Under African Skies (Arusha, Tanzania)

First of all, you know you've been traveling for a while when a long indirect series of international flights sounds like a luxurious way to spend 14 hours. Thank you Emirates. I even caught up on Oscar viewing (did those happen yet?) with my own personal TV screen and watched "Walk the Line". In Dubai, the delicious smell of toxic lemon bathroom chemicals was met with ecstaticly appreciative nostrils who were only sorry not to have more time to explore the advanced westerness of the airport. The Australian goldminer sitting next to me on the final flight from Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam kindly prepared me for arrival with warnings about never going out after dark and I encountered like 80 of the biggest insects I've ever seen in my life before I even had my visa.

I'm in Africa! I've had the "In the Jungle" song stuck in my head for a week. On Wednesday, I got into Dar late and then turned around and took an early bus north to Arusha, safari central. My first impressions of Tanzania were riddled with "After India..." comparisons which left Africa looking like Europe. A week later the developing worldness is a bit more clear, but I'm still routinely awestruck by clean bathrooms and a prevalence of toilet paper. One is still expected to throw all plastic and Styrofoam waste from moving vehicles, but the quantity of visible trash lining the roads is relatively minimal by comparison. The people are really friendly and quick to smile and help a lost white girl in a foreign land which is a welcome change.

My first day in Arusha I set out to research safari companies and by chance and a little necessity very quickly ended up hopping in a jeep full of camping equipment, a Belgian, a driver, a cook, a shrivelly old Scottish half-owner of the company and his very young Tanzanian girlfriend bound for the Northern Circuit of national parks. We spent 7 days driving around Lake Manyara, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire. The Belgian and I stood through the sunroof almost every second spotting animals and being generally amazed. We saw a million zebras, billions of wildebeest in the midst of the Great Migration, giraffes (my favorite), hippos, a huge crocodile, leopards sleeping in trees, rhinos, enormous African buffalo, a thousand kinds of antelope, badgers, a trillion hyenas, cheetahs, mongooses, vultures, eagles, cranes, ostrich, and other crazy birds, warthogs, baboons, vervet monkeys, blue monkeys, and elephants and lions so close I could have touched them if I didn't think they might have trampled or eaten me. There are probably a ton of other animals recorded in my 500 pictures too, but forgive me as that's all that comes to mind right this second. The scenery was spectacular and the opportunity to see nature in nature was something else.

The human company was a little less enjoyable than the animal, but in very recent retrospect is already starting to seem comic. The Belgian was perfectly nice and had good animal vision, along with a true passion for the sound of his own voice. I'm sorry Know-It-All, but one bike trip through the US does not make you an expert on all things American so please stop lecturing me on my own country and no you and your experiences are not better and more interesting than everyone else on the planet's so please give my poor ears a break. The ancient Scottish half-owner's profound lack of knowledge, understanding, and interest in all things Tanzanian - the land, people, language, culture, and ecology was utterly offensive. Between inappropriate comments about "The Africans" and inaccurate comments about our surroundings (he tried to tell me a wooden outhouse was an insect-catching research box), he had just enough time to talk about himself as an artist which is only accurate if you consider as "art" tragically bad oil paintings of animals that look like they belong next to the dreamcatchers in an RV resort giftshop somewhere in central Florida. His girlfriend was literally young enough to be his granddaughter, but nice enough if you could manage to disregard their creepy interaction. The cook was really sweet but didn't speak English and made the same vegetables and sauce over a different shape of pasta or rice every night. The driver was awesome, but replaced two thirds of the way through the trip because he came down with malaria which he apparently gets once a year. The hilarity of that combination wasn't obvious all 7 days, but now that I've survived, it sounds pretty typical and it was definitely an acceptable trade-off for the phenomenal access to the observation of a fascinating ecosystem.

Now I'm back in Arusha staying in a very clean room run by lovely Catholic nuns. I went running this morning dodging speeding overcrowded mini-buses, school kids in uniforms, ladies in bright fabrics with baskets on their heads, guys in slacks and ties on cell phones, and of course your standard Masai with stretched ears carrying massive spears. The juxtapositions here are insane. Tomorrow I head to Zanzibar to dive and lie on the beach recovering from my stressful week of riding around in a car. Paradise. I can't for the life of me find a Lonely Planet for Southern Africa so I'm not exactly sure what happens after Zanzibar. Hopefully they have bookstores there...