The Road to Serengeti

The rain and lightning were spectacular last night. As I've mentioned, we were on the shoulder of the rain season. This could have made for a miserable tour. But so far, we have experienced rain only at night. It has woken me up in the middle of the night, but it has not ruined any of our days.

On the contrary, as I mentioned regarding Taranguire National Park, the rain has helped by making the roads damp which kept the dust down. I'm told in the dry season, which is the more popular tourist season, the combination of dry roads and ten times the number of Land Cruisers creates a big dust problem. People have needed to take their cameras in for a deep cleaning after the safari.

After a lively breakfast, we started our long journey up and over Ngorongoro crater. Originally, we were to see the crater today. But that would mean getting to the Serengeti late in the day. We would see the crater on the way back.

My Lovely Wife and I were in Joshua's Land Cruiser. (We changed vehicles every day.) He is a Maasai junior elder, is very proud of his heritage and happily shares stories of his culture. Joshua spotted two Maasai teenage boys near the road and stopped to tell us about them. They were wearing black clothes and had white masks painted on their faces. They had just gone through a rite of passage, circumcision.

For the Maasai, circumcision is a decision the individual makes. By going through this test, one is starting down the path that leads to being a warrior and then an elder in the community. This is not a light decision. If one doesn't go through the circumcision ceremony, no woman will ever marry him. But deciding to be circumcised can be a death sentence. No pain killer will be given. If you cry, and the Maasai have their own definition of what crying means, you are killed on the spot. If you don't cry, you can bleed to death.

We had asked how it was that the Maasai men could have so many wives. The death rate from circumcision throws the ratio of men and women off. There is a shortage of men. When a boy has completed circumcision, he dresses in black, and paints his face white. The latter is a mask meant to prevent people from recognizing him. It's thought that if a woman recognized a freshly circumcised boy, evil would kill him.

The teenagers have been standing around the Land Cruiser while Joshua told us about them. They were hoping we would want to photograph them. In Tanzania, you can be required to pay for the privilege of photographing a person. You should always ask first.

In 1959, after 40 years of digging, Mary Leaky found a skull in Olduvai Gorge. The skull was named Zinjanthropus, or simply Zinj. The scientific community is still debating whether to classify Zinjanthropus as an Australopithecus, or a distinct genus.

The Leakys had come to Olduvai Gorge to dig for early tools, which had been originally discovered by a German named Wilhelm Kattwinkel. The name should be Oldupai Gorge which is named for the Oldupai plant. But Kattwinkel who wrote about the location misspelled the name, and Olduvai Gorge is what has stuck in most of the books.

There was a small sign on the side of the road from Ngorongoro to Serengeti which pointed down another dirt road and announced the Gorge. We arrived at a small museum. Most of us headed for the Happy Room, the tour guides' phase for water closet.

In about a week, I would learn that the small museum at the gorge had about a quarter of the information that was in the Tanzanian National Museum. That's how important the gorge is. Some have called Olduvai the cradle of mankind.

The parking lot, museum, and Happy Room sit on a cliff looking down at a geological feature often called "The Monolith". The name reminds you of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Early man pushed to evolve by God by means of the strange black monolith.) But it is not a monolith. It's much more like the cliffs of the Grand Canyon made up of many strata. Sitting in a shady area, looking at The Monolith, we ate lunch while a curator gave us a short lecture before taking us into the gorge where Leaky's discovery was made.

The gorge was hot. We noticed there were large chunks of quartz laying on the ground. Could there be gold in them thar hills? Near the site of the skull's discovery was a marker commemorating it. The concrete structure holding the marker was covered in fossils, animal skulls, and interesting rocks. On the exact location of the discovery, Leaky had placed a concrete cube. H6 1959 had been drawn in to it while the concrete was still wet.

Once on the Serengeti Plain we saw wall-to-wall wildebeest. Joshua estimated there were five to eight hundred thousand in sight. Also in attendance where Thomson's gazelle, ostrich, zebra, and jackals. We were, of course, going nuts with our cameras.

When we arrived at the camp, I understood why the tour company had moved the timing of the visit to the crater. It was already late in the afternoon. We would camp in the national park for four nights. Since we were in lion country, we were not allowed to freely roam, especially after dark.

The big surprise was the luxury camping we were being treated to. Each tent had a flush toilet and a shower. The water supply was brought to each tent by hand, and the waste water was dropped into a leach field. Since this camp was not permanent, once our visit was over, it was broken down, and our underground waste would have time to decompose before another camp was built here.

At dinner I discovered Coca-Cola in Tanzania was made with real sugar and tasted much better than back home. This might have been camping in the middle of nowhere, but it was nicer than many hotels I've been to in major cities.