Out of Africa, Over the Rainbow

On our last day In Zanzibar, while sipping our first cup of coffee after an early morning beach walk to greet the sunrise, sitting on a deck gently rocked by the lapping of waves beneath it, a spectacular rainbow swathed the sky, plunging into the horizon of the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. It was visible only for a brief moment as the rising sun swallowed it swiftly, but it gave much excitement to the moment as our adventure in Africa was coming to an end. A stripe of many colors, how fitting an image to paint the picture of the memories of these last 2 weeks.

I arrived in Nairobi at 8:30 PM of the next day, East Africa being 7 hours ahead of EST, after a journey of 8500 miles and an 18-hour flight from Atlanta via Amsterdam. I barely slept, watched 4 movies en route, and had wine with the 4 meals I consumed on board. Furthermore, the wait for my luggage and visa processing was chaotic and very long. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was very basic and merely functional, a stark departure from the gleaming and entertaining Schiphol where a layover is welcomed because of the many amusements offered such as the casino, trendy shops loaded with international goods, movable exhibits of the Rijksmuseum, at this time showing art from the Dutch golden age such as Jan Vermeer and his Girl with the Pearl Earrings, massage lounge, internet stations, numerous restaurants, bars and coffee shops, sleek toilets and showers, a lounging area where you can stretch and snooze, banks and currency exchange and ATM’s, and attentive and customer-centered service . I was exhausted as I took a taxi to my hotel. However, less than 5 minutes on the road to the city center, the taxi headlight shone on a magnificent black and white striped horse standing and facing us, a Zebra! It was so unexpected and so amazing that all fatigue left me. I knew then that I was going to have a great time.

Our Kenya and Tanzania experience covered over 2200 km. in 10 days trucking and camping from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam and 4 days in Zanzibar, where we got to stay in hotel rooms in Stone Town and a beach resort in Nungwi. Driving to our destination was long and bumpy and dusty, but we got to experience the immense diversity that East Africa has to offer. Many places in our itinerary were not accessible by air, train or bus. The custom-fitted Mercedes overland truck we used was a veritable hotel on wheels. The space under the seats were built with storage bins where we can unpack our luggage and safely lock them. The back rests were built with shelves which stored groceries and dry foods and condiments. The outside panels of the truck had shelves and storage under it and it also housed the water tank, fuel tank, coal bin and the camp stools and tents. When we open camp the side panels go up and all things are on hand for making dinner. Peter, our camp assistant did most of the cooking and heavy cleaning but we all took turns to help with chores. It was a novelty for me to be camping and I didn’t know what to expect. The first night, after driving down the escarpment of the Rift Valley, we pitched tent on the edge of Lake Naivasha. I layed awake listening to strange sounds and sensing the presence of living things outside my tent. I was told the next morning that hyenas and hippos were in the vicinity. The trip I booked was midway between the really basic camping and the luxury safari. I figured the basic was too rough and the luxury, aside from being very expensive, will not offer the authentic experience of the wilderness. We camped in organized campsites except for 2 nights in the wild, where there were absolutely no amenities that we had to forego showers. In organized campsites there were showers and toilets and electricity, and some have bars. A few have upgrades for basic lodging with en suite bath which I availed myself of whenever offered. Camping got old with me very quickly. One upgrade was in the farm campsite in Kembu which was a charming 1 ½ story cottage with a twin bedroom on the main level and a queen loft with a veranda. I shared this with 2 crazy guys from Vancouver. Our cook didn’t serve brewed coffee which I missed terribly, so it was a treat to have a kitchen where I brewed fresh Kenyan coffee for the 3 of us. In Mikadi, near Dar es Salaam, the upgrade was a palm-thatched beach hut. Here breaking waves lapped at my doorstep, the sea breeze caressed me to sleep and the warm sunrise woke me up in the morning. In Kilimanjaro, the upgrade was a cottage built in colonial times with extensive grounds planted with bougainvillas and hibiscus and where there was a birdman who was nursing an orphaned falcon with raw meat, and a large bar with cushioned couches to lounge in.

Exodus operates from the UK and most of the 15 travelers were from there. Four were from London, 2 couples from Southampton, one from Birmingham, one from Scotland, 4 from Vancouver, and I from the US. Our trip co-leaders were a young Caucasian couple from Zimbabwe and our camp assistant and cook, Peter, is an African from Tanzania. Peter was amazing in the camp kitchen. Without a Cuisinart or an oven he prepared pureed soups, mashed peas and vegetables, and even baked a cake.

At first camp I identified my travel buddies, the Truckin’ Thrashers. They’re a motley group of comedians who needed a female audience so their excesses at scatological and lewd allusions will not descend into the gutter. There was the monologist whose string was played masterfully by the artful picker and aided in harmony by the sidekick. The ensemble was completed by the passionate force of our man from Puglia. We sat around late into the night after everyone had zipped themselves into their sleeping bags cracking up around the campfire or in the bar. We had been scolded about propriety and to mind our manners. I’ve been around enough with guys like these, having been regularly recruited to be the 4th man in a golf foursome, or to fill in at poker or mahjong, or just to be the ear for their stories when the going at parties gets boring. The jokes and the laughs are all about the same things, to conquer sexual anxieties and homophobia and to titillate with erotic fantasies. I smile at them with indulgence even if I’m tempted to wash their mouths with soap, because in their other lives, away from the guy group, they are quite lovable men. I’ll remember them fondly, for they made me feel special on this trip and the pleasure was mine.

Jambo! Karibu! Hello! Welcome! in Swahili. From Nairobi we drove down to the Rift Valley on bumpy pot-holed roads passing the shanty suburbs teeming with activity of the market on Sunday. Kenya looks very poor. I’m reminded of the squatter district in Tondo, with its dirt-floored huts made of corrugated aluminum and salvaged construction materials. Everyone on the street greeted us. Children waved and ran after the truck laughing in merriment. The people are very friendly. However they have also learned from the tourists. In cities and tourist areas they are intrusive and accost you with offerings of service or goods for sale. I got lost in the labyrinthine alleys of Zanzibar and I asked a little girl about 11 or 12 years old for directions and she asked for money first before showing me my way. She pissed me off so I gave her only half of what I intended. On the other hand one of us left a camera in the Land Rover in Ngorongoro, and the African guide returned it safely, but the taxi driver on the way to Dar airport quoted 15000 shillings when I engaged him which I verified clearly, then tried to rip me off by demanding 50000 when I got off. I prevailed.

The Rift Valley grabs you breathless. It was formed 20 million years ago by a violent tear of the Arabian and African tectonic plates and ripped the earth from Syria to Mozambique. In its wake volcanoes and lakes and mountains and vast plains were formed. Serengeti, the endless plains or siringit, as the Masai calls it, is an ocean of undulating golden grass from horizon to horizon and beyond, as big as Belgium, as big as Ohio. Its surface is dotted by kopjes, charcoal gray volcanic rock outcroppings that take on fanciful shapes and precarious positions as they are molded by changing temperatures through the millenniums. The immense landscape of grass is relieved by the graceful spreading crown of acacia trees. It is the season of migration. Around January and February 1.6 million wildebeests, and hundreds of thousands of zebras, gazelles, impalas, topis, waterbucks, hartebeests, buffaloes, warthogs, and giraffes march from Masai Mara in Kenya to Serengeti and Ngorongoro in Tanzania following the rains to graze in the new vegetation and mate and give birth. Later in the year the reverse trip occurs as the rains turn north. It is dazzling to drive amongst these wild animals and see them up close and personal. There are wildebeests everywhere. They are massed in front of you and behind you and against the horizon you can see lines of thousands of them trudging along in a file, following the one in front of them from nose to tail. They didn’t bother us and seemed not to be bothered by us. They gave way for the truck to pass through. We came upon a family of giraffes, lumbering and very tall and very colorful feeding on acacia trees and sucking water from the tall cactus. Click and whirr, the cameras shoot. It is fatal for them to lower their heads so they cannot drink from the ground. We camped in the wild and had an early morning drive before the sun is up to spot the predators as they stalk their prey and make their kill. One has to know the habits of these magnificent animals higher up in the food chain to know where to look for them. We were rewarded with 2 hyenas finishing up after a lion kill of an impala. Meanwhile vultures were silently and patiently hovering by or perching still on treetops, vigilant, ready to swoop as soon as the hyenas had their fill. In a moment we heard shrieks and the rush of wings. About 20 vultures swooped into the abandoned carcass in a feeding frenzy. In the distance the lion that made the kill was walking away in a relaxed stride, looking for a cool spot under an acacia tree to rest and sleep, his hunger satiated for the next 3 days. Our guide spotted for us a solitary leopard up in a tree. Jackals and more lions and hyenas completed our morning. We felt fulfilled seeing a kill here and other evidence of it with abandoned carcasses of downed wildebeests and antelopes, but in the alleys of Zanzibar we were repulsed and turned away from a cat feeding on its kill of an alley rat.

The Rift Valley has many lakes and we visited the fresh water lake Naivasha and had a boat ride to view hippos and a variety of birds. We identified the fish eagle, ibis, kingfisher, various sea gull and pelicans, superb starlings, sparrows, an owl and a flock of the weird huge bird, the maribu stork. We visited Elsamere, on the other side of Lake Naivasha, the former home of Joy Adamson, of “Born Free” fame, now a conservation center, and we had tea on its lawn, where colobus monkeys stand alert to steal our crumpets or playfully grin and make faces at us. In lake Nakuru, a soda lake, we came upon the dazzling sight of thousands of pink flamingos feeding on its shores swathing the edge of the lake with a ribbon of pink. There were mean rhinos in the near distance, and we had to walk behind the cover of the truck to get on shore to get close to the flamingos. We had lunch high on a kopje, and had a sweeping panoramic view of all these grandeur. We didn’t have to spend $400 on a balloon ride over Serengeti to experience this breathtaking vista, as 2 of us did and they missed all the excitement of viewing a lion kill up close. We saw the rock hyrax, a tiny strange rodent-like animal, the nearest relative of the elephant, believe it or not! And elephants, we saw herds of them, feeding on acacia trees and bulldozing the landscape.

We camped for a night on the banks of Lake Victoria, the 2nd largest fresh water lake in the world, next to Lake Superior, its size as big as Ireland, and bordered by 3 countries, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. It’s the source of the headwaters of the Nile. With a glass of wine we pondered the romance of its waters flowing through the legendary river in the land of the pharaohs as we watched its spectacular sunset unfold before us.

We left Serengeti to drive to Ngorongoro, a collapsed crater 16 km wide with steep walls 600 meters high. We camped at the rim of the crater before descending in 5-man land-rovers early the next morning. As we opened camp 3 zebras galloped across our site and hyenas laughed and kept us awake all night. But the night was magnificent with the pitch black sky and brilliant constellations so clear with shooting stars drawing a bright flash across the horizon. I’m reminded of Van Gogh’s swirling starry night. We descended the crater in the early morning mist and caught the sunrise peeking out of the caldera’s rim and illuminating the crater with its lake below in muted surreal light. Ahh, I have no care in the world. I can live like the Masai who are allowed to graze and water their cattle herd in the Ngorongoro reserve. The Masai man leads his cattle from the village to the water every morning, lays in the shade and wait for every animal to finish grazing, then herd them back to the village at night, to repeat the same thing everyday. The women remain in the village and build their mud and dung huts, cook, gather wood and fetch water and tend the children. On second thought, I take back my wish.

Ngorongoro is a natural zoo with about 100,000 animals living permanently there and swelling in numbers during migration, with the arrival of the herbivores, wildebeests, et al. The elephant population is old, all males, as the females stayed up to be with the children, as once down they cannot go up the steep walls of the crater. Similarly there are no giraffes. It is disconcerting to see everyone here, land-rovers in huge numbers darting here and there in stalk of animal specimen, unlike in the Serengeti where it’s so vast you seldom see anyone else with you. There were 3 van-loads of Orientals and I was curious so I inquired and they were Koreans. If a party spotted anything of interest it was relayed to the guides in other vehicles and everyone scrambled to the site. It was gridlock. It spoiled the experience for me, but it illustrates the dilemma for tourism in this country. It is a poor country and needs dollar exchange revenue badly, it has limited habitable land, and population is growing fast, yet they have reserved vast wild parklands for protection, for the rest of the world to experience, for there is no place on earth like this, unchanged from the day of the big bang or from when god created it, depending on your persuasion. It could be the birthplace of humankind, based on finding “Lucy” near here.
We paused at the hippo pool for lunch and were warned to guard our meal from the black Kites, scavenger birds who had learned to steal the lunches of tourists. I barely lowered myself to sit on a driftwood under a tree when a Kite swooped from nowhere and ripped the 2 sandwich bags from my hands nearly amputating my fingers. “Shit, there goes my lunch!” Later on I was still fuming as I told the story, when something dropped at my feet. It was one of the bags, with a piece of bread crust still in it, and the bird was over my head up there in the tree, amused I’m sure at my expense, and then I felt something trickling down my legs. It was the bird’s chalky guano, its excrement! Such nerve, I was really dissed.

It’s a long drive to Kilimanjaro but I was filled with excitement. I recall Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the movie with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner, which I saw as an adolescent in the Philippines, and I fell in love with it! I had yearnings then of going to Africa, and to see the world, and there I was, right in its bosom. I had to climb Kili. It is the highest free-standing mountain in the world at 19,335 ft (5895 m), rising from the hot savannah and rolling plains of the Great Rift Valley to its frigid snow-covered peak. One can climb it without mountaineering skills but one has to be fit and can stand sustained running for half an hour, for the altitude can be a killer. I never acclimatized to the low oxygen tension climbing only to 2700 m, up to Mandara base camp, in the Marangu route. It takes 3-4 hours to reach Mandara, and I was huffing and puffing and stopping every 20 steps for the last 30 minutes of reaching the camp, to catch my breath. Pole pole, slowly in Swahili, that’s how you finish. I decided right then and there, never mind my romantic notions of the mountain, that I will not return to climb my dear Kili to its snow-capped peak after all. The descent was a cinch. I was comfortable with my breathing, there was a refreshing drizzle, and I was able to observe and enjoy the semitropical lushness and beauty along the way.

By this time, after 10 days of camping, we were weary and ready to relax on the beach in Zanzibar. The drive was long, through sisal and coffee and tea plantations. We got to view the lush countryside before descending to sea level and confronting the heat and humidity, but a plane trip would have been better as there’s an airport between Kili and Zanzibar.
We reached the port of Dar es Salaam, a busy city teeming with people and honking vehicles. Up until this point we encountered only occasional trucks and buses on the road. There are no private cars on the highway in Africa. The locals walked to their destinations, long walks sometimes on bare feet. From Dar we took a 2-hour ferry ride to cross the channel to Zanzibar. The ferry was packed, there were custom checks and bag inspections, the locals elbow their way through and do not queue, and the population stinks with a peculiar body odor which gave me a headache. We were soaked with sweat as we had to dress covering our knees and arms, in deference to the custom of the majority Muslim population on the coast. We were held in an airless packed compartment, 6 to a row, and the sailing was choppy than usual, we were told, I needed to breathe. I got out of my seat and stood on the deck among the crates and bags and chickens in cages. Sa-id, the ticket conductor invited me to the bow of the ferry where there’s better view and seating, where I could sit on a stair and face the horizon ahead, among the crates, and bags, and chicken in cages. On the way to the bow I had to pass through the galley and got to meet the captain and the officers. Captain Chile,etc. was chatty and we had a long conversation, and that’s when I learned Coretta King had died. That was Thursday, February 2.
There are no more gigolos on the beaches of Zanzibar. That went with the Aga Khan and Rita Hayworth. Zanzibar is imbued with exotic and ignominious history, being a busy and rich trading post in its heyday for cloves and other spices, ivory and slaves, and ruled by sultans and sheiks in their gilded palaces. It is a tropical island with bananas and coconut trees and the red colobus monkey, and white fine sandy beaches. But it is run down and faded like an old dowager who had lost her fortune, and slowly crumbling into ruins. But you can imagine how it can be a jewel if restored and cared for. Stone Town with its narrow alleys and remains of grand houses with intricately carved doors accented by brass finials can be imagined to be once magnificent and shining. But alas many sections are in ruins with the dwelling’s guts exposed and inhabited by alley cats and had become receptacles for the ubiquitous flimsy used plastic bags that are strewn all over the landscape. The oceanside park is inhabited by locals who squat or nap there all day and accost you with touts of tours or goods or taxi for hire. At night it is lovely at a distance with the night fish market and bazaar, but it is intimidating for the tourist to stroll through it. There is a program unveiled for restoration, but the government has no money and has no private benefactors to do the massive work. It is such a pity for it is a world heritage site. However there is a Freddie Mercury restaurant, the local world recording artist celebrity. There are several fine restaurants housed in the few restored grand houses, and the meals are cheap and the South African wines are great, as the beers, Kilimanjaro and Tusker. We tried their Chinese restaurant, and it felt strange not to have pork in the menu. At the next table from us the newly appointed Minister of Agriculture was being honored. There is a nice shopping section but there were no unique blings to buy. Tanzania is not the place to buy Tanzanite jewelry. There are no chic shops. New York and Las Vegas have the best designs in Tanzanite. We spent 2 days in Stone Town and took the spice tour and viewed the slave market and Prison Island, where recalcitrant slaves were held until shipped to the New World.

Then we were off to the beach in Nungwi, north of the island, 1 ½ hours from Stone Town. It takes determination to get there. The road is dusty and bumpy and pot-hole ridden. I’m reminded of the drive from hell when we went to Boracay. You pass through little villages of thatched huts and roadside vegetable stands. In Nungwi Village our accommodations are 3rd rate but adequate. Nearby, a 20 minute walk on the beach away from the Village, there is a new international caliber resort, Gemma del Est, with competitive international 5-star rates, but expensive by local standards. Regardless of where you stay, the beach is the picture of paradise, endless and broad white stretch of fine sand, turquoise waters, gentle breeze, clear sky, coconut trees curtsying to the sand, and quiet coves where no one else is there but you. I spent the day following a snail as it crossed a sand ripple, watched a spindly sea urchin roll on its many spines, studied shallow pools formed by the receding tide, turned over stones to coax colorful fish out in the open, picked shells, stalked sand crabs to its hole, dug for clams, looked for starfish in different colors, picked brilliant broken off corals, read a book, dozed and dreamt.
I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson in a downpour, and learned that my sister is boycotting her daughter’s wedding, that my son and his girlfriend have broken up, that my Philippine Foundation executive director had resigned, and Coretta King is dead. I am back to my life, but on that last day in Zanzibar the rainbow dipped into the horizon and I think the other end lies in the Amazon.