Always drink beer when the tap water is questionable, and
3. Never change money at an airport bureau de change.

For some stupid reason I decided to change AUD$200 into Tanzanian shillings while I waited for our driver-guide to materialize (no fault of his, there, as we landed half an hour early), at the seemingly handy bureau de change in the arrivals area.

I checked the blackboard in front of the teller and saw that the rate was 100 Tanzanian shillings (Tsh) to the ZA Rand, and 700 to the Australian dollar. Sounds all right, I said to myself. However, when I forked over my 200 Aussie dollars the woman behind the bullet proof glass tapped away at her calculator and told me I would be getting Tsh20,000.

OK, I’d had a couple of Tusker Lagers on the flight and I can’t add up for peanuts, but that didn’t sound right. “Excuse me, shouldn’t that be 140,000 shillings?” I asked the teller politely.

In fact, I pounded on the glass to get her attention while she was counting out the 20 grand and may have used a rude word, preceded by “What the…”.

“Oh, sorry,” the teller said in a bored voice, not meeting my eyes. If this was Tanzania I was already having flashbacks to Tsavo East and its non-value-for-money safaris.

Any satisfaction I’d felt for picking up the teller’s honest mistake/blatant crime was short lived. When Godwin met us (he was actually just outside the terminal), he informed me that I should have been getting between 1200 and 1300 Tanzanian shillings to the Aussie dollar. I have my cardinal rules for a good reason.

On the bright side, it became clear within about five minutes of sitting next to Godwin in his pop-top Land Cruiser that he and the company he worked for, Maasai Wanderings (www.maasaiwanderings.com) were in a totally different league to Safari James and his fellow drivers of Kamikaze zebra-striped minibuses.

As we drove through the twilight north towards Arusha town, Godwin managed to turn the discussion to the number of stomachs that cattle have, and the reasons why so many of them had died as a result of the unseasonally heavy rains that had followed a severe drought in Tanzania. The science was lost on me, but that was cool – I was tired, a little drunk, and, as I’ve said before I like my safari guides to be much smarter than me.

I’d met one half of the couple who own Masai Wanderings at an African travel expo in Australia. Donna, an Australian woman married to a Tanzanian guy, had invited Mrs Blog and I to come visit some time.

To be honest, when I’m traveling in Africa I much prefer it when I’m behind the wheel. I like self-drive safaris, in my own Land Rover, where the only person I can blame for bad driving or lack of local knowledge is me. However, I’d been convinced that it might be better to do the Crater (Caldera, Godwin corrected me, for the first of many times) and the Serengeti National Park with people who knew the area.

It took about 50 minutes to drive from Kilimanjaro Airport to the Safari town of Arusha, which is jumbled around the foot of Mount Meru. What can I say about Arusha? Not much – it’s your typical African town boasting your typical poor drainage, blaring ghetto blasters outside oddly named shops, suicidal minibus taxis (known as Dalla Dallas in Tanzania), and school children whose school uniforms miraculously manage to stay pristine clean and starched amidst all the mud, dust and dirt.

I knew nothing about where we were staying that first night (one of the pitfalls of embarking on a guided, as opposed to self-guided tour) because I hadn’t bothered to check out the link that Donna had sent me. The narrow, twisting dirt laneway that ran with muddy water (at least I hoped it was mud) between shanty houses and informal shops through what clearly seemed to be the ‘bad’ part of Arusha did not promise a happy ending on arrival.

Perhaps Godwin was, as well as being a self-taught expert on cows’ digestive systems, a particularly smooth-talking and well turned-out serial killer?

When the steel security gate rolled open it was as if I had been transported from Africa at its most chaotic to the back yard of a rather nice and tastefully appointed house in suburban Australia.

In a way, I had.

Donna notwithstanding, the last thing I expected was a “g’day” from the woman who met us as we climbed down from the something-spattered Land Cruiser.

Erica, the co-proprietor of Ahadi Lodge (www.ahadi-lodge.com) was from Brisbane, Australia. She’d come to Tanzania to be with her daughter, Fiona, who, like Donna, had also fallen for a local guy. Erica and Fiona run Ahadi Lodge, an extremely pleasant guest house, as a separate operation from the son-in-law’s safari business and their pride in the place was immediately obvious.

The room we were shown to had a funky, angular layout and was practical and spotless. Ahadi Lodge even has satellite TV and wireless internet access. The rooms open out on to a small but perfectly manicured lawn and a pristine pool. We arrived just in time for dinner and were blown away by the quality and creativeness of the menu. (No cooling buffet rubber chicken here – there’s a choice of mains, served at the table, plus a warming soup and a trendy desert).

Is it too corny, unreconstructed-neo-colonialist and condescending of me to describe Ahadi Lodge as an oasis of calm amidst the clutter of crazy Arusha? Yes. But there you go.

We started to realise Tanzania was special as soon as we cleared Arusha the next morning. The rather lush greenery of the mountain foothills soon gave way to wide open grassy plains that rolled away forever on either side of us.

The road north towards the Crater… err, Caldera… and the Serengeti was good, and so, generally, were the drivers. Even before we hit our first national park we started seeing game.

Godwin stopped to show us some Maasai Giraffe, which differ from their southern African cousins by having darker coats with neatly coloured-in patches. The pattern looked to me like that of an expertly tiled and grouted brown slate floor.

The giraffe were in the company of zebra and a few Maasai tribesmen and their cattle. All were following a corridor that these days links the Tarangire and Lake Manyara National Parks and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The giraffe were clearly used to traffic and people and when Godwin stopped I got out of the Cruiser to walk a little closer to them, something I’d be executed for in the Kruger National Park.

We passed the entry to Lake Manyara National Park and had a good view of it as we climbed steep and high up the outer wall of the Ngorongoro Caldera. The countryside changed quickly to dense bush and then full-on jungle, and we saw some olive baboons. These differ from the chacma baboon (of southern Africa) in that they are olive coloured (duh), and very hairy. They look like southern baboons wearing fur coats – kind of like affordable mountain gorillas, although not quite as majestic (they are baboons, after all, so they still eat pooh, steal food and have sex with anything that moves).

Godwin sorted the park entry fees at the entrance gate and Mrs Blog and I did the arithmetic for what it would cost us to bring our Land Rover back one day. It didn’t bear thinking about. I’ll talk about park fees in a later blog, but please be seated when you read that one.

For now, though, it was not time to think about money as Godwin stopped at a lookout on the edge of the Caldera wall. Below us was a natural amphitheatre roughly 10-15 kilometres in diameter, where the game of life is played out 24-7. You could see the whole show from up here, with a good pair of binoculars and a good guide to deliver the commentary.

Godwin started pointing out things immediately, while we tried to remember to breathe and to press the shutter release on our cameras. “Elephant, buffalo, black rhino…” he said, as he scanned the open floor of the Caldera and the edges of its salt lake.”

I switched from the 300mm lens to the 20mm wide angle, but it made no difference. I couldn’t capture the light or the sight or the feeling of finally being on the edge, literally, of one of the most famous, most dreamed-about safari destinations in Africa.

Would I, I wondered, be able to connect all those little dark dots Godwin was pointing out down there and have them form a picture that would be forever treasured in the photo album of my mind, or would I find the bottom of the caldera to be just be an over-priced cauldron bubbling with too many tourists, too many safari vehicles and too much hype?






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